MY FAVORITE PRIEST

Free grand pianos
By James Gilhooley

“Relax, Sister, this here piano is a gift to your pupils from their Uncle Sam. It won’t cost you or them a dime.”

The rushed words were spoken by a sweating truck driver to a nun principal outside a barrio parochial school in the heady days of the ’60s. While desperately wanting a piano, the rattled principal was fearful of another budget overrun or at least a crude scam. For some time, she had been angrily trying to wave off the delivery of the newly minted piano.

The man who had pulled off this delicious and legal coup for her students was one Monsignor James A. Feeney. He was working with little fanfare as Superintendent of Schools in the Archdiocese of New York.

Girls and boys attending inner-city schools were his special province. His successful advocacy with government washed over on children not only in parochial schools of the archdiocese but also on other non-public schools in New York City as well as the state.

These young people were touched through his work as president of the Council of Catholic Schools in New York State as well as chairman of the Committee of Non-Public Schools of New York City. The lives this priest touched have to run into the mega-thousands. The word “countless,” I concede, is an adjective that deserves to be buried in unconsecrated ground without honors. Yet it is the only adequate one I can use to catalogue the young lives Msgr. Feeney touched in a most vital bread and butter fashion.

He may well have been the person who delivered the most goods to disadvantaged children in the difficult period I write of. There were other people who served children with more flash. So, they received press attention from journalists anxious to fill space. Usually they walked on the stage for Andy Warhol’s fifteen minutes. Then they moved off into the wings for greener pastures. But the educator Feeney stayed on the job almost two decades. This is not a question of comparing apples and pears but rather Colossus and lightning bugs.

The complicated laws of the time on aid to non-public children were like school yards strewn haphazardly with barbed wire and broken glass. To work you way through such a mine field and reach the gold bars locked in the vault one had to be equal parts magician, engineer, and genius. It was not a ballgame meant for bush leaguers.

Happily for New York’s boys and girls, Msgr. Feeney possessed a brainpan outweighed only by his large body. It was said of him with awe in his seminary days, “He doesn’t get a mark. He runs a temperature.” While we his classmates frantically crammed for end-of-semester exams, he sat in his room blithely reading Jane Austen.

As educator, he studied complex legislation with the same enthusiasm and astuteness he had brought to Aquinas, Hegel, and Heidegger in his student days. It is a pity he never played chess. He would have been a grandmaster.

A government bureaucrat of the time told me, “What your man Feeney doesn’t know about education laws coming out of Washington isn’t worth knowing.” An education colleague wrote, “His brilliant mind, ability to work long hours (often at the Board of Education till early morning), and his willingness to suffer fools gladly resulted in inner city schools and students getting a maximum share of the benefits they were entitled to.”

His last residence was in a ghetto parish though it could easily have been affluent Westchester County. He told me, “If I’m going to work for these kids, I better live with them.”

A massive heart attack rudely killed him there on September 11, 1977. He was 47 years old.

The strongest memory I have of his funeral Liturgy in New York’s St. Patrick’s Cathedral presided over by Terence Cardinal Cooke was the vast number of priests among the mourners. Their silent presence was testimony both of their affection for this priest as well as their recognition of what he had accomplished for all God’s children. No doubt many of them were pastors of the parish schools he had so ably aided as Superintendent.

I must confess to a recurring fantasy over the years since 1977. Somewhere at least once a onetime slum kid will walk out on a stage dressed in white tie and tails. He will play a difficult program of Chopin and Liszt for a sold-out house to rave reviews in the morning papers. That concert artist will have learned his scales and whetted his interest as a youngster on one of Jim Feeney’s free grand pianos.

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