Abbot from the Yards

It was a raw, grey morning on Chicago's southwest side. Sooty slush was ankle deep, the wind whined so bitterly through the littered alleys that the police outside grey brick St. Procopius' Church beat their arms against their sides. But from everywhere the people came.

From the Gold Coast came big names in wealth and society. They hurried into the church, holding their furs around their ears. Large-boned, narrow-eyed Slavs in Sunday-best waded through the slush from smoke-stained frame houses and brick tenements near the stockyards. Priests, bishops and archbishops occupied a solid 14 pews within St. Procopius'. The occasion: the four-hour investiture of Father Ambrose Ondrak as Abbot of the Benedictine Abbey of St. Procopius, one of 21 abbeys of the U.S. Benedictines. The investing prelate: Samuel Cardinal Stritch.

Said Chicago's Auxiliary Bishop Sheil: "Of all the priests I know, Abbot Ondrak has been most generous and most eager in his response to the Church's wish for priests who, in the words of Pope Pius XI, dedicate the better part of their endeavors and their zeal to winning back the laboring masses to Christ and to His Church. He has battled against economic injustices. . . . He has . . . battled . . . against unemployment, insecurity, disease and crime. . . . Because of him, and men like him, no one can say that the [Roman] Catholic Church is irrelevant today."

One of Them. Little (5 ft. 7 in.) Ambrose Ondrak is literally at home among the carcass-luggers and breast-splitters who sweat in the packing houses, among dirty-faced kids playing in vacant lots. He was born among them, of Czech immigrants, 54 years ago. As a boy he joined gangs, played sandlot football. On school holidays he weighed beef in the packing houses. In 1924, after he had been a priest for six years, he was sent to St. Michael's in the Back of the Yards district as assistant pastor. Since the pastor of St. Michael's must be a Slovak, Father Ambrose never got the top job.

It was natural that Father Ambrose should be interested in labor. "My people are all labor people," he says. "I know their problems and I know the conditions under which they work. . . . When my people go on a picket line in a strike, I go with them because I am one of them."

"When the packing houses were being organized," he explains, "there was a great deal of talk about Communism within the C.I.O. I knew that the organization drive had to succeed. The workers were underpaid and working under bad conditions. Yet I certainly didn't want people under Communist leaders. And I knew that the Catholic workers in my parish wouldn't join the union unless we priests said it was all right. So we set out to provide leadership. We encouraged the workers to join the union. . . . Because we provided leadership in the Back of the Yards, there is little Communism there today. ... As long as we can take care of our people and offer them a good life, there'll be no Communism."

Priest at Work. Though St. Procopius Abbey is in rural country outside the city, the new Abbot will not be wholly removed from the Studs Lonigan district in which he grew up and has lived all his life. Under his supervision will be the priests of several Chicago parishes like his old one of St. Michael's, as well as priests scattered over several states. He will have charge also of Benedictine missions in China and Czechoslovakia.

As Abbot, Father Ambrose will be deeply concerned with the education of youth, always a chief objective of the Benedictines. But he is no blind supporter of traditional or classical training. His own background and experience are against that, and he believes that all Catholic education--for laity and clergy alike--should place more emphasis on social problems. Says he: "The big trouble in parochial schools is that the nuns never get out in the world, are unacquainted with social problems."

Last week, seated at a desk piled high with administrative work, he sighed. It had been simpler on the picket line. Besides, it was hard to take a healthy swig of water without losing the abbot's skullcap.

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