Et tu, Father Smylie?

Actually, when the favorite priest from my time at Strake was accused of abuse allegations, it should have surprised nobody with eyes to see.

When he arrived at Strake Jesuit, circa 1986, my sophomore year, he was welcomed by his first first theology students as the “cool priest.” Though not a young man – he was already in his 50s by the time he was finally ordained, up in Dallas, in 1985 – Father Benjamin Smylie, SJ, had a way of communicating with us most of the other priests or aspiring priests did not, conversant as he was in certain music and movies and a sort of mysticism that fascinated us at the time.

Fairly tall and square-jawed, with a mop of wavy salt and pepper hair over square-rimmed, DMC-style specs, he was fond of wearing plaid shirts to set off his dog collar. He spoke in the dulcet baritone of an old-school public radio announcer. He once told our entire theology class he was going to hypnotize us, and damned if it didn’t work – at least on me, I, one who prides himself on being above such wowserism, was successfully put under by his methods. 

(Apparently there are no pictures of the man anywhere on the ‘net.)

Ruckus reader John McKee kindly furnished two pics, apparently both from Dallas Jesuit yearbooks, via Ancestry.com, from years apart. In retrospect he looks the epitome of a creep in both of them.

Not long after he singled me out in class. Believing he could predict my future, he predicted that one day I would become a great televangelist. He said that, in front of the whole class. He was not that far off – what is journalism but manipulating people toward your version of the truth for money? And he didn’t know it then, but I have long been a connoisseur of the great and sleazy televangelists who infested my TV set as a child and young man. (Smylie’s fellow Dallasite Robert Tilton being my favorite ever.)

He became an icon among ITK – I Tappa Kegga, the popular set of boys there. I was a fringe member of this group, recruited less because they liked me than they saw me as something of an enforcer, due to my size and football ferocity and aura of mystery as a kid with no past in Houston when I arrived. (Much the same went for my best friend Steve Uecker, who though smaller, was accurately regarded as equally fierce.) The core group of the rest of ITK were made up of rich kids and the boys on the cheerleading team – best cars, best clothes, dated the right girls, all that.

And Smylie was their totem priest, and mine too. He was a rock star among men who were at best staid and at worst nerds or effete. He could argue those of us who were serious about our faith to a standstill and advise the more lax on the finer points of partying.     

One of the faithful was Austin attorney Joe de la Fuente. “He was the first theology teacher who told me that challenging the orthodoxy was GOOD religious thinking, rather than something to be avoided.  I told him, as a smart ass 15 year old that ‘I don’t buy it - the divinity of Christ, the virgin birth, any of it.’  Because I wanted to jab him in the chest.  He grinned and said, ‘That’s fantastic, that means you’re thinking about it.  We have enough Catholics who believe what they’re told.  We need Catholics who believe because they think.’  Well….shit.  I meant to piss him off, and now I’ve got some real thinking to do.”

Even my grandmother loved him. When she would come pick me up from school, Smylie would be over in the vacant lot on the Gessner side of campus whacking golf balls in shorts and his plaid shirt south toward the priests’ residential compound.

“Who’s that?” she asked me one time.

“Father Smylie,” I said. “My theology teacher. He’s really cool.”

“Well I can see that’s a man’s man,” she said.

I didn’t tell her about certain other episodes; not just the time he predicted a Jim Bakker future for me. There was another time I was in his counseling office with a couple of other students and talked turned to illegal drugs. And sometimes all you can do is shrug and wonder at the reality of the things you’ve experienced in life, because then and there he said he had this really cool way of smoking weed he wanted to teach us.

“You get a spoon and heat it over a stove until it is extremely hot,” he said, “and then you drop a bud in there and catch the smoke as it rises off the spoon.”

Whoa, Father Smylie, that’s so dang cool! (De la Fuente reminded me that Smylie had studied at Berkeley in the ‘60s.)

As with so many of our teachers who’d taken orders during that era, he was there and he was gone. In his case, back to Dallas. It was ordinary to us for these teachers to come and go. It was just the Jesuit way of doing things. The “troubled” priest shuffle. 

I’d look him up from time to time and saw only that he’d returned to Dallas and taught at Dallas Jesuit and pastored at St. Rita’s, a church near that campus. I even seem to recall that he sent me a note from that parish later in life, for some reason. I can picture the letterhead. He died in 2004 and his obit was very light on details, not even mentioning his short stint at Strake.

And then today I looked him up again, just ‘cause my mind got to wanderin’ and, well, yeah….

“Named publicly as accused by the Dallas diocese on its list 1/31/19….Taught at Jesuit College Prep for many years. Retired in 2002. Died in 2004. Added to the Jesuits Central and Southern Province list 2/27/20. It notes the allegations against Smylie were received after his death and that the abuse was said to have occurred in the 1980s. Included in a lawsuit by multiple former Dallas Prep students, filed on 8/19, of abuse of a student in 1981. Allegedly the boy went to Smylie for counseling while his mother was dying, and the priest plied him with alcohol then sexually assaulted him on an overnight at a Jesuit retreat center.”

Well…he’s not around to defend himself anymore, so there’s that, but why on earth would anyone wait almost four decades to concoct a terrible story like that? So many more questions – none with good answers. 

And the thing is – I’ve shared this now with three of my friends – we all knew this was inevitable. Nobody batted an eye. No shock whatsosever. For as much as we loved him and as cool as he seemed, we all just knew Father Smylie was not who he seemed to be.

And as de la Fuente said, he was one of the Jesuits who valued the teaching of independent thinking. That was pretty much all I learned at Jesuit, but here it is: it is all you need in life. Learn how to think and your only boundaries are your intellect and your courage. Smylie was all about that.

But given the history of his “company,” forgive me thinking there was a darker side to the man.