Inducted in 2019
Prep Teacher (1954-1962)
Educator & Administrator, Various Jesuit Institutions

“The teacher shall so train the youths entrusted to the Society’s care that they may acquire not only learning but also habits of conduct worthy of a Christian.  He should endeavor both in and outside the classroom to train the impressionable minds of his pupils in the loving service of God and in all the virtues required for this service.”
— The Ratio Studiorum of 1599
 
During his 48 years of life, Father Thomas Crowley, SJ, was no stranger to suffering, yet with faith and grace, he put aside his own woes and never failed to place the needs of his students before his own.  More than a half-century after his sophomore year in Crowley’s classroom, Augustine Perrotta, Class of 1956, would note: “By his instruction and example, Fr. Crowley instilled in us the “Man for Others” concept well before it was articulated by the Superior General of the Society of Jesus in 1973 at that convocation in Valencia, Spain.”  Perrotta is not alone in his estimation.  One after another, his fellow homeroomers from yesteryear would affirm the extraordinary mark Fr. Crowley had indelibly left on their minds and hearts.

Thomas John Crowley was born Thomas John Murphy in Bayonne, New Jersey on March 16, 1916.  The delivery was complicated.  Thomas’ mother, Anna Higgins Murphy, would pass away only three months later, and his father, John Murphy, would follow within a few years.  Thomas and his older sister, Alice, were taken in by their aunt, Hannah Murphy Crowley and her husband, Cornelius Crowley, an accountant.  Aunt Hannah would raise her nephew and niece along with her four sons, David, Francis, Charles and Cornelius, Jr.  In time, the Crowleys would adopt them, and Thomas and Alice would take the Crowley name.

Tom grew up on Rankin Street in Elizabeth, New Jersey.  Despite his chronically poor health, he was given a good home and a comfortable childhood by his aunt, uncle and cousins.  He attended his parish grammar school, Holy Rosary, and from there, entered St. Peter’s Prep in Jersey City in September 1929 as a member of the graduating class of 1933.

Academic success does not seem to have come easily to Crowley, and the rigor of the St. Peter’s program certainly tested him.  But he was challenged, supported and inspired by the Jersey City Jesuits, and by the end of his senior year, he would graduate near the top of his class.  An active member of the St. Peter’s Sodality — the student devotional and charitable organization of the day — Tom’s classmates would write of him that he had “applied himself diligently and thus won the esteem of his classmates and teachers.”  They would also go on to note his reflective quietness and sense of punctuality.
 
Thomas Crowley entered the Society of Jesus shortly after his St. Peter’s graduation at the St. Isaac Jogues Novitiate in Wernersville, Pennsylvania where he would remain until 1937 through the juniorate of his Jesuit formation.  He continued with his philosophical studies at Inisfada on Long Island and Woodstock College in Maryland, returning to the New York Metropolitan Area in 1940 to teach at Regis High School for three years.  Mr. Crowley, SJ left Regis in 1943 to complete his theological studies in Maryland and was ordained on June 23, 1946.

Though health plagued him as a young priest, Fr. Crowley’s spirit was indomitable.  After ordination, he spent time at Manresa Hall in Washington State, taught again at Regis, and spent a year teaching Greek and Latin at St. Andrew’s Novitiate in Hyde Park, New York before arriving at Rose Hill in September of 1952.

At Fordham Prep, Fr. Tom Crowley soon found his instructional niche.  Like his fellow Hall of Honor inductee, Fr. George MacAleer, he taught sophomores.  Fr. Crowley’s position, however, was a bit more specialized.  Given a homeroom of students who had performed “less than stellarly” in their freshman year, he was assigned to teach them three subjects: English, Latin, and Religion — at the time a highly unusual arrangement.

In the days before Fordham Prep had officially created its Mentoring Program, Fr. Thomas Crowley was to his students not only a mentor, but an extraordinary one.  With compassion, careful attention and a good dose of wry humor — “The F does not stand for fine, gentlemen,” he would joke with his homeroom in years designated as 2F — Father would teach his boys to have confidence in themselves and to take pride in their accomplishments.  He helped them to study more efficiently and to work together in fraternal cooperation.  He gave them the tools they needed for success at the Prep and in life.

As Augustine Perrotta and the Old Boys of 2F would always recall, Father Crowley gave them a sense of their own dignity and reminded them that they — and all of God’s sons and daughters — were more than just a sum total of their own “mannerisms, peculiarities, and hang-ups.”  And perhaps that was Father’s greatest and most enduring lesson of all.

At the Prep, Fr. Crowley would also coach the Latin Sight-Reading Team.  Under his five-year moderatorship, the team would bring home All-Jesuits top honors four times.  Finally, as students from the ‘50s would recall for decades, Father and his homeroom would always break records when it came to collections for the missions, tallying up over $550 in 1954.  Adjusted for inflation, that would amount to over $5,100 at the time of Father’s 2019 Hall of Honor induction.  Interestingly enough, Crowley would always request that his students’ mite-box money go to support Jesuit works in or Chuuk, Micronesia — still the destination of the Prep’s annual Lenten collection.

By 1960, Father Crowley’s health had finally caught up with him.  Over the next two years, his responsibilities at the Prep were lessened, until at last, in 1962, he was reassigned to a light administrative post at the University.

Fr. Thomas J. Murphy Crowley passed away on March 10, 1964.

The excerpt above from the Ratio Studiorum demonstrates the high academic and spiritual standards the early Jesuits set for their teachers when it came to the formation of their students.  That Fr. Thomas Crowley embodied these ideals even 350 years after the Ratio was first written, there can be no doubt.

Today at the Prep, there is a scholarship given in Father’s honor, established, of course, by Augie Perrotta and his former 2F cohorts, so that other boys today who’d spent their first year performing “less than stellarly” might experience what they had so long ago.  Crowleyesque, indeed.