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Father Owen W. Daley, S.J., who was involved in labor issues and legal service to the poor, died April 10 at St. Vincent's Hospital in Manhattan. He was 77. He was assistant director of the Xavier Institute of Industrial Relations, known informally as the Jesuit Labor School, 1977-1988. Based at St. Francis Xavier parish in Manhattan, the school was founded to bring Catholic social teaching into the workplace to improve labor-management relations and to secure just conditions for workers. He earned a law degree from Brooklyn Law School and provided legal aid to the poor from 1979 to 1994. He was an admissions counselor at Fordham University, 1994-2002. Born in Jersey City, N.J., he entered the Jesuits at St. Andrew-on-Hudson in Poughkeepsie in 1947 and professed vows in 1949. He studied at Weston College in Weston, Mass., and at the Canisianum in Innsbruck, Austria, where he was ordained July 26, 1960. He taught German and religion at Regis High School in Manhattan, 1962-1974. For three decades he was a member of the West Side Jesuit Community. He is survived by two brothers, John and Edward, and two sisters, Jane Greer and Anne Dispoto. A Funeral Mass was celebrated at St. Ignatius Loyola Church in Manhattan April 14. Burial was in the Jesuit Cemetery at Auriesville.
