Former priest William Hogan never backed down from a fight, even with his superiors in the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Chicago. His headline-grabbing activism frequently landed him in jail, and it once got him suspended by the church, but the perpetually upbeat Mr. Hogan was unapologetic.
“I am doing priestly things, things with educational and teaching value,” he told an interviewer in 1973. “I’m training people to move together against injustice in society and to do this with alternatives to violence.”
Mr. Hogan, 76, who left the priesthood in the early 1980s, died of a heart attack Wednesday, Dec. 31, in St. Mary of Nazareth Hospital Center in Chicago.
Mr. Hogan was raised on the South Side and decided as a teenager to become a priest. He was ordained in 1952 at the age of 25 and, at his request, was sent to an African-American parish. Soon he was swept up in the civil rights movement.
He organized “wade-ins” at a beach where blacks where traditionally barred, marched with comedian-activist Dick Gregory and Rev. Jesse Jackson, and helped with voter registration drives in the South. His activism contrasted with what he described as a “Don’t-rock-the-boat” attitude among other priests.
“Somehow I believed we had to change the white community’s attitudes,” he said. “We called it integration.”
His protesting eventually encompassed the Vietnam War. He was arrested for a sit-in at a draft office, for blockading traffic on the Eisenhower Expressway and for dumping 30 pounds of red dye into the Chicago River just before St. Patrick’s Day in 1970.
His arrests, defiance and the amount of time he spent on activism eventually ran afoul of the archdiocese leadership. Saying he had been disobedient, church officials in 1973 forbade Mr. Hogan from presiding over mass and declined to give him a parish assignment–an effective suspension. It was a hard time for Mr. Hogan, but it didn’t dent his commitment to what he called the Movement.
“I think the way he handled it personally is that he was really called to do it,” said Rev. William Flaherty, a Winnetka priest who went through seminary with Mr. Hogan. “He felt that if he could have enough time to explain, if you were open, you’d understand him.”
Mr. Hogan supported himself as a cabdriver during his suspension and, in a racially tense city, made a point of driving African-American passengers anywhere they wanted to go. Although he continued with his activism, the pleas of his fellow priests persuaded the archdiocese to reinstate him in 1977.
But Mr. Hogan was never fully at ease in the church. His nephew, Dan Brekke, said Mr. Hogan left the priesthood in the early 1980s partly from discontent with church policy on celibacy.
“He’d say the church was making a mistake by excluding really good, faithful, accomplished priests who also felt they wanted to follow their impulse to be men and to be human,” his nephew said.
Mr. Hogan went on to marry, raise two stepchildren and take a job as a probation officer. All the while he kept an ardent interest in politics.
“He was just a very upbeat person who just seemed to have an incredible faith that everything would come out all right in the end as long as you kept fighting,” Brekke said. “He was a steadfast optimist.”
Mr. Hogan is survived by his wife, Jackie Bartholomay; a stepson, Jeff Bartholomay; and a stepdaughter, Katie Bartholomay. Services are still being arranged.
