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Profiles ST. JUDE’S BUSINESSMAN-PRIEST

By Joe Holley |

At the age of 76, Arthur C. Hughes, senior vice president of the S.H. Lynch Company, Dallas distributor of Schlitz beer, became Father Hughes. Today, the small, frail-looking priest with the white, neatly combed hair sits in his hardback rocker patiently explaining why he wants no more publicity for himself. His piercing blue eyes from behind silver-rimmed glasses look kind but firm. All around him are books, mementoes, religious art objects. Outside the comfortable glassed-in back porch/den, a backyard filled with trees slopes down to Turtle Creek.

“I’ve had all the advertising I can take,” he says. “I don’t need any more. When your name is in the paper too much, and you’re before the public too much, two things can happen – after a while, they get tired of you, for one thing, and the next thing is people that would come and talk to you about the church become reluctant to do it. They say, ’Well, he’s too busy.’ “

For 84-year-old Father Hughes the latter consequence would be tragic, for what he loves to talk about more than anything else is St. Jude Chapel, the small Catholic church with the distinctive modernistic sun-burst facade on Main Street in the heart of downtown Dallas. “The more you can say about the chapel, the more people will come there, and everybody will be better off,” he explains. “It’s a wonderful place for people. It’s a haven of rest from the noise and bustle outside.”

But it is practically impossible to write about St. Jude Chapel without writing about this remarkable man who continues to celebrate noon Mass nearly every day at St. Jude, and who still goes in to the office every morning as perhaps the only businessman/priest in the United States.

Arthur Hughes grew up in St. Jo, Texas, a small community west of Gainesville. He became a Catholic in 1913 at the age of 21, after growing up in the Presbyterian Church where as a young man he “taught every Sunday school class the Presbyterian Church had.”

“When I was growing up, we had dances on Saturday night, and I always liked to dance,” he recalls. “The Methodist preacher told everybody they would lose their soul in Hell if they kept on dancing. Well, I didn’t want to lose my soul in Hell so I asked the Presbyterian preacher about it. He said dancing could lead to sin, but that there was nothing wrong with dancing per se. ’That’s an odd thing,’ I thought, so I began to study religion.”

Hughes began to read everything about religion he could get his hands on in St. Jo and Gainesville. One day he met a priest in Henrietta, and realized he had not yet explored Catholicism. The priest agreed to send him some books, although Hughes surmises the priest lost his address because the books never came. So Hughes went to one of the three Catholic families in St. Jo and borrowed books. When he had read all he could find in St. Jo, he went back to Gainesville for more books. For two and half years he studied by himself.

He was 21 when Joe Houcton, the St. Jo man who had first loaned him books about Catholicism, told him that Father Luke Hess, a Benedictine from the monastery at Subiaco, Arkansas, came through St. Jo every six weeks to offer Mass in the Houcton home. Hughes was by then convinced that the Catholic church was the original church founded by Jesus Christ, so he was waiting for the priest when he arrived on Saturday, July 8, 1913. “I remember it was a real hot day,” he says. “We sat out on the porch and talked.”

Father Hess told him it normally took about 40 hours of instruction, usually one hour a week, before a person was ready to join the church. “I’ve been studying for two and a half years,” Hughes said. “I wonder if you can just quiz me now?”

“I don’t see why not,” the priest answered. He catechized Hughes for two hours and then exclaimed, “You know more about the church than any layman I ever encountered! There’s absolutely no reason why I shouldn’t receive you into the church immediately.”

“That is what I want with all my heart,” Hughes said. His reception took place in the front parlor. Next morning, when Father Hess celebrated Mass at the sideboard in the dining room, Hughes received First Communion.

Catholics were relatively rare in St. Jo so it was only natural that friends and family had plenty of questions for the young convert. He studied 100 questions and answers each week, along with several books a week, to be prepared for their questions. “I kept it up for several years,” he says, “100 questions a week, 5,000 questions a year. I still do the equivalent. If somebody asked a question I didn’t know, I’d write it down and get the answer.” Even today books like Ask and Learn, Great Controversies, and Questions and Answers of the Catholic Faith take up quite a bit of space on his book shelves.

A few years before his conversion he had started in business as the nine-year-old switchboard operator for the St. Jo telephone exchange. By the time he was 15, he was a lineman. While still in his early twenties, he bought the telephone exchanges in Alvord, Sunset, and Bridgeport.

“I always liked to sell,” Father Hughes says, “so I started selling Edison phonographs on the side.” He sold the telephone exchanges in 1921 and went into business with Silas H. Lynch and another man, owners of the Edison Shop in Fort Worth. They later moved to Dallas. Today, 56 years after they first met, Lynch and Hughes are still in business together.

“You name it, I’ve sold it,” Father Hughes says with a laugh. “I’ve sold carpet sweepers, I sold Edison phonographs, later we took on jukeboxes. We had the distributorship for Seeburg coin-operated phonographs for six states.” In 1921 he sold more Edison phonographs than all but one man in the United States. “If I’d sold one more phonograph at a hundred forty-seven dollars, I would have won first place,” he remembers. Nevertheless, he won $500 and an all-expense-paid trip to New Orleans for his efforts.

Today the S.H. Lynch Company, Arthur C. Hughes senior vice president, is one of four American distributors for the Adidas sportswear line as well as the Dallas County distributor for the Schlitz Brewing Company – the Adidas line did 10 million dollars worth of business last year; Schlitz, 19 million dollars. To those who might raise an eyebrow at priestly involvement with alcoholic beverages, Father Hughes has a tongue-in-cheek retort: “I’m not in it as deep as our Lord,” he points out. “I just work for a company that sells it. He manufactured it.”

“He’s a man of considerable wealth,” a colleague says, “but he lives very frugally. He gives everything away, a lot of it to the foundation. [The Arthur C. Hughes Foundation was set up in 1950 to help young people get a Catholic education.] A big treat for him is Wyatt’s Cafeteria.”

Father Hughes would probably have studied for the priesthood as a young man, but as the youngest of nine children, he felt it his duty to care for his elderly mother and father. “I began to say that whatever the Lord wanted me to do, well then let Him show me, and I’d try to do it,” he recalls.

But if God didn’t see fit to make him a priest right off, He certainly kept him busy. In his 55 years as a layman, he instructed 110 people in Catholic doctrine, all of whom embraced the Catholic faith. He was also counseling young married couples, helping youngsters get into Boys Town and Notre Dame, providing a home for boys who, for longer or shorter periods, needed a place to stay, and talking to literally hundreds of young people about their faith. “The young people keep me on my toes,” he says.

Hughes and several friends first began talking about the need for a Catholic church in downtown Dallas in 1940 but for many years the idea was merely an occasional conversation topic – unti a young man who knew Hughes said to him one day, “Mr. Hughes, the young people like myself have no influence But you big shots who could have got a chapel down here years ago, all you do is talk, talk, talk.” Arthur Hughes got busy.

Well-attended noonday Mass at the Tower Theater during the Lenten season in the early Sixties convinced Bishop Thomas Gorman that a downtown chapel was needed. He committed the diocese to paying for a downtown site if Hughes could raise the money for a building. The Main Street site cost the diocese $325,000 – $50,000 less than the asking price thanks to Hughes’ business acumen, and with a little help from several friends Hughes was able to raise through private donations an additional $320,000 for a building. Mrs. Mary Saner, who died recently at the age of 101, made the first contribution – $10,000. She later contributed $30,000 more. “Four years after the building was completed, we were able to clean up our part of the debt,” Father Hughes says.

Despite complications which more than justified naming the downtown church for the patron saint of difficult cases, St. Jude Chapel was dedicated on September 15, 1968. Arthur Hughes as lay reader at the dedication Mass chose a verse from St. Paul’s letter to the Ga-latians: “Let us not grow weary of doing good,” he read, “for if we do not relax our efforts, in due time we shall reap our harvest. So while we have the opportunity, let us do good to all men.” Two months later (November 16, 1968), 76-year-old Arthur Hughes was ordained a priest.

He had considered becoming a priest nine years earlier, but Rome wanted him to take four years of seminary training which he wasn’t in a position to do. This time, the Vicar-General, Mon-signor Gerald Hughes (no relation) took the request personally to Rome and the seminary requirement was waived. It was an extraordinary concession, apparently the only one in modern times. Older priests have been ordained – a few years ago an 80-year-old became a priest, but he like everyone else attended seminary. “Rome was worried about attracting people to the priesthood about that time,” Father Hughes says with a laugh, “so when the Holy Father heard about me, he probably said, ’Feel of him and see if he’s still warm and still breathing, and if he is, we’ll make him a priest.’ “

Father Pacifus Kennedy, a friend of Father Hughes, has written that when the Holy See’s concession was announced, a young priest protested to Father Joseph Schumacher, St. Jude’s first administrator, “It doesn’t seem fair. We had to go through college and seminary, and he gets ordained without all that.”

For Father Hughes, who will be 85 in April, the day begins about 6:40 every morning. He arrives at his Lynch Company office about 9:30. Although he passed his driving test recently, he has a man who takes him where he needs to go in Father Hughes’ white Oldsmobile with the “ST. JUDE” personalized license plates. “My work around the Lynch Company is more or less in an advisory capacity,” he says. Besides his position as senior vice-president, he also serves on the board and is chairman of the profit-sharing trust.

After an hour or so at the office, he goes to the chapel, celebrates the second of two Masses offered daily, hears confessions, then goes home to rest before going back to the Lynch Company for about an hour. In the evening, he usually gives instruction in his home, and on Sunday he preaches.

For nearly two years, until a second operation was successful late last year, Father Hughes was, for all practical purposes, blind because of cataracts. “Not being able to read was torture,” he says. “Sometimes young fellows would come in and read to me, but I missed it like everything.”

“All he could see was shadows,” Father Graham explains, “but he still conducted services. He had the Mass memorized, but the prayers that change every day were a problem. A young man, Tony D’Amico, would come in every day and print them in big block letters so that Father Hughes could read them. It was humiliating, but he wouldn’t complain. He never got down in the dumps, and he never gave up hope. Now he can see just fine.”

Father Hughes is happy in his merger of two worlds; he has no regrets. “All the time I’ve been in business I’ve tried to conduct my part of the business, and Mr. Lynch certainly does, so that nothing smacks of dishonesty,” he says. “You don’t have to. If you’re a good salesman, you can sell your product on its merits. You don’t have to lie about it.

“The first thing that I always did, I always went to a world of trouble to pick out what I thought was the best thing in its line. And then, feeling that I had the best to sell, I never talked about the competitors. I don’t believe in that. And in instructing people about the Catholic faith, I never do talk about any other faith. Sometimes they’ll speak up and say, ’Well what do you think about the Methodist faith?’ I’ll say, ’I’m not going to express myself on it. If you want to talk about the Methodist faith, go talk to a good Methodist. I’m selling the Catholic faith – that’s all I’m selling.,”

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