Monsignor John J. Egan (1916 - 2001)

Remembering A Lifelong Crusader
The Egan Urban Center lost its namesake and Chicago a tireless campaigner for social justice with the death this past spring of Monsignor John J. Egan. His unstinting efforts to enhance the life of the community and the lives of those who create it earned him a national reputation and continued undiminished right up until is passing at the age of 84.

"He loved Chicago. He was like the mayor, he absolutely loved Chicago," recalled Peggy Roach, Egan's longtime ally and administrative aide, who has a long list of activist credentials herself. He loved it for its vibrancy, for the friendliness of its people. And while he knew "the problems are endless," Roach added, he was convinced that "if people get together they can do something."   

An ironclad work ethic, an affable nature and a knack for tapping the right people for help equipped Jack Egan to persevere through a lifetime of meaningful and sometimes lonely campaigns.

"Whoever speaks at my funeral will not say I was a priest's priest. I was lay person's priest," Egan said in An Alley in Chicago, The Ministry of a City Priest, by Margery Frisbie, a biography of Egan (Sheed & Ward 1991).

"I think he just had this wonderful drive," Roach said. "He just kept striving. He was always there for the long haul." And Roach was with him, both in Chicago and for the 13 years he spent at Notre Dame University in Indiana. Since 1987, the two worked out of DePaul's Office of Community Affairs where Egan was an assistant to the president. "It was a team effort all along the line," Roach said. "I thought we were a pretty good team."

Battles for better housing, for open housing, for interfaith and interracial initiatives led him into local, national and Chicago archdiocesan politics. The struggle for civil rights found him in Selma, Alabama linking arms with the Rev. Ralph Abernarthy to show his support for extending voting rights to blacks. When a photo of him at the march landed on the front page of a Chicago newspaper, religious leaders around the country were inspired to coverage on Selma. He became the local church's most visible promoter of integration.

When Egan died of cardiovascular disease on May 19, the Illinois Department of Financial Institutions was in the process of adopting rules he had promoted and helped inspire to regulate high-interest payday loans. Within the Church, he long advocated higher visibility for women. And just the month before his death, he had circulated a plea for the church to ordain women and married men.

A Lifetime of Learning
"I think the only thing I was good at was working," Egan recalled in Frisbie's biography. "What I remember about my youth is that I was working all the time." Frisbie recounted how Egan peddled newspapers for 10 years in the ethnically diverse Ravenswood neighborhood on the North Side, paying his way to DePaul University where he started out to study business. His decision in 1935 to leave DePaul after just one year and begin training for the priesthood met stiff resistance from his father, a bus driver from Ireland whose job had brought the family from New York to Chicago when Jack was six years old.

"A lot of damned nonsense. Somebody has twisted your mind," Egan remembered his father telling him. Caustic, authoritarian John Egan didn't speak to his son for six months. Earlier when Egan was in 8th grade, his father had refused to let him join the Oblate of Mary order in Texas. Only after his father's funeral, when Jack Egan had been a priest for eight years, did he learn what lay behind that opposition. His father had trained for the priesthood himself, with the Irish Christian Brothers in Canada. He left before taking his vows and he didn't want to see his son labeled a "spoiled priest," a man who trained for but never realized the priesthood, according to Frisbie.

The austere environment and rigors of classes all in Latin at St. Mary of the Lake Seminary in Mundelein where he trained to become a priest could have proved claustrophobic, but instead the world opened up to Egan who joined the orbit surrounding Reynold "Rynie" Hillenbrand. Hillenbrand was an intellectual rector who had a powerful influence on many idealistic young priests of that generation and at a time when Chicago led Catholic Church in the United States. A cornerstone of Hillenbrand's philosophy was the dominant role he envisioned for laity in church affairs.

When Egan was ordained a priest on May 1, 1943 he made "something close to a vow that two things would have precedence in my life," Frisbie wrote. "I will try to work for the enhancement of the lay role in the Church and, wisely or not, I will never say no to anyone."

Egan's eagerness to fill the gaps in his own education and his genius at identifying instructors emerged early. When he felt inadequate counseling parishioners in his first assignment out of the seminary at St. Justin Martyr Parish on the South Side, he turned to the eminent therapist Carl Rogers at The University of Chicago. Rogers taught him that people change only at their own pace, from within, when they know that they are respected, Frisbie recounted.

A sojourn through France to learn what priests there were teaching about marriage brought him into discussions with theologians who would lead the way in opening up and reforming the Catholic Church through the Vatican II Ecumenical Council. For three years, Egan spent his summer vacations in Rome so he could listen in on the historic debates taking place there. From Saul Alinsky, another close friend, he got a challenging course in the nuts and bolts of community organizing.

But his high-profile career never obscured Egan's original vows. He could butt heads with clergy and hierarchy within the Church and even part ways with mentors, but he was able to adhere to the boundaries his vocation imposed. "He was born to be a priest. He loved being a priest, It was in his bones," Roach said simply.

"He was a very humble man," said community organizer Robert Squires. Egan recruited Squires in 1959 to work with Alinsky out of a settlement house on the West Side and he later baptized Squires' two daughters. "Egan was a charmer," he recalled. "The man would come in, and the light would shine." He credits him with making the corporate world aware of the need for social justice. "He challenged the power structure to be fair" said Squires. "He was ambitious to get things done, but not for himself. He hated to see poverty - poverty and oppressing the poor. He thought people should be treated equal.

"He was very astute in the game of politics," Squires added. "He was a behind-the-scenes man. He knew how to hit the sensitive nerve of the movers and shakers of this town, and he did it with class." He was adept at networking long before it had a name.

An Enduring Legacy
For Egan, who spent a lifetime educating himself to become more effective, DePaul's Egan Hope Scholars program is a fitting legacy. Since his death, more that $32,000 has been contributed in his memory to the scholarship endowment fund, including a leadership gift of $25,000, according to the office of Development. Begun in 1992, the program has provided scholarships for 40 minority students from disadvantaged neighborhoods who would not otherwise get the chance to go to college and who share Egan's commitment to community service. A half dozen new Egan Hope Scholars started this fall.

Despite Egan’s sometimes controversial reputation, DePaul did not object to naming the Egan Urban Center of Egan when it was founded in 1995. DePaul had awarded Egan an honorary doctorate in 1985. "I used to enjoy pointing out in my introduction of the Center, and often of our namesake Father Egan himself, that one thing that I liked about DePaul University is that around here, they named things after people while they were still alive, to enjoy the honor," said EUC Executive Director Michael Bennett. “While we at the Egan Center will miss him, we are eternally inspired by his spirit and his great work.”

Roach, who came out of retirement to work part-time with Egan at DePaul, has now officially re-retired and plans to do volunteer work. “He left Peggy work that will last her a couple years,” Squires predicted.

"He's still around," he added. "As long as people ask why are there poor people, Egan's still going to be around and want answers."