Because, we’d say, he was a fulcrum in the lives of those who formed themselves around him. Because he paid us the compliment of driving us hard as students and then, in the decades to come, sustaining us individually and collectively with the shared bread of his friendship—like one of the righteous souls that the Talmud is always mysteriously crediting with holding this world together.

At least that’s how it seemed to those who knew him.

So we gathered on a cloudy day during the lingering pandemic in a stone church with its vault of azure blue. We warbled out upbeat songs, singing of alabaster cities gleaming, undimmed by human tears; of a tender Lord who extracts us when we’re snared like a bird in a fowler’s trap; and of the biggest promise ever made: resurrection after death.

Most of us had begun as Ray’s students at one Jesuit university or another, Fordham included. He was blatantly magnetic, a man-about-campus with a playful smile and form-fitting Izod shirt. But his main devotions were interior: to intellectual pursuits and his vocation as a priest. He celebrated Mass with a marked sincerity and taught his classes with a passion. He published his writing—rigorous journalism with a disarming dash of memoir—in national publications. And in his music-filled apartment, next to the armchair, was an elbow-high stack of magazines and books. He would read them all, sometimes late into the night after a steak-and-martini dinner with friends at an Arthur Avenue restaurant, rebuilding the stack as he went.

Somehow, Ray made his life of the mind seem glamorous—like if you yourself couldn’t get in on it, you’d keel over from an acute lack of fulfillment. Then one day he’d tap you on the shoulder, so to speak, and allow that he saw something in you. This was both thrilling and nerve-racking for the way it made you want to measure up. It embarked you on what felt like an adventure of spiritual striving and cold ocean swimming, high literary endeavor and incessant bonhomie. The bonus was membership in a community not of his followers but his brethren.

Years later, at the memorial at Fordham, a few of us sang his praises. “Ray was not a Catholic apologist but he was also not an apologetic Catholic,” said Kevin Doyle, FCRH ’78, a lawyer who has applied himself to defending men on death row. “He ached to be generative,” added Anne Gearity, TMC ’70, GSS ’74, about Ray’s zeal for teaching. She herself is a therapist who teaches children to cope with trauma.

Author Eileen Markey, FCRH ’98, noted the absence of Ray’s prize student, Jim Dwyer, FCRH ’79, who’d been one of his closest friends. A Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist of impeccably chiseled prose, Jim had been lined up long ago to deliver the eulogy. But before a memorial could be held, he died of cancer, a loss so devastating that it bordered on the absurd. All the more reason, Eileen observed, to gather at liturgy and find shelter with each other.

Afterward at a reception, there were mini muffins and comforting conversation, which is how I imagine the anteroom of heaven. Still, life haunts you. I kept dwelling on what Kevin Schroth, a professor at the Rutgers School of Public Health, had said at the Mass about the last two years of his uncle’s life: “Ray told me he was at peace with his condition, that he understood why he had to go through it.”

On a summer day in 2018, Ray was taking a walk on Webster Avenue when a stroke knocked him to the pavement. Remember those righteous men and women of the Talmud? This is how they quietly move among us, keeping chaos at bay through the practice of some discipline, until the chaos comes for them. Ray lost his ability to walk and write and gained a problem with swallowing that put him on a feeding tube. He entered a season of suffering. And yet, he clung to delight. He’d still beam at the sight of friends at his door, lifting his head as if lit from within. As if no loss in the world could keep him from loving you.

—Jim O’Grady, FCRH ’82, recently joined NPR’s Planet Money as a host and reporter after more than a decade at WNYC, where he earned numerous honors, including two Edward R. Murrow Awards. He is also the host of the podcast Blindspot: The Road to 9/11, a co-production of HISTORY and WNYC Studios.

Read more about Father Schroth’s life and legacy in our full obituary, published on July 7, 2020: “Raymond Schroth, S.J., Who Taught Generations of Journalists, Dies at 86.”  

Scenes from the memorial Mass and reception held at Fordham on October 23, 2021. Photos by Bruce Gilbert

“Father Schroth—Ray, as many of us knew him—was a towering figure at Fordham: he was a beloved professor, a treasured colleague, a lucid journalist and writer, and an insightful historian of the University and the Jesuits,” said Joseph M. McShane, S.J., president of Fordham. “He was wise, compassionate, and rigorous, and held his colleagues and students to his own very high standards. We will miss him greatly, and we will keep him and his loved ones in our prayers.”

Father Schroth received a bachelor’s degree from Fordham College at Rose Hill in 1955. In 1969, he returned to his alma mater as an associate professor who taught journalism in the communications department. During that time, he became the first person in University history to be granted tenure by the Faculty Senate, after initially being denied tenure by his department. The tense battle was covered by The New York Times, which referred to him as “probably the most popular teacher on campus.” He did earn tenure, thanks to a majority vote, student support, and the intervention of James C. Finlay, S.J., president of Fordham at the time. 

“Many of us on the Faculty Senate at the time, including myself, felt that a rejection by his tenured faculty in his department was not an appropriate decision. He was known by us to be a good teacher and a popular teacher,” recalled Robert Himmelberg, Ph.D., professor emeritus of history. 

For decades, Father Schroth taught American literature and journalism and/or served as academic dean at at least six universities. In 1979, Father Schroth left Fordham to become academic dean at Rockhurst University (formerly known as Rockhurst College) in Kansas City, Missouri. But almost two decades later, he returned to Fordham, where he served as assistant dean of Fordham College at Rose Hill from 1996 to 1999. 

In August 2016, he moved to Murray-Weigel Hall for health reasons. After experiencing a bad fall in 2017, he was confined to a wheelchair and “accepted reluctantly, but with faith, his disabilities,” read his obituary from the Jesuits USA Northeast Province. 

“I think of the different seasons of Ray’s life on that campus, from a young man in the ’50s to a young priest just beginning his work in the late ’60s, to this robust and storied presence in the ’90s. And now, in his last couple of years, a man who really suffered under the weight of age and infirmity,” said journalist Eileen Markey, FCRH ’98, past student and friend of Father Schroth’s who has served as an adjunct professor at Fordham. “All of those seasons on this campus really defined his life.”

‘At Heart Ray Is a Reporter’

Raymond Augustine Schroth was born in Trenton, New Jersey, on November 8, 1933, to Raymond Schroth, a journalist and U.S. Army veteran who was awarded the Distinguished Service Cross in World War I, and Mildred (née Murphy) Schroth, a teacher in the Trenton public and Catholic schools.

“Somehow I had made the basic decision inspired by both my parents’ lives: I wanted to write and teach, and that’s what Jesuits do,” he wrote in a 2007 story for the NJVoices column that reflected on his life. 

Father Schroth served for two years as an officer in the U.S. Army with an anti-aircraft battalion in West Germany, where he found his two vocations: the priesthood and journalism. In 1957, he joined the Society of Jesus and was ordained as a priest a decade later. He went on to earn two degrees in addition to his Fordham degree: a bachelor of sacred theology degree from Woodstock College, Maryland, in 1968, and a Ph.D. in American thought and culture from George Washington University in 1971. 

Journalism ran in his blood. His father served as an editorial writer for the Trenton Times, Brooklyn Eagle, and Philadelphia Record. His uncle, Frank D. Schroth, was the last publisher of The Brooklyn Eagle, according to a 1977 obit from The New York Times. 

For most of his life, Father Schroth followed in his family’s footsteps. He reported from 14 countries, including Syria and Russia, according to America magazine. In the U.S., he covered the aftermath of the Detroit riots and the 1968 Democratic National Convention, among other historic events.

Throughout his lifetime, Father Schroth authored eight books, including Fordham: A History and Memoir (Fordham University Press, 2008), a 300-page document that chronicles 137 years of the institution’s history. Other titles include The American Jesuits: A History (NYU Press, 2007) and Bob Drinan: The Controversial Life of the First Catholic Priest Elected to Congress (Fordham University Press, 2010). He published more than 300 articles and reviews that have appeared in multiple publications, including the Los Angeles Times, The Boston Globe, the National Catholic Reporter, Commonweal, and Newsday. In 2010, he joined the editorial staff of America, where he served as literary and books editor until he retired in 2017 and received the title editor emeritus. 

“At heart Ray is a reporter. … [H]e has never forgotten that an important part of a reporter’s job—especially for a Catholic journalist—is to tell the stories of ordinary people, the folks in the pews or on the streets,” Matt Malone, S.J., editor in chief of America: The Jesuit Review and president of America Media, wrote in a 2017 story. 

In that piece, Father Malone quoted something Father Schroth wrote on teaching: “The first step in teaching moral values to young journalists is to get them to feel pain—not their pain, the pain of others. From that, other virtues—compassion, skepticism, courage and the like—might follow.”

Mentor to Students ‘From All Eras’

Father Schroth loved to tell stories. That was clear in the ’70s, if you entered his room and studied the walls, and even two years ago, in his room at Murray-Weigel Hall. 

“You could come into his living room and see posters about strikes or political events that were going on, or you could see these very of-the-moment nonfiction books,” recalled Jim Dwyer, FCRH ’79, a two-time Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist who writes for The New York Times. “For an 18- or 19-year-old, it was a portal from the protected world of the campus to the wider world beyond.” He shared that passion with his students, too. 

“There’s this fraternity of Ray’s students from all eras, people ranging from their mid-sixties down to those of us in our forties or thirties, and people at all kinds of publications all over the country,” said Markey.

Father Schroth urged students to fact-check official statements from powerful figures, past students recalled. He was a writer who despised the phrase “the fact that” and emphasized the importance of writing concisely. He taught young journalists to set high standards for themselves and their work, and he stressed the importance of using their stories as “a force for change,” said another alumna. 

“In the early ’70s, the thinking in journalism was that a reporter had to report both sides of the story and be this impartial person … He understood that view, but he also presented the view that journalism was a force for change and a voice for the underdog and the underprivileged,” said Loretta Tofani, FCRH ’75, a retired investigative journalist. 

Father Schroth introduced Tofani to the work of several investigative journalists who played a role in her Pulitzer Prize-winning exposé of prison rape for The Washington Post, she said. 

Exposing students to important works and history was a priority for Father Schroth. He convinced his colleagues to come up with an annotated list of the most significant 10 books they had read, which he shared with his students as a guide to life, said Roger Wines, Ph.D., professor emeritus of history. He spearheaded the “Great Walk,” an annual student trek between the Battery in Manhattan and the Rose Hill campus—a way to explore the city and show students parts of New York that they might not otherwise see, said past students. Father Schroth also refused to become a “stale” professor.

Dwyer recalled one summer when he returned to campus and found Father Schroth in his room in Martyrs’ Court, shredding sheets of handwritten looseleaf notes. 

“I’m tearing up my notes for the books I’m teaching this semester,” Father Schroth explained. 

“Why on Earth would you do that if you’re going to be teaching them in a couple weeks?” Dwyer asked. 

“To force myself to read the books anew, so I don’t become stale,” Father Schroth replied. 

Connecting Students ‘to a Wider World’

In phone interviews, past students and colleagues described “Ray” as a stellar journalist and stalwart friend. He occasionally clashed with students, faculty, and his more conservative Jesuit brethren, but stood up for what he thought was right and inspired scores of students to do the same, they said. 

“One of the things that was really singular about Ray is his combination of intense rigor, high expectations, and personal standards, mixed with a tremendous sweetness and warmth,” said Markey. “Sometimes we think of those as two different things … But Ray did both.” 

Father Schroth was a tall, lean man who stood so straight that it made you want to stand up straighter, said Markey. He was also an avid runner, bicyclist, and swimmer. At age 83, he walked for miles along the Camino de Santiago, a pilgrimage trail in Spain, as he recounted three years ago. He loved show tunes, especially songs sung by Nelson Eddy and Jeanette MacDonald, and persuaded his fellow pilgrims to sing with him as they trekked the Spanish countryside, said Dwyer. He also took his friendships very seriously. 

“On Holy Thursday every year, he would send an email to many of us, saying, ‘This is when Jesus gathered his friends together and said, do this in memory of me, and this is a ritual of friendship and community, and that’s what we are to each other.’” said Markey. 

Over the years, he created a box filled with index cards that listed the names of hundreds of friends and family members. Every time there was a birth, move, divorce, job change, or marriage, Father Schroth updated the cards. 

“He married students. He buried their parents and baptized their children. And he did all that for me,” said Dwyer. “But he did that for hundreds of people.” 

“He connected me to the world of journalism, which has been my life for the last 40 years,” Dwyer continued. “But the bigger thing that Ray did for me and thousands of others is connect us to a wider world. He taught us that friendship has to be looked after—that it has to be cultivated and nurtured.”

Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, the wake and funeral Mass for Father Schroth at Murray-Weigel Hall will be private. He will also have a private burial at the Jesuit Cemetery in Auriesville, New York. His family will have a public memorial Mass when it is possible. Notes of condolence may be sent to his nephew, Kevin Schroth, at 79 Bingham Avenue, Rumson, NJ  07760.

Last spring, Jost taught Community Service and Social Action. His students complete 30 hours of service in the Bronx at more than a dozen community-based organizations. Markey, who taught The City and Its Neighborhoods, had her students immerse themselves in the study of a particular Bronx neighborhood. Both will be teaching the courses again next spring. 

Both raised outside of New York City, they are now raising families and working in the Bronx. Markey is an investigative reporter who teaches journalism at Lehman College; Jost is director of organizing at Banana Kelly Community Improvement Association, a housing-focused nonprofit in the South Bronx. 

The two recently sat down with Fordham News at 188 Bakery Cuchifrito, a Puerto Rican eatery just off the Grand Concourse. As neighbors popped in to buy coffee, crispy chicharrón, tropical fruit drinks, and lottery tickets, Jost and Markey talked redlining and gentrification, as well as art, food, music, and all things Bronx.

TS: When did you feel like you were from the Bronx?

EM: It happened over time. I have a memory of coming back one summer, I must have been picking up a friend or something. I remember driving in on Kingsbridge Road and it being hot and hearing all the music from the street and thinking, “I really miss the Bronx.” In terms of moving here, I knew that I wanted to come to the Bronx because I knew this neighborhood from my time at Fordham and from the newspaper. We were young adults, recently married, settling down. This was the place where we were gonna live permanently now. And then a bunch of other friends moved into our building, other Fordham people who chose the Bronx, who stayed and who were all doing work here. Most of those families are still around. But I think an important transformation—when I stopped thinking of myself as a Fordham person who moved to the Bronx—was really when I had kids. Then you really belong to a neighborhood and you have to make all these moral decisions around schools.

TS: Gregory, what about you? When did you feel that you were from the Bronx?

GJ: I think the real shift comes when you realize that you and everybody around you are actually in something together, that these are all your friends, your neighbors. For me, it was a work in progress, because coming out of a strong service-oriented model I had a lot of issues to come to terms with around power, personally. I had to switch to a framework of not doing anything for people, but doing things with people.

TS: How can Fordham students distinguish their residential role from that of a tourist?  

EM: It’s become more and more clear to me that the way we speak about neighborhood change and gentrification, we use the exact same terms as when talking about conquest. Terms like “pioneers of the neighborhoods,” or “settling neighborhoods,” or “I’ve discovered this neighborhood.” I don’t even like to use the word “explore.” I’m a journalist, so one of the students’ first assignments is to do what reporters do. It’s called a “beat note” of a neighborhood. When a reporter takes over a beat, you produce a big document about the geography, where the schools are, where the houses of worship are, who’s leading them, how old they are, etcetera. I’ve been really struggling not to use the word “guidebook.” I don’t want students to be part of tourism, which is really impossible to remove from a colonial history. A better way to say it would be “asset inventory,” because I want to get across this idea that neighborhoods have strengths. I think one difficulty is that students arrive in the Bronx and only see the problems. Sometimes that comes out of a decent, generous do-gooder instinct, but it doesn’t lead to good things. This neighborhood has tremendous strengths; it’s not a problem that you need to solve.

TS: As someone who lives and works in the Bronx, does it bother you when you meet students don’t know much about the borough and its past?

EM: I mean, one wouldn’t know unless you took a class, right? I didn’t know post-modern literature until I took a post-modern literature class. But I have students who are juniors and seniors who don’t know the Bronx.

TS: How do you teach that responsibly?

GJ: We’re really talking about power, and wealth is a piece of that. Students need to understand why there’s massive wealth disparity—opportunity disparities that exist even between students in the classroom, but then definitely between Fordham students and people who live in the neighborhoods surrounding campus. And that’s not just the history of the Bronx, that’s a history of the whole country.

TS: If that’s the case, how do students make the connection?

GJ: Most of the kids at Fordham, their parents used to live in the city, or their grandparents. You can see your family story in this natural story by asking, “Where did we live in the city? Why did we move out? How did we benefit from moving out? How were we able to build wealth through that?” Now I can come back into the neighborhood, and I’m in a position now to do service or just go explore—in a way that there is a power dynamic. If you’re not aware of that different power disparity when you’re going out into neighborhoods, you’re not going out in a responsible manner.

TS: What’s the difference between service learning and social justice?  

EM: For me, when I was a high school kid at a diocesan Catholic school in Massachusetts, we did lots of community service. It was better than not doing community service, but it’s not as good as doing social justice work. When I came to Urban Plunge, we got this history lecture about the fires, the ’70s, disinvestment, and suburbanization. A lot of institutions pulled up stakes and left, but what Fordham did instead helped to found Northwest Bronx Community and Clergy Coalition, which helped the neighborhood, but from within. We were invited to be, and this is so cool, to be a part of history.

GJ: When I’m on a panel and we’re talking about gentrification, this is exactly what I’m talking about. If you’re doing service without acknowledging the power disparity and then doing something to rectify that, then we’re not actually solving any problems. We’re not dealing with the underlying issue. You want to be looking at the structures. There’s a structural injustice, there’s systematic injustice, and there’s a perfect corollary to that in Catholic social teaching: that’s a structural sin. It’s a good thing to go do service for a couple hours in the soup kitchen, but we need to dig deeper into what we can do to disrupt the systems that keep people relying on soup kitchens in the first place, and create a society where we don’t have that inequity.

TS: Could some of these disruptions simply be going out to a restaurant or concert or learning about the culture by simply participating in the culture?

GJ: The best Urban Plunge experience I ever witnessed was everyone walking up to Poe Park. It happened to be the day of one of those free live concerts and they got the mobile stage, and it was salsa music, and everyone was out dancing. There was no power dynamic present.

I mean, if you want to talk about the things that came out of Bronx, it’s music and food. In good times and bad times, from Latin jazz and doo-wop to hip-hop. All these different moments, there’s a ton of creation happening, something that people value. And so, this is where it comes to a value question and who has value to contribute.

TS: The Bronx is back and it is extremely attractive, suddenly, to investors. What now?

EM: All these good things are things that the people who survived fought for, and those things didn’t happen because white people from the Village wanted them. It is because people who survived organized and fought and demanded it. People fought tooth and nail for 20 years to reclaim their river and to reclaim their parks. If they don’t get to live there anymore, which is a hundred percent happening, it’s so awful because the only reason it’s nice is because the people who were there made it nice and fought for it to be nice, and fought for it against tremendous resistance.

TS: Sounds like redlining in reverse.

GJ: It is so important to talk about like race and place, the reason neighborhoods were redlined was because of “infiltration” of people of color.

EM: Which is the term that was used on government paperwork.

GJ: There was a systematic devaluing of land based on the presence of people of color. And the flip side is that now when you have a piece of land that is attractive to white people there’s a system of mass displacement that’s generally pushing people of color around. You could say the Bronx is the last stand in New York City.

The deaths of Maura Clarke, M.M., Ita Ford, M.M., Dorothy Kazel, O.S.U., and Jean Donovan spurred outrage against the U.S. government’s support of the right-wing Salvadoran dictatorship and its campaign of terror against anyone who resisted it.

Five years ago, at the prompting of Clarke’s family, investigative reporter Eileen Markey, FCRH ’98, sought to recover the details of the Sister’s life from the shadow of her horrific death, in a book titled A Radical Faith: The Assassination of Sister Maura (Nation Books, 2016).

On March 7 at the Lincoln Center campus, in honor of International Women’s Day, Markey gave a talk titled “Foremothers Against Tyranny: The Radical Faith of Maura Clarke,” in which she brought Clarke to life as a deeply courageous woman devoted to human rights.

A Way Into the World

According to Markey, for Clarke and many other girls in her insular working-class neighborhood in Rockaway, Queens, joining a religious order was a way into the world—not out of it.

“These girls weren’t running away from anything. Given their class and the gender constraints that they faced, going into the convent was a way to a bigger life,” she said.

After the young woman became a Maryknoll Sister, she spent most of her adult life working with the poor in Nicaragua, and later in El Salvador.

Markey said that ideas raised by the Second Vatican Council of the early 1960s played an important role in Clarke’s deepening commitment to social justice. Special among those ideas were the universal call to holiness, and the emphasis on the church as not just an institution, but of the people themselves.

“By the middle of the sixties, Maura understood the phrase ‘the body of Christ’ to be a description of the people gathered in the pews as much as the wafer in the tabernacle,” said Markey.

A Faith in Which Everybody Matters

According to Markey, Clarke began to live out these ideas in Latin America by working with poor people, especially women, in small groups in their homes—analyzing Bible stories, asking questions about God in their life, and listening to what they had to say.

“I think that’s the radical faith—this idea that everybody matters . . . that nobody is a number, that nobody is a product, that nobody is for sale,” said Markey.

In researching her book, Markey met a number of people whose lives had been touched by Clarke, whose tireless endeavors serving others also included working in schools and health clinics, demonstrating for land reforms, assisting victims of government violence, and documenting human rights abuses.

For Markey, remembering Clarke helps us do more than just understand the conflicts of Latin America in the 1970s.

“There’s something transformational for ourselves when we study a good person, when we understand how her life made sense,” she said.

Markey’s talk was sponsored by the Department of Sociology and Anthropology; Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies; and Peace and Justice Studies.

–Nina Heidig

While women have made significant economic and social and political gains in the last century, those working within the Catholic Church are still symbolically relegated to the “pews in the back,” said Jennifer Owens, co-editor of From the Pews in the Back: Young Women and Catholicism(Liturgical Press, 2009).

“If I have learned anything from my studies in feminist theory and theology, it is that there is often an untold story, a pause in a sentence, a look, a sigh that signals the unconventionality of so-called conventional women,” said Owens, a doctoral student in theology at Graduate Theologian Union. “If we pretend that the elephant in the room isn’t there, the situation is not going to improve.”

Owens and co-editor Kate Dugan undertook the publishing project—a collection of 29 essays of Catholic women born in the 1970s and 1980s—to help “fill out the silences in the Catholic story,” she said.

Three Fordham students joined Dugan and Owens on the panel to document their struggles with Catholicism.

Fordham College at Rose Hill junior Kathleen Mroz described the difficulty she had combining her love of the Eucharist and the Virgin Mary with her disillusionment in how the church has treated women as well as her father—an ex-priest who left the church to marry her mother.

But her Fordham education, and in particular her work with Sister Elizabeth Johnson, Ph.D., Distinguished Professor of Theology, has enabled her to discover a renewed faith in Catholicism through feminist theology, she said.

Panelist Eileen Markey (left) and Aimee della Porta speak at Young Women and Catholicism.

Mroz has been inspired to view theology as an integral part of being Catholic, she added, and has inspired her to stay in the church.

“The most important discovery of all was that I can fight for women’s ordination in the Catholic Church and still be 100 percent Catholic,” Mroz said.

As a 21st century Catholic transitioning out of the church, Fordham College at Rose Hill senior Aimee della Porta said she has come to find God in her spiritual passions, such as performance, literature and—most profoundly—in service to others.

“This concept is unfathomable to my dad,” della Porta said. “What my parents consider to be a phase, I see as both a generational influence and an effort to live like Christ. My service experience has taught me to value human interaction as a means of encountering Christ.”

But her service work with underrepresented women has led her to be attracted to other religions that she feels better promotes gender parity. For these reasons, della Porta described herself as “dwelling somewhere between Catholicism and Quakerism.”

“I don’t know whether this transition will ever be complete,” she said.

Most of the women in the book, said the editors, have made the decision to stay in the church in spite of its shortcomings. Essayist Eileen Markey, FCRH ’98, who wrote in the book about her struggle over her son’s religious education, noted the difficulty in educating him in an institution that she feels “distrusts the fresh air of argument.” And yet, Markey said, many women—she included—stay as Catholics because it is part of who they are.

“Nobody is going to take it from me,” she said. “You are not going to take the rituals, the community, or the good art. It’s mine.”

The event was sponsored by the Francis and Ann Curran Center for American Catholic Studies.