The Rev. Robert Herbert Mize Jr. is an Episcopal minister who is conducting an experiment. That experiment has sometimes roused the good citizens of Ellsworth, Kans. to unholy wrath. But this week Kansans were digging down as usual to give Mize the money he needs for his St. Francis Boys' Home. Said one bank vice president wonderingly: "This man is Christlike, all right, but he's a genius at raising money."
Bob Mize, 40, took his B.A. in journalism at the University of Kansas and went to work for the United Press. He was a good newspaperman; one night he made up his mind that he would be a better minister.
After his ordination in 1932 he was assigned to a mission in western Kansas. As an unmarried vicar he was often asked to board paroled reform-school boys. The boys' response to his decent treatment kept Minister Mize pondering the problems of "exceptional children," as he likes to call delinquents. In 1945, when he learned that the vacant Poor People's Home at Ellsworth could be rented cheaply, "Father Bob" seized the opportunity to put some pet theories into practice.
Mize's bishop gave his blessing, but no salary; the county commissioners gave him a three-year lease on the poorhouse at $25 a month; the Kansas businessmen he buttonholed came across with $25,000. In September 1945, he opened St. Francis Home and brought in 22 tough kids, more than 75% of them with jail records.
Bob's Bad Boys. The cornerstone of Bob Mize's method is to give delinquents a chance to mingle with normal society. St. Francis boys go to regular public school, and are encouraged to date local girls on Friday or Saturday nights. At the beginning, Ellsworth's citizenry was skeptical of such freewheeling, and they soon had apparent cause. Father Bob's first bad boys practically took the town apart.
Since then, things have changed. Twenty-one boys have been "honorably discharged" without a single backslider so far. But in Ellsworth, there is still some headshaking. Said a leading local lawyer: "I think he might better do a little whipping out there than waste time having the kids bending marrow bones, pesterin' the Lord."
The Dreamer. Bob Mize sees it differently: "If I had to give up the spiritual side of the Home, I'd just as soon give it all up." For 15 minutes in the morning and 10 at night the boys attend compulsory chapel services. And the spiritual effort is far more than "bending marrow bones." Perhaps Mize's most revolutionary practice is his emphasis on forgiveness, rather than discipline.
"In the act of forgiveness," says Father Bob, "we have the most effective instrument for the transformation of character. ... If you forgive a boy, his knowledge that he has done wrong is deeper and his penance is more sincere. . . ."