REYNOLD HILLENBRAND - Priestly rabble-rouser, obedient son of the church.

Old Saint Patrick's on Chicago's West Side has a low-ceilinged, paneled basement. There on a May weekday in 1998 about a hundred people whose lives had been changed by Reynold Hillenbrand, a Chicago priest, paid reverence to his memory (he died in 1978). As the countless number of people whose lives he touched remember, Hillenbrand had patiently disassembled their easy certitudes to reveal for them new understandings which shimmered in their minds the rest of their lives. I drove to this commemoration from my home in Michigan because Hillenbrand had also done this for me. It is past time to recall what he did to make "the lay apostolate" a reality, and how he did it.

Some at the commemoration remembered him as the national chaplain of the Christian Family Movement (CFM), an organization of Catholic married couples who met every other week in small groups to pursue ordered inquiry into the large things in their lives: their marriages, their children, their parishes, their work, their leisure, and their relationship to the political structures that affected their lives. There were also veterans of similar groups for students and for young single people who worked for a living-the Young Christian Students (YCS) and the Young Christian Workers (YCW); together these organizations were called the Catholic action movements. Representatives of organized labor also came to celebrate Hillenbrand's memory; theirs was a cause to which he gave much of his time.

Monsignor Jack Egan, with whom I had once been assigned as curate at Presentation parish on Chicago's West Side and who received an award at the commemoration for his lifetime of social action work, remembered Hillenbrand as one who brought to Catholic lay people and priests new drive and direction. During a break, he and I recalled Hillenbrand's YCW workshops held every summer in stifling classrooms at Saint Joseph's College in rural Rensselaer, Indiana. A married couple whom both Egan and I knew from our days together at Presentation asked me what Hillenbrand was like. It was easy, I told them, to remember things he said and did and to discuss the great influence he had on people. But I faltered when I tried to explain that influence. On my way home to Michigan I wondered about that and decided to visit the archives of the University of Notre Dame, to which Reynold Hillenbrand had willed his papers, to see if they might help me understand how he came to be what he came to be.

In the vaultlike archives on the sixth floor of the library building, the papers of the laconic Hillenbrand are conserved in sixty-three linear feet of file boxes. I rubbed my fingers over an old mimeographed schedule-complete with handwritten marginal notes-for a YCW day of recollection. It was easy then to imagine Hillenbrand on that long-ago day explaining a line of Scripture in his quietly deliberate voice.

Reynold Hillenbrand was born on July 19, 1904 of German-American parents who belonged to Saint Michael's parish on Chicago's Near North Side. He was the second of nine children, six boys and three girls. It was a middle-class neighborhood of refined congestion: old, decently maintained three-story apartment buildings and houses, all within earshot of the church bells. The family lived in a large rambling house on Hamond Street (now called Orleans). Hillenbrand's father was a dentist with offices on North Avenue not far from the residence of Cardinal George Mundelein. Indeed, Dr. George Hillenbrand was Mundelein's dentist. One brother also became a dentist, another, a psychiatrist, and a third, who was elevated to the rank of monsignor, eventually became the pastor of Saint Mary's in Evanston, Illinois. Perhaps it was from this socially secure family that Reynold received his patrician ease, his apparent freedom from self-doubt, and his refined aesthetic sense. This latter sensibility was not a cultural skin but part and parcel (a favorite phrase of his) of his life. One follower-and we were followers-said of him, "If you want to make a point in a letter to him, make the case well and frame it in correct and graceful sentences."

The Hillenbrands attended Mass, which in those days was celebrated in Latin, at Saint Michael's, a nineteenth-century neo-Gothic church administered by the Redemptorists. The celebrant faced the tabernacle, his back to the uncomprehending congregants who busied themselves with their prayer books or rosaries. They struck their breasts in adoration and contrition when the host was raised after the consecration of the Mass and prayed, "Oh Lord, I am not worthy." Few saw the Mass as a sacrificial meal shared by a community of worshipers. The organist often crackled or whined the Gregorian-chant hymns and the celebrant often hummed, mumbled, or whispered the Latin prayers. Hillenbrand thought Latin kept people from understanding what was going on. He reasoned that some day the Mass would be celebrated in the common tongue, the vernacular of each people, and that it would be celebrated by a priest looking across an altar toward the faithful. The Mass, he said, had to be taken seriously because it was the source and center of the spiritual life.

After Hillenbrand graduated from Chicago's Quigley Preparatory Seminary, he entered Saint Mary of the Lake Seminary in Mundelein, Illinois to continue his studies for the priesthood. He was ordained in 1929 and remained at the seminary to receive his doctorate in sacred theology in 1931. Then he was assigned to teach at Quigley. But the times were now quite different from those that existed when he entered the major seminary. The Great Depression had bowled over the American economy. Unemployed men, sullen, ragged, and despondent, grouped idly at street corners. Workers had few avenues of redress because the 1935 Wagner Act, which was to strengthen the rights of workers to organize, had not yet passed Congress. But Hillenbrand knew that the Catholic church clearly supported workers' rights. In the 1870s, during the reign of an otherwise conservative Pope Pius IX, the church had given support and therefore legitimacy to the Knights of Labor, which was the forerunner of the American Federation of Labor. In 1919 the American Catholic bishops condemned child labor and supported the right of workers to form unions in order to deal with such matters as wages and job security.

Work, in Hillenbrand's mind, was a means of earning a living. But it was also a way of continuing the act of creation that had been begun by God, a way of serving one's fellow man, and of developing into the kind of person God wanted. When, later in life, he would discuss the place of work in God's redemptive plan, Hillenbrand would compare it to the saving work of Christ on the cross. And he would show how the Mass itself could not exist without the contribution of those who worked in wineries and bakeries to make the elements employed in the sacrament.

Hillenbrand saw the world's problems systemically. It wasn't enough to have Christians and others of good will give food to the hungry. If a man had a job with decent pay, he would be able to provide for his own family. Although Hillenbrand respected the work done by social agencies and parishes in alleviating the misery of the disenfranchised, he thought such services would never begin to answer the world's social problems. Whole systems had to be changed.

Hillenbrand's lifelong agenda became the Mass and the doctrine of work. His next priestly appointment, which was to the archdiocesan mission band in 1933, gave him an opportunity to preach about these things. The mission band was a group of priests who went from parish to parish, spending several days in each to preach, to celebrate Benediction of the Blessed Sacrament, to lead the congregation in the rosary, and to bless articles of prayer and devotion. When Hillenbrand's stint on the mission band came to an end in 1936, his voice was worn out from preaching. And I guess that he may have wondered-when he revisited a congregation he had preached to in the past-if the people were any different from when he preached to them the first time. His strong and lasting appreciation of small groups may have stemmed from his frustration with larger groups.

His next assignment, in 1936, was as rector of Saint Mary of the Lake Seminary in Mundelein. To the Jesuit faculty at the seminary he added diocesan priests who were familiar with the church's social teachings, because he wanted to be sure that the seminarians' academic training included those teachings. During his time at Mundelein, he toured Europe where he visited with Canon Joseph Cardijn of Belgium, the international chaplain of YCW, which had national chapters throughout Europe, Latin America, French Canada, and West Africa. Patrick Keegan, who was the president of the international YCW, admired Hillenbrand and considered him a close friend. Hillenbrand and another friend of his, Monsignor Donald Kanaly of Oklahoma, would bring the YCW to the United States.

Cardijn lived in Belgium during the period immediately after World War II when the electorate came close to voting for a Communist government. A theorist, Cardijn devised a Christian dialectic to compete in young workers' minds with the theoretical machinery of communism. He coined the phrase "observe, judge, and act" to describe the Christian dialectic. Members of a YCW group would discuss the reality, say, in their place of work. This was the observation part of the inquiry. Then, for the judgment part, they would consider if the Gospels or the church's social teachings had anything to say about the facts they had observed. The action part of the inquiry required them to discuss what might be done to bring the reality they observed more in accordance with the desires of Christ for society. The genius of the "observe, judge, and act" model of the social inquiry was that it permitted people to participate in their own development and-because it was rooted in reality-it was not boring.

Back at the seminary, Hillenbrand distributed translations of literature of the French Canadian YCW movement based in Montreal. His hope was that the Mundelein seminarians, after ordination, would form YCW groups made up of young men and women in their parishes.

Hillenbrand had a winning gift for drawing out the seminarians. I entered the seminary in 1943 and was treated to a weekly poetry class he gave. He brought in stacks of plain and emphatically rhymed popular poems copied from newspaper columns and asked us what we thought of them. He also brought in copies of poems by great poets of earlier ages. Then he would ask us to compare the popular poetry with that of the established poets. He was open to whatever good we might find in either kind of poetry. One of the poems we read was Gerard Manley Hopkins's "God's Grandeur," and I remember the image Hopkins used to describe that grandeur. "The world is charged with the grandeur of God. It will flame out, like shining from shook foil." It was an image I would later come to associate with Hillenbrand himself.

In 1944 Cardinal Samuel Stritch removed Reynold Hillenbrand from his position as rector of the seminary and assigned him to be pastor of Sacred Heart Church in Hubbard Woods, a suburb of Chicago. Rumor at the time had it that this was arranged by two groups: the Jesuit seminary faculty, which resented Hillenbrand's bringing in diocesan priests to help with the spiritual direction of the seminarians, and a powerful clique of Chicago pastors who disliked the liberal character of the priests who were being ordained under Hillenbrand's leadership. Hillenbrand never complained about his sudden change and he never, as far as it was commonly known, speculated about the forces that arranged his transfer. He simply packed his things and moved to his new assignment. He was an obedient son of the church, and never was this more obvious than at this juncture of his life. It was part of his patrician style to obey those who had proper authority over him.

In retrospect, few things could have advanced his goals in life so well as this transfer. He was now in a position to influence the YCW groups that had been formed by parish priests who had learned about YCW when they were in the seminary under him. YCW rented an ancient three-story apartment building at 1700 West Jackson Boulevard in Chicago. There, under Hillenbrand's inspiration, YCW trained its leaders in intense six-month courses. Hillenbrand brought in labor organizers, liturgists, political leaders, and intellectuals. The vitality of YCW matched that of the college YCS movement and worked hand in glove with its members and with those of the CFM. Hillenbrand had the major formative role in each of these movements.

He arranged for Cardinal Stritch to appoint me as his assistant for national YCW matters. I met with him often in his study in Hubbard Woods to discuss plans for yearly workshops and to help in the preparation of inquiry booklets for the coming year. Bookcases in his study, made from unpainted fir or pine, extended from the floor to the ceiling and covered every square foot of wall space. The fragrant odor of wood mixed agreeably with the subdued, antique smell of the old books. Once, when we were discussing a point in a gospel passage, he said that an interesting reference was made to that point in a book about Shakespeare he received in the mail that very day from Ducketts, a used book store in London. With that he climbed the bookcase ladder, a disabled foot notwithstanding, to retrieve the book and read the passage aloud. I don't remember what the gospel passage was about, but I'll never forget the quiet seduction of his study and his love for books-used books.

YCW held weeklong summer workshops, first at Notre Dame and later at Saint Joseph's College in Rensselaer, Indiana, a quiet setting amid the cornfields of northcentral Indiana. These were the placid pre-Vatican II fifties when there was little impetus for change. Each yearly workshop was dedicated to a single major area of the Christian life. Small-group discussions centered on them and sermons at morning Mass explained them. In the gray fabric of the culture, Hillenbrand's sermons were like colorful threads. The group was held together by its common appreciation of the man.

At the workshops there was a Minneapolis priest named Blaine Barr, who respected Hillenbrand but was not in awe of either him or his point of view. He would frequently ask Hillenbrand why a certain thing had to be a certain way. Weren't there reasonable alternatives? Hillenbrand thought that, no indeed, there were not reasonable alternatives. The rest of us thought that Barr was disruptive, harmlessly and amusingly so, but disruptive nevertheless. It never would have dawned on any of the others to challenge a truth articulated by Hillenbrand.

But there were to be many Barrs in Hillenbrand's future, because the times, as Bob Dylan began to sing at the time, were "a-changin.'" YCW full-timers decided to go to Montgomery, Alabama, in 1963 for the Walgreen Drug Store sit-in. Though Hillenbrand supported the plan, it wasn't his idea. The college-based Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), which was to figure so importantly in the coming civil rights movement, had ties to college YCS. The movements that Hillenbrand had created were beginning to go their own way. Blaine Barrs appeared everywhere asking Hillenbrand why things had to be the way they were. Even Patrick Keegan, one of Hillenbrand's closest friends, thought him authoritarian and encouraged me to bring up the issue when I saw him next.

When I told Hillenbrand that many thought his authoritarian style was disrupting the leadership of YCW as well as that of the other specialized Catholic action movements, he was surprised. "Why do you come up here and sail into me?" he asked. I was pleased with myself that I had stood up to him but he dismissed my criticism out of hand. We awkwardly completed our discussion about other YCW matters and I left.

One of the things that were happening, of course, was that Hillenbrand's work was bearing fruit and that young people didn't need him any more to facilitate their thinking. They could do their own thinking, thank you. He had spent most of his adult life encouraging young people to observe and make judgments about the reality about them and to act bravely on what they saw. They had gotten the hang of the thing and now they were challenging their teacher. He wasn't sure he liked the result. His friend Patrick Keegan, as president of the newly formed International Commission on the Laity, had become the first layman since the Emperor Constantine to address an ecumenical council. Hillenbrand was far less necessary than he had been. Perhaps he felt that.

Toward the end of the 1960s, a group of priests, including myself, who had always considered themselves "Hillenbrand men," visited him at his parish in Hubbard Woods and told him he ought to resign from his position as national chaplain of the specialized Catholic action movements. Like the assassinating cabal that surrounds Julius Caesar in Shakespeare's play, each one of Hillenbrand's critics took his rhetorical shot at the master who made him. But unlike Shakespeare's Caesar, Hillenbrand refused to die, quietly returning each shot in the volley at the one who had fired it. To one of them, who was known widely for his wit, he said, "And you, it may disturb you to know, are not funny." Then he poured us all a drink, chatted amiably with us for a short while and, explaining that he had work to do, showed us to the door. We regrouped on the sidewalk in front of his rectory, wondering where we went wrong. I was part of this cabal and yet I later came to think it was Hillenbrand's finest hour. Later still, I came to think it was a sad hour for all of us. Ultimately Hillenbrand, who perceived truth in its grandeur, believed it could be revealed only through a proper chain of command.

In any case, Hillenbrand wasn't quite as self-possessed as he appeared. When death finally came, the thought that he might have wasted many good years of his life by working with small groups instead of large groups troubled him. Jack Egan visited and pointed to the specialized Catholic action movements and the changed lives of the lay people and priests who belonged to them, trying to reassure him. Egan thinks that Hillenbrand understood and accepted the truth of this reassurance.

And so Hillenbrand died. Those who knew him have not been able to forget him. He did indeed brighten life, "like shining from shook foil."

John Hill, a former priest of the Archdiocese of Chicago, lives with his wife near Dowagiac, Michigan. He was the first chairman of the Association of Chicago Priests. During the early 1960s he was assistant national chaplain of the Young Christian Workers.