Asking anyone to write about what makes Fr. Bob Hilbert, SJ a special human being and so distinctive a proponent of social justice is a little like asking a puddle to explain what it’s like to be a great lake just because both are technically pools of standing water.

Fr. Bob Hilbert, SJ baptizes a baby at St. Stephen’s Mission. Opposite page: Fr. Hilbert clears the entrance for the faithful.

Fr. Hilbert is a reservoir of wisdom, patience, compassion, love, sensitivity, quiet assertiveness, and a whole lot of other things collected over 78 years of life experiences that continue to churn passionately yet gently beneath a calm surface.

Those deeper currents have influenced him through a wide range of apostolic assignments. Since becoming a Jesuit in 1943, Fr. Hilbert has taught Latin, theology, and math; served as a director of a diocesan retreat house, rector at a Jesuit boarding school, and superior of a Jesuit community. He’s been a pastor in a variety of locations and spent many years working in various posts on several Indian reservations, all the while developing a deep sensitivity to conditions and issues affecting society’s poor and marginalized.

“He is a giant,” says Fr. Ed Mathie, SJ using an interesting choice of words to describe the diminutive priest he selected to join his staff after being named University as director of university ministry, Fr.Mathie recalls how Fr. Hilbert and he collaborated in the late 1960s on a summer program to bring disadvantaged blacks from Milwaukee to Campion High School, then a Jesuit boarding school near the Iowa-Wisconsin border.

“He looked around and wondered what the buildings were used for in summer,” says Fr.Mathie, who wrote the proposal for what became “Project Summer Prep,” a program for grade school students to help prepare them for Catholic high schools in Milwaukee, including Marquette University High School.

“He was the vision behind it. He is always seeing things. I brought him onto staff because I felt it’s critical to reach out and have all folks who might not otherwise be listened to heard and understood,” Fr.Mathie says. “Social justice means nothing unless you do something about it. He can connect, hear, and come up with ideas. That’s his genius.”

Stephanie Russell, director of Marquette University Mission and Identity, worked with Fr. Hilbert for three years at the province office, sharing responsibilities for social and pastoral ministries.“He is a completely honest and guileless person who doesn’t turn away from things and consistently sees the potential for the Gospel to heal. The Gospel is always bigger than any problem he’s dealing with,” says Russell who, like Fr.Mathie, appreciates Fr. Hilbert’s desire to listen and hear.

“He says a lot without words. His presence in a room calls people to their better selves. The conversation in the room is different because of his character,” Russell says. “He might go a whole meeting saying very little, but what he says is very crucial. Listening is more important to him than talking, and that’s a rare gift.”

When he hears these words of praise, Fr. Hilbert smiles and says, “I appreciate their opinions though I’m not sure I agree with them.”He says he has failed at so many things and what others see as a gift for listening might only be shyness.“My shyness is such that I enjoy being with a group. But I don’t enjoy being the focus of attention. That alone can make you stand out in a room of extroverts.”

Kellie Webb, of Riverton Wyo., a town on the Wind River Reservation near St. Stephen’s Mission, has longstanding ties with the Jesuits. A member of the Shoshone tribe, she met Fr. Hilbert after graduating from college and moving back home. “I started going back to church a little bit after that,” says the 1983 graduate of Marquette University. “I felt instantly calm around him. I have not experienced that much in white males and priests.” Fr. Hilbert baptized her two eldest daughters. She says she and others living on and around the reservation, Indian and white alike, appreciateFr. Hilbert’s ability to bring the richness of the Native American culture to non-Indian parishioners.

He is also gifted, she says, at weaving social questions related to faith and justice into homilies that are rich in wisdom and can open minds to important questions without sounding preachy or condescending.

Fr. Rick Abert, SJ cited similar gifts in Fr. Hilbert whom he says not only knows what questions to ask, but is willing to ask them, and does so in a way that encourages dialog. “I like being around him. I’m challenged by him, and I learn a great deal from him. He is a very wise man.”

The notion that he is somehow wise makes Fr. Hilbert humbly smile again, a smile that brings warmth to an otherwise frigid February morning at St. Stephen’s on the reservation that is home to both the Arapaho and Shoshone people. Fr. Hilbert’s path to working with Native Americans here and in previous assignments began early on in his studies to be a Jesuit priest. In the early 1950s he spent summers working as a plumber’s assistant to a Lakota man in St. Francis, S.D. on the Rosebud Reservation. He admits his motivation was not so much a desire to be among the poor as it was to get a break from academics.

“I was tired from the school year and really had no inclination to spend the summer studying,” he laughs.

However, his experiences in one of the nation’s poorest counties piqued his curiosity about the history of western expansion. In simplest terms, he says, the settling of America involved importing one culture to serve as slaves while oppressing the native ultures of the new world, all justified because the dominant culture felt superior to the others. Fr. Hilbert believes who he is as a person, and what defines us as a people and a nation today, are rooted in that history.

“I can discern elements of that in me. I am very much a part of that culture. In terms of culture, I am sinfulness incarnated, made flesh in this particular person, Bob Hilbert.”

Over time as he studied, reflected, and prayed, he traced his own prejudice to that history. How else, he wonders, could he as a child have been prejudiced against black people when he had never known one? He still remembers as a moment of self-revelation “a very minor incident” when he was a teen-age Western Union delivery boy. The first time he took a telegram to a black family on Omaha's northeast side he found himself treated more kindly and with greater dignity than he experienced in his calls in white areas.

“I use the term sinfulness rather than sin because it’s a sinful attitude that is embedded in all of our society – white society, European-American society. It has been with us for centuries… and led to things that we now can see were ugly and hateful.…

Fr. Bob Hilbert, SJ prepares for Mass.

“I don’t say that evil people were doing all that. A lot was done by very good people unintentionally because there was a prevailing cultural attitude they all simply took for granted.” It took many forms – even missionaries spreading the Gospel, looking only to help, were inclined to dismiss and repress traditional spiritualities because they felt their own was superior.

How we view and act toward others, individually and collectively, should be examined with an understanding that we are imprinted with these patterns of our past, Fr. Hilbert says. And the very pattern of what we appear to be to ourselves should be viewed in a context that acknowledges that the work, sacrifice, and even oppression of others make possible who and what we are and all that we possess.

Fr. Hilbert cites the example of the gap between rich and poor, and how the latter are sometimes referred to as the underside of society. That gap might appear wide, but is really very narrow, he says,much like the difference between the beautiful top of an embroidered tablecloth and the chaotic stitches of the underside of the pattern – an underside without which the topside could not exist.

There is an adage about not judging another person until you have walked a mile in their shoes. Fr. Hilbert, in all he does, seems to be living a variation of that adage, not just swapping shoes for a mile, but walking longer distances wearing one from each culture until somehow both feel comfortable and not so very different.

In doing so he sounds less concerned about how deep or wide cultural differences seem to run than how to effectively bridge the gaps between them while desiring to live harmoniously with the people on the other side. Perhaps this, in part, is what others see him striving to do when he listens, and why he can sit silent in a meeting and appear to be so wise before he speaks and removes any doubt.