By Ryan Di Corpo

The Rev. Raymond A. Schroth, S.J. wants to tell you his stories. They are all there: in pictorial form, scattered about the hallway and on the walls of his third-floor room at the Murray-Weigel Hall Jesuit Infirmary. There is a picture of his mother and father, a button which reads “BOYCOTT GRAPES,” a press pass from the 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago and a framed drawing — or perhaps scribbling — done by a young relative but which looks like the work of an aging Cy Twombly.

As his walls would suggest, Fr. Schroth, FCRH ‘55, has plenty of stories to tell — and good ones, too. Now editor emeritus of America and former associate editor of Commonweal, Fr. Schroth continues to write, as he has for The New York Times Book Review, The Los Angeles Times, The Boston Globe and the Columbia Journalism Review.

He has written books on Robert “Bob” Drinan and Eric Sevareid, and has interviewed Saul Alinsky, Richard Ford and Fulton J. Sheen, among others.

He attended the 1967 March on Washington, where he became impressed by Norman Mailer’s ability to accurately spell “Schroth.” He surveyed the destruction in Newark and Detroit after their respective riots in 1967. He witnessed a policeman strike a protestor in Chicago’s Grant Park after the 1968 Democratic National Convention, where Schroth was tear-gassed.

He found himself disgusted in Iraq by the wreckage of a bomb shelter, and the fate of the civilians, attacked by American forces — “This makes me ashamed to be an American,” he wrote in the shelter’s guestbook.

And now he sits in a moderately-sized room — featuring a piano, various artifacts, and just about as many books as a small-town library — reliving once again those earth-shattering events with a young reporter who was not alive for most of them.

Fr. Schroth began his non-professional journalistic career writing for The Fordham Ram. During Fr. Schroth’s junior year, he served as the “foreign correspondent” for the newspaper, documenting his experiences while studying abroad in Paris.

From 1954 to 1955, after having returned from France by way of a several day boat trip, Fr. Schroth served as both the editor of the editorial section and as a columnist. His column, titled “Between the Lines,” was a collection of writings about “whatever I wanted.”

He speaks with a great fondness for his days at The Fordham Ram, a publication that Fr. Schroth would later credit with helping him keep his professorship. He speaks with great admiration for the paper’s mentor, the late Edward A. Walsh.

From 1955 to 1957, Fr. Schroth served in the U.S. Army stationed in Mannheim, Germany, where his title was first lieutenant and his orders were to be a killer — so he describes it. Fr. Schroth never saw combat, and later wrote an article on how a man could be “a good Catholic and a good solider at the same time.” Fr. Schroth, who joined the Jesuits in 1957 and was ordained in 1967, further stated that he previously operated under the idea of “presumed righteousness” regarding American wars. That is, until Vietnam.

Fr. Schroth began teaching journalism at Fordham in 1969. The climate on campus, as he described it, was “hot” — not in terms of temperature, but in terms of people and politics as anti-war sentiment swept like an ideological tidal wave across the nation’s college campuses. Fordham students staged their own protests – both against the Vietnam War and Fordham’s administration. One protest – which involved the firebombing of the Campus Center in 1970 – sent Fr. Schroth running into an inferno.

On Nov. 12, 1969, several members of the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) and the Committee to Abolish ROTC — some of whom were students of Fr. Schroth — staged an occupation of the Administration Building, forcing out then-Fordham president Michael P. Walsh, S.J. Several Fordham members of the SDS, a national leftist organization founded in 1960, were also students in Fr. Schroth’s class “The History of American Violence,” a class he created.

Fr. Walsh, whom Fr. Schroth described as “a genius” and as “one of the greatest presidents in the history of American Jesuit education,” did not fight the protestors once they gained entrance to the building. Six students were later arrested, prompting Fr. Schroth to don his Roman collar and visit the “Fordham Six” in prison.

Fr. Schroth’s support of the protestors and his prison visit caught the ire of “a handful of Jesuits” who identified him as the cause of the students’ radical behavior. In Apr. 1970, when then-USG President Robert Reger, and according to The Fordham Ram, “approximately 250 students” occupied the Administration Building to demand tenure for English professor Dr. Ronald Friedland, Fr. Schroth once again supported the students. In our conversation, he described the occupation during as having been “all done in a very gentlemanly way.”

Despite the umbrage of certain Jesuits, Fr. Walsh stood by Fr. Schroth, just as later Fordham president Fr. James C. Finlay, S.J. would support him during a tenure battle which once again placed his job in jeopardy.

Fr. Schroth’s defense of the student protestors, and his own stalwart opposition to war and oppression, inform his overall understanding of what journalism ought to be. He describes journalism as “perhaps the greatest civic educational […] tool to spread democracy and to give voice to the voiceless.”

Fr. Schroth, now 84, has not relented in his mission to tell people’s stories. He is currently in the process of writing a new book on persons who have exhibited that rare quality called courage. Perhaps he should include himself in this project. Perhaps he should look at his walls.