March 11, 2025 • 39 mins
It's 1971 and Paul Couming is a member of the underground Catholic resistance to the Vietnam war. Two years ago, he sent his draft card back to the government, refusing to take part in the bloodshed. Now, as he faces trial, a harebrained scheme emerges to give him political sanctuary in a downtown Boston Catholic Church, the first of its kind in 400 years.
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
So wanted me to start very simple in to sort
because you say your name and where you're from.
Speaker 2 (00:04):
Oh, okay, my name's Paul Koming. I'm from Rochester, mass
originally great okay, so I made some of those nuts.
Speaker 3 (00:13):
So little.
Speaker 1 (00:14):
What did you want to talk about to start off
the end?
Speaker 4 (00:16):
Oh?
Speaker 2 (00:17):
Kind of my how it was. I came to be
the kind of person I was outspoken from a rather
quiet person because I never usually spoke out about much
of anything when I.
Speaker 4 (00:27):
Was a kid.
Speaker 1 (00:31):
Two miles before you get to downtown Boston on the
Southeast Expressway, you pass a giant gas tank right at
the edge of Boston Harbor, covered in a rainbow of
colorful stripes. Seeing this gas tank means you're passing the
neighborhood of Dorchester, where much of our story takes place,
or at least where most of the characters seem to
(00:51):
have apartments. It's the largest neighborhood in Boston, making up
the southern half of the city. For a brief period
in the nineteen eighties, it had a bookstore and a
movie theater, but unfortunately they didn't last. It is perpetually
right on the verge of gentrifying, but fortunately it never does.
(01:12):
I'm your host. Brendan Patrick Hughes. I grew up there,
and so did Rose Kennedy, eighty percent of new kids
on the Block, John King, who does the Magic Wall
on CNN, and Iowa Debris from the Bear. Dorchester is
where Boston has its morning. The sun is too bright,
(01:33):
the wind is too strong, the trees never have leaves,
and describe crooked witch finger silhouettes against Newport meantal billboards
featuring laughing people who'd never set foot here, and they're
slush on the floor of Dunkin Donuts. Dorchester has four
subway stations, all on the Red Line, far more than
its share of break service and autobody shops, triple deckers,
(01:56):
package stores, burgeoning Vietnamese and Cape Verdean commune these African Americans,
Irish Catholics, and a long history of apartments full of activists,
Activists like Paul Komick. Paul was born in the salad
(02:17):
days of post World War two.
Speaker 2 (02:18):
I was born in forty eight. So the war ended,
and there's a lot more opportunities there, and there's a
lot more hope in the nation as a whole. Dad
went a lot to what kind of person I became
you know, and I was quiet, but I was very
open to the things being hopeful.
Speaker 1 (02:33):
Okay, before I unleash all these accents on you. Something
that's always driven me crazy. When you see a movie
about Boston, there's always some character walking around being like kid.
If you see Tommy Sullivan at Doyle's, tell that chuckle, fuck,
I need a ride back to Revere. These ridiculous accents.
We're not all hit in the package store for fat
(02:54):
mouth makys and scratch tickets. It's not really like that.
I mean, I guess it is kind of sometimes a
little bit in some places. Yes, in Dorchester, certain pockets,
but there's also everything else. Everyone I grew up with
became a teacher who worked in a nonprofit nonprofit. The
(03:17):
point being the image of Boston in the American imagination
is incomplete, but I will say there is something strange
about the city and the overly colorful people it relentlessly produces.
Take that giant gas tank with the colorful stripes out
on ninety three. You can't miss it. It's a huge,
(03:38):
kind of half of a pill capsule dome top cylinder
tank thing, fourteen stories tall in brilliant blazing white with
these incredibly dramatic hand painted splashes in rainbow colors running
over the top. And it turns out it has a name,
Rainbow Swash. It was created in nineteen seventy one by
(03:59):
Sister Karita Kent, and when it was painted, it was
the world's largest copyrighted piece of art. Sister Kurita was
a peace activist, a Roman Catholic nun, and a prolific
abstract painter. In nineteen seventy one, she was commissioned to
brighten up this giant industrial behemoth of a gas tank
that would block the view of the harbor for miles around.
(04:22):
Like some Catholics, she strongly opposed the war in Vietnam,
and she would later deny that she had secretly painted
Ho Chi Min's profile into the left side of the
blue stripe as a protest and at the risk of
conveying too cute a metaphor too early in a podcast,
There's something I really love about Dorchester's largest monument being
(04:46):
an explosive cauldron of colorful subversion. This is divine intervention.
This is a story about radical nuns and combat boots
and wild haired priests trading blows with j Edgar Hoover's
FBI in a hell bent effort to sabotage a war.
(05:07):
It's got heist's tragedy, a trial of the century, and
the god damnedest love story you've ever heard. When Paul
was growing up, his family had a strong tradition of
caring for the welfare of people you didn't know. Beginning
with his grandmother.
Speaker 2 (05:28):
She went overboard. No matter who came to the back door,
people would come, She'd always have it open and serve
them sup.
Speaker 5 (05:35):
Their strongest beliefe.
Speaker 2 (05:37):
Were to help other people. My father worked as a
janitor in a housing project at Columbia Point. He's saw
it as a pleasure to serve the poor. He's sorry
as a Christian honor to be able to do that.
Speaker 1 (05:52):
Like many Catholics of the fifties and sixties, the church
was the centripetal force in their lives.
Speaker 2 (05:57):
One of the things about living right next to the
church that we open up our kitchen to anybody from
the church who want to come over, and we had
this big urn of coffee, and we'd have coffee and
donuts for anybody that wanted to command. And they used
to be a crowd of twenty twenty five people who
would come over every Sunday after the church, and that
would be the more progressive wing of the parishioners.
Speaker 1 (06:19):
Paul grew up in the Franklin Hill housing projects near
Bluehill Avenue.
Speaker 2 (06:23):
I was very much going to join the Marines and
fight for freedom.
Speaker 5 (06:28):
I was religiously.
Speaker 2 (06:30):
I would always put the American flag out.
Speaker 1 (06:33):
By the time he was in his early twenties, the
Vietnam War had hit Dorchester hard. A mile north of
the gas tank on Morrisey Boulevard, a memorial stands for
the eighty Dorchester servicemen that were killed in Vietnam in
our neighborhood. By nineteen seventy one, the once innocuous act
of checking your mailbox had become a game of Russian
(06:56):
Roulette for mothers and sons from Ashmont to Savin Hill
for going on seven years, and more draft notices were
landing in Dorchester mailboxes than in the wealthy suburbs surrounding Boston,
whisking young men to what felt like certain death in
an unfamiliar hemisphere. And sure enough, every few months for
(07:16):
the last five years, another body bag had landed at
Logan on its way to another devastated Dorchester family, and
those families, like families all across America, were watching a
war broadcast on their TV screens for the first time
in history.
Speaker 5 (07:33):
Casualty figures to a new high.
Speaker 1 (07:36):
Every night Americans received horrifying images of the government's vain
attempt to pound a tiny agrarian nation into submission. And
as these nights drew on into weeks and months and years,
and as veterans came home and broken states of sorrow,
Americans like Paul began to wonder why the hell are
(07:58):
we doing this? And the funny thing is, if Paul
hadn't grown up Catholic, he might never have ended up
resisting the war and wanted by the FBI, which is
particularly strange because Catholics are known for their love of authority,
so much so that j Edgar Hoover, then the director
(08:19):
of the FBI, would regularly recruit new agents from Catholic
universities like Notre Dame in Boston College. Yet when Paul
found himself progressing from finding the war troubling to feeling
genuine dissent to finally committing active forms of resistance, there
were other young Catholics ready to welcome him in the movement.
(08:41):
Paul would eventually become known as Little Big Man, owing
to the combination of his height and his utter disregard
for his own safety. And in nineteen seventy one, as
Rainbow Swash was being painted onto the gas tank, Paul
was on the run from the FBI, and he was
hiding out and he already very full Dorchester apartment of
(09:02):
a young woman named mary Anne.
Speaker 4 (09:07):
Paul comes to Florida Street with me and Sarah and
the kids.
Speaker 1 (09:13):
If it's five am in Dorchester, where she still lives
with Prince by sister Careita hanging in her pantry. Mary
Anne is sitting in her living room reading books about
spirituality and leadership. In January of nineteen seventy one, however,
she had just left her first husband and was living
on welfare with her best friend Sarah and her two children,
(09:34):
Chrissy and Jojo. Chrissy was four.
Speaker 6 (09:37):
Paul, I remember, like I thought Paul was mine, Like
I thought he was like my friend, so funny, so
fun the most outrageous laugh. I can't even describe to
you how bizarre his laugh was.
Speaker 1 (09:51):
Paul's laughs. Okay, that brings up an important point and
we have to stop ever everything right here and get
something out of the way. I listen to serious podcasts
all the time. I listened to NPR. I know how
this is supposed to go. I put my mouth really
(10:11):
close to an expensive microphone and speak softly, with hushed
patrician enthusiasm about lofty things. But it's really hard to
do that if you're talking about Irish Catholics, especially if
culturally you are one as well. I'm not per se Catholic,
but every single one of my ancestors was, going back
(10:32):
to the fifth century. I won't insert myself much in
this story, but very quickly, half of my family is
from Scranton, the other half is from Dorchester. So you
know the whole Joe Biden thing they used to make
fun of him for about being too close and hugging
people and stuff like that. That makes perfect sense to me.
When I went to my grandfather's wake in Scranton, I
(10:52):
could barely hear myself think over the backslapping. And I
will do my best to deliver for you a serious
podcast where yes, everything is thoughtful and considered and pairs
well with a gluten free brand muffin and the Sunday
New York Times. But I grew up knowing all these people,
and it's important for you to understand that. Throughout every
ordeal I'm about to share with you, they all roared
(11:15):
with laughter and slapped each other's backs and grabbed each
other's cheeks, and they were thrilled to see each other
and yelled their greetings too loud. For instance, here's Marianne
again on speakerphone, talking about her friendship with her roommate, Sarah.
Speaker 3 (11:29):
You have no idea how I wish, Oh my god,
because we were both really funny. I mean we would
scream laughing, scream laughing. I remember one time we're walking
down to the Newman Center and we're laughing so damn hard.
We're like like literally bending over, and Mike Hunt yelled.
Speaker 7 (11:51):
On the street.
Speaker 8 (11:52):
Do you two know wars going on?
Speaker 1 (11:56):
Legend has it? Sigmund Freud once said of the Irish
that they are the the only people in the world
completely impenetrable to psychoanalysis. So with that caveat out of
the way, that this is going to be a fucking
mess because Catholics are involved, let's continue with Chrissy describing Paul.
Speaker 6 (12:13):
And I remember like everybody whenever he would let would
stop whatever they were doing, like in a restaurant or
at the Paula Center, or just like walking down the street.
He just was special. He was really special and small
and elfin and always had rosy cheeks.
Speaker 1 (12:27):
So why did sweet little Paul, he of the world's
most wholesome upbringing, have to go under ground in the
first place? And by that I mean hide from the
FBI by moving into a one bedroom apartment that already
had four people in it.
Speaker 7 (12:40):
Paul Koombing had signed up as a conscientious objector.
Speaker 1 (12:43):
This is Anne Walsh, who at the time was a
nun living on Claiborne Street in Dorchester. In those days,
she was known as pretty h core and was often
seen wearing combat boots and rocking up Pat bennetts ar haircut.
She had just rebelled against her mother's superior and was
in the midst of starting a renegade order of nuns
in Dorchester. When Anne met Paul, he'd already gone before
(13:06):
the Selective Service Board and been given conscientious objector status.
This was a rare designation, reserved for someone who could
not fight in a war on religious grounds.
Speaker 2 (13:16):
They grilled me on whether I would defend my mother
she was being attacked on the street. I said, I
would do everything in my power to stop that from happening,
but I would not kill the person trying to do it.
Speaker 1 (13:28):
If you're granted conscientious objector status, you still have to
perform some sort of alternative service during the time you
would have been in the army.
Speaker 7 (13:35):
And he was assigned for alternative service to be an
orderly at the Newton Wellesley Hospital.
Speaker 1 (13:43):
But Newton and Wellesley are fancy suburbs full of rich people,
and it's hard to get to on the tee.
Speaker 7 (13:48):
And this is Paul Combing grew up in Dorchester between
the Franklin Hill Project and Saint Leo's Parish, and so
he said, you know, I'll go to City Hospital if
you want, where poor people would be served. But I'm
sure I'm not going to go to Wellesley. So they said, no,
you're going to go to Wellesley. You don't get any choice.
Speaker 1 (14:05):
So Paul never showed up in Newton, which people in
Dorchester call Snewton, and in doing so forfeited his sought
after CEO status. And then he took it one step further.
Speaker 2 (14:15):
Filar at the time said that you had to carry
your classification card and your registration card on your person
at all times if you were over the age of eighteen.
Speaker 1 (14:24):
Not satisfied with merely flouting his orderly assignment, Paul wanted
to make sure he was in direct violation of federal law.
Speaker 2 (14:31):
I took my cards and put him in an envelope
and mailed them back to the Draft for telling them
to do was against my religion to continue to hold
these cards to participate in the draft. So I sent
them back with the statements similar to that, and they
kept them.
Speaker 1 (14:45):
He was basically jumping up and down and waving his arms,
yelling at the government to come get him, and sure enough,
the long arm of the law eventually did.
Speaker 2 (14:56):
A few years later, they charged me with not having
them on person. Yeah, I got a summons from the
court that I was being charged with three counts of
violation of Select Service Act.
Speaker 1 (15:07):
Paul was facing fifteen years for not carrying his draft
papers on his person.
Speaker 2 (15:12):
They knew I didn't have mommy, because they had them
in their hands.
Speaker 1 (15:16):
As you can imagine, he found this pretty depressing.
Speaker 2 (15:18):
I was just going to end up going to jail
for a while, and I was really just bummed out
about the whole process.
Speaker 1 (15:23):
He started looking at every option.
Speaker 2 (15:25):
My brothers all three years I mentioned were in the service.
We're all trying to convince me to go to Canada.
Speaker 1 (15:33):
But Paul knew he only had one choice to stand
up to the government when he knew it was wrong,
because sometimes the only way to be a good citizen
is to do something illegal. Then a Kakamami idea developed
among the Catholic activists in the Dorchester Resistance.
Speaker 4 (15:54):
There was some tauk Mary Anne amongst the community Claiborne Street.
Speaker 2 (15:58):
Kind of action around on my refusing to carry my
draft cards in my trial.
Speaker 4 (16:03):
That Paul wanted to take this action that he wasn't going.
Speaker 2 (16:08):
To show up for Corey Ann Walsh grabbed me by
the call of one day and said, look, I want
you to go down to the Poula Center. I want
you to meet some people.
Speaker 1 (16:15):
The Paulist Center was a church in downtown Boston that
was beginning to make a name for itself as a
hotbed for a very new kind of youthful Catholic unrest.
Speaker 2 (16:25):
And talk to them about your situation.
Speaker 7 (16:28):
I don't know who came up.
Speaker 8 (16:28):
With the idea.
Speaker 1 (16:29):
Anne Walsh.
Speaker 8 (16:30):
What we came up with this idea.
Speaker 7 (16:32):
We were hoping that the Paulist Center community would put
Paul in sanctuary.
Speaker 1 (16:37):
Sanctuary meaning Paul would turn himself over to the authority
of the religious leaders inside a church instead of federal
law enforcement. The Catholic Church had adopted this practice at
the First Council of Orleans in five eleven AD for thieves, adulterers,
and fugitive slaves to seek refuge in churches from capital
punishment until an oath was sworn to do them no harm.
(17:00):
But it had long since been abandoned.
Speaker 4 (17:02):
So the question was could they find a Catholic church
in which to take sanctuary. So Anne Walsh approached an
Tobin at the Paula Center.
Speaker 1 (17:12):
So now we have an Ann, an Ann, and a Marianne.
This is, as I warned you, a story about Catholics.
Here's an Tobin who everyone called Tobin.
Speaker 9 (17:22):
I would meet people and they would say, oh, what
are you studying. I'd say, oh, theology, and they oh,
geology or isn't that interesting?
Speaker 1 (17:29):
I say no not. Rocks Tobin was diminutive like Paul.
She had a master's degree in theology and its great
at keeping housecats. Alive well into their twenties. Tobin had
recently and controversially been named female lay minister at the
Poula Center. Once she got a call from Anne Walsh.
Speaker 9 (17:48):
And she called me one day and said, could you
come and meet me. I have somebody I want to
introduce you to and we want to discuss something with you.
Speaker 1 (17:58):
That night, Anne Walsh, Paul Cooming and a Tobin met
at a Peter Pan restaurant near Boston University.
Speaker 9 (18:04):
She had this young man with her. She introduced me
to him and she said, this is Paul Cooming. He's
been drafted and he's not going to go. He's going
to resist. And she said, we want to know if
we could have a sanctuary at the Paula Center. And
I said, well, yeah, sure, why not? And she said,
(18:27):
well clearly, she said, you don't know much about sanctuaries.
She said, there have been several sanctuaries in Boston and
they have been very violent situations because of the police
in the National Guard, and so she gave me an example.
Speaker 1 (18:42):
Anne Walsh then explained to Tobin that there had recently been
a sanctuary at a Protestant church across Boston Common from
the Paulist Center. Here's how Tobin and Paul remembered it.
Speaker 9 (18:52):
Federal marshalls broke into the chapel and beat people up,
and people were hurt, and there was a lot of
damage done to the Arching Street. Church.
Speaker 2 (19:02):
Police had gone in a riker and smashed heads with
billy clubs and drag the soldiers that were a wall
basically out into the street and the rest. And there's
a lot of injuries.
Speaker 8 (19:13):
Is it all? I see? Well, that's okay.
Speaker 9 (19:18):
We'll do it anyway, you know, we'll do it.
Speaker 8 (19:20):
We'll figure it out.
Speaker 1 (19:22):
The thinking was that maybe in a Catholic town like Boston,
where the police force was filled with Irish Catholics just
like them, they could avoid a visit from the goon squad.
Speaker 2 (19:32):
The sanctity of the Catholic church was just a much
more really you know, chose of prejudice against other religions,
I guess, but it was much more secure than any
other church that would offered.
Speaker 1 (19:44):
Or at least the action would create a pr nightmare
for the authorities.
Speaker 2 (19:48):
We felt that for sure the FBI would want to
try to stop me from going into the church, rather
than having to dragged me out of the church.
Speaker 1 (19:55):
But their other problem was that this would put the
Police Center at odds with the Catholic Church at large, and.
Speaker 2 (20:02):
A Catholic Church had not done that during the Vietnam
Antaiwan movement as far as I know at that time, because.
Speaker 10 (20:07):
It really a Catholic Church had never had a sanctuary
for a conscientious subjector ever in the history of the
Catholic Church ever anywhere in the world before. It was
a first, like all through World War Two, no nothing, zero, zippo.
Speaker 1 (20:19):
It won't generally sound like it because a lot of
what I'm going to tell you is hard to believe.
But this show is in fact fact checked and we
found nothing to disprove this claim. In fact, there hadn't
been any instance of political sanctuary in a Catholic Church
since the sixteenth century, and for that matter, the American
Catholic bishops, led by Cardinal Spelman of New York, were
(20:41):
staunch supporters of the war in Vietnam. But Tobin's church,
the Polish Center, was a huge flagship chapel for the
Order of the Polish Fathers. It was the perfect place
for this crazy scheme because it had just fallen into
the hands of two young priests who had transformed it
into a headquarters of do gooding and hell raising. The
(21:06):
police Center sits right below the Golden Dome of the
State House at number five Park Street, smack in the
middle of downtown Boston. Park Street is the shortest side
of the confusingly five sided Boston Common, and it's where
you'll find two sets of red double doors that mark
the entrance to the Paulis Center Chapel. It was dedicated
in nineteen fifty seven, but because of anti Catholic prejudice
(21:29):
in Boston at the time, Cardinal Cushing had to have
a Protestant friend by the building and then turn it
over to the Polists. The Polices are one of many
orders in the Catholic Church, like the Jesuits, the Benedictines,
the Josephites, and the Dominicans. They were the first order
formed in the United States, and they have a uniquely
American focus. The mission of the Polis is outreach to
(21:52):
non Catholic.
Speaker 5 (21:53):
I remember being overjoyed that I was assigned to Boston.
Speaker 1 (21:56):
That's Jim Carroll, who at the time was a Polis
priest working at BA You with Anne Walsh. He's also
the author of several books, including Practicing Catholic Prince of
Peace and an American Requiem God, My Father and the
War that Came Between Us, which won the National Book Award.
Speaker 5 (22:12):
And I was assigned to Boston University, which also pleased me.
I didn't want to go to the Paula Center. Why not, Well,
it was a church, and it was also a famously establishment,
and it was full of old guys, and it was
going to be hearing confessions and saying masks. But it
was a church.
Speaker 1 (22:32):
Two of jim seminary brothers, Patrick and Floyd, had been
assigned to the Paula Center when they were all ordained.
Patrick was a wild man. Electric shocks of curly hair
flew from his head as he merrily kreemed down the
halls of the place from one urgent meeting to the next.
Speaker 8 (22:51):
And he never wore his caller.
Speaker 1 (22:53):
This was a Roman Catholic priest, the ones that wear
the all black habit with a cardboard collar, putting a
telltale white square at their Adams apple to signal to
the world. I am a man of the cloth. But
Patrick just wasn't into it because it.
Speaker 8 (23:06):
Was the new church. And they never did I think,
he said. He wore it three times in his whole
time he was a priest.
Speaker 1 (23:12):
Patrick was a kook and a revolutionary. He was on
a mission to reinvent what it meant to be a
priest in the world, starting with not taking himself so
goddamn seriously all the time.
Speaker 11 (23:24):
He would come really through a doorway and he would
take one foot and put it in front of the
other and cause himself to trip, like just to make
people laugh, like he was a natural clown or something
like that, and he had the ability to do that,
and everybody.
Speaker 8 (23:41):
Would laugh, and he would laugh too. He just thought
it was hysterical. Every time.
Speaker 11 (23:46):
He thought it was as funny as the time before,
and it really was.
Speaker 1 (23:48):
Patrick had only been ordained two years prior, and he
and Floyd had spent those two years trying to drag
the Poulas Center kicking and screaming into the twentieth century,
and through a bizarre series of events which we'll soon
learn about, Patrick had been placed in charge of this
entire place at only thirty years old. He was the
one that appointed Ann Tobin to be female lay minister,
(24:12):
something in the Catholic Church at large found absolutely scandalous.
But hell or high water. Patrick and Floyd were going
to make changes.
Speaker 4 (24:19):
They were going to do it by renewing the church
from head to foot, including Floyd getting a screwdriver and
going into the chapel and literally starting to unscrew all
the mealers because that was ridiculous.
Speaker 8 (24:33):
That was part of the old church.
Speaker 1 (24:35):
And now Patrick, Floyd and Tobin were running the place
in an avant garde, non hierarchical Berkeley food co op structure.
So of all the Catholic churches in all of Boston,
this was the one that could wedge itself between the
anti war movement and the Department of Justice. And so
Tobin started putting the wheels in motion.
Speaker 4 (24:56):
And Tobin calls me and Sarah and says, you're not
going to believe.
Speaker 1 (25:02):
This is Mari Anne, what just happened.
Speaker 4 (25:04):
So we were beside ourselves with excitement about the possibility
of doing this because it would be so powerful, and
Tobin had to bring it to the team.
Speaker 9 (25:16):
The only problem was when I went back to the
Paula Center.
Speaker 1 (25:19):
That night Tobin after her meeting with Anne Walsh and
Paul Cooming, I.
Speaker 9 (25:23):
Ran into Patrick and I got off the elevator upstairs
and I said Oh, Patrick, this is the most exciting thing.
I said, We're going to have a sanctuary that. Don't
say anything else about it. I don't want to know.
He said, don't tell me anything else about it. I said, oh, okay.
Speaker 1 (25:42):
When this conversation happened, Patrick was going through some serious
shit with the Paula's Brass, so basically the last thing
he could think about was unilaterally pitting the might of
the church against the might of the federal government. So
Patrick wanted to help paul at the Paula Center on
Park Street at the behest of Anne Anne and Mary Anne.
But he was frankly pretty slammed.
Speaker 9 (26:03):
That was really kind of shocking to me. So I
called Anne and I said, well, there's a little bit
of a problem. I said, Patrick is probably the most
liberal person on the team, and so I'm not sure
about the reaction of the others.
Speaker 1 (26:19):
What were the stakes, though, would it be could they.
Speaker 10 (26:21):
Have been maybe they shut down that, Yeah, Mary Anne,
they could have maybe shut down the follow Center or whatever.
Speaker 5 (26:26):
Did Rome have that authority to do that?
Speaker 10 (26:29):
Well, Boston archdioceis could have Yeah, they could have said
you're no longer welcome in the Boston Archdioces.
Speaker 1 (26:34):
Patrick had only taken over the Paula Center about eight
months prior and was in the middle of trying to
rescue the church at large from itself. He was an innovator,
holding crazy multimedia liturgies that bore no resemblance to the
Catholic Mass one thinks of today. But he had thus
far avoided too much direct anti war activity, focusing instead
on issues of hunger and justice. Staging the first political
(26:57):
sanctuary in a Catholic church in four hundred years and
thrusting the Polist Center directly into conflict with the government
would threaten the existence of everything he had built in
that short amount of time. But Tobin, Paul and Marianne
and her roommate Sarah pressed their case to Patrick and Floyd.
Speaker 2 (27:15):
The group came around to it. I think it probably
took quite a few conversations.
Speaker 1 (27:20):
Somehow they managed to convince Patrick and Floyd that it
was better to beg forgiveness than ask permission, that if
you play two behemoth institutions like these against one another,
it can create enough confusion to get away with anything.
Speaker 8 (27:35):
And they said yes, so, oh God, that was bad.
Speaker 7 (27:40):
Although I loved him to death, I feared the ramifications
of it, like the federal agents, you know, bashing people.
Speaker 4 (27:48):
So the decision was made amongst all of us that
we were going to do it.
Speaker 1 (27:52):
And so they began making preparations.
Speaker 4 (27:55):
And there were hundreds of people involved in this, from
the whole community. The Newman House would be you all
of us at the Paula Center, the whole Catholic left
community up and down the East coast.
Speaker 8 (28:08):
There were hundreds of people involved.
Speaker 2 (28:10):
We were planning us for about a month. I believe
the peace community within the Poula Senate was so advanced.
Speaker 4 (28:17):
The groundwork that had happened prior to this was getting
the church ready for sanctuary because we knew, you know,
there would be many people who would stay inside the
church with Paul, including me, the two kids, Sarah, and
one hundred other people.
Speaker 2 (28:33):
We were sure that the word had gotten out that
this sanctuary was going to happen.
Speaker 1 (28:39):
By this point, j Edgar Hoover's FBI was being incredibly
aggressive with the anti war movement following Paul and his friends,
harassing everyone's parents and even conspicuously searching through their parents'
neighbors trash pins.
Speaker 4 (28:53):
Because the FBI was so vigilant. There was concern that
Paul would be arrested.
Speaker 2 (28:59):
Because we knew that were parishionists who had brothers or
relatives in the FBI.
Speaker 8 (29:03):
And that they would find out about this ahead of time.
Speaker 2 (29:05):
We fell for sure that they knew.
Speaker 4 (29:07):
So the question was where could Paul go quote unquote underground?
Speaker 2 (29:11):
I and mary Anne and Sarah and others Anthobin and
Patrick decided the idea.
Speaker 8 (29:18):
Was could he come and stay at Florida Street with.
Speaker 2 (29:20):
Us, pretty low income building that was not well kept up.
Speaker 8 (29:24):
Why we were thought to be underground? I have no idea,
because maybe because of the kids.
Speaker 2 (29:29):
Okay, I had a crush on Sarah Toci, So I
think I was the one that brought up the idea
that a good place for me to hide out was
their apartment. So Paul moves in with us, and the
fact that there was no place other than a floor
space for me to be didn't make any difference.
Speaker 8 (29:47):
You know, three rooms.
Speaker 2 (29:49):
Christy and Jojo.
Speaker 8 (29:50):
Had one bedroom, kids had the bedroom.
Speaker 2 (29:52):
There was a kitchen, and there was a living room
and that's all there was to this apartment.
Speaker 8 (29:55):
Paul's got a bid roll. Sarah and I are on
the day bed pullout.
Speaker 2 (29:59):
Coach on the flos and did that for two weeks.
Speaker 6 (30:02):
One thing I remember about Paul was sitting.
Speaker 1 (30:06):
On him Chrissy again, Mary Anne's daughter, who was four.
Speaker 6 (30:10):
He just loved him, sitting on his lap, holding his
hand while he was doing his crazy laugh, feeling his
body's shape.
Speaker 1 (30:16):
This was a group of people who knew first and
foremost how to have a good time, a distant second
how to be criminals. Mary Anne would come to refer
to them all as the ganger couldn't shoot straight after
a screwball Jerry Orbach gangster comedy running in cinemas at
the time. They were about to break the law, they
were about to take on the Department of Justice, they
(30:39):
were about to throw a Catholic church into the anti
war movement, and god damn it, they were going to
have fun doing it soon enough, and too soon as
far as they were concerned, Because time, as we all know,
is a motherfucker. The day of the sanctuary arrived.
Speaker 4 (30:57):
Now we're all living together at Florida Street, and we're
all involved in getting the sanctuary organized and then getting
him in town without being seen. And I will never
ever ever forget the morning we're going to go to
take sanctuary. He's supposed to show up at court at
nine o'clock.
Speaker 2 (31:17):
I had a quick date. I was supposed to show
up for a trial to answer questions and ask questions
because I was defending myself.
Speaker 1 (31:24):
But instead the plan was Mary Anne, Sarah and the
kids would spirit Paul into the Paula Center while the
trial was underway.
Speaker 2 (31:32):
There was a lot of pressure from my family not
to do it this.
Speaker 1 (31:36):
Way, but despite their preference for Paul to escape to Canada,
Paul's parents agreed to appear in his stead at the trial.
Marianne and Sarah knew meanwhile that the FBI was on
the lookout for Paul, and so they had to somehow
go incognito.
Speaker 4 (31:51):
So the morning of the sanctuary we all get up
at the crack of dawn.
Speaker 8 (31:55):
We had a long brown coat with a hood.
Speaker 6 (31:59):
I remember the cape. They had to dress him up
in a costume, and I think it was like a
cape with a hood. Again seventies.
Speaker 4 (32:08):
The styles of the winter coats at that time, they
almost looked like monk's habits.
Speaker 2 (32:13):
I either looked like a woman or I look.
Speaker 5 (32:15):
Like a monk.
Speaker 6 (32:15):
I remember. I think it was my mom putting a
little bit of makeup on him.
Speaker 2 (32:19):
I think I even put on a little bit of makeup,
lipstick or something to emphasize the fact that I.
Speaker 5 (32:24):
Was a woman.
Speaker 6 (32:24):
Joe and I were part of the cover because we
held his hands.
Speaker 4 (32:28):
And we have the kids. We've got Jojo in the carriage.
We're carrying backpacks.
Speaker 8 (32:34):
Because we know we're going to stay.
Speaker 4 (32:36):
And Kristen and Sarah, Paul and I and Jojo all
go to Ashmont station.
Speaker 8 (32:42):
It's snowing.
Speaker 6 (32:43):
I mostly remember the subway ride being anxious.
Speaker 4 (32:49):
When we get off at Park Street, we look up
Park Street and we see that there's activity outside Park
Street and it looks like the FBI.
Speaker 8 (33:01):
It looks like Park Street is being covered.
Speaker 6 (33:04):
When the sanctuary started, Paul was not in the Paula Center.
The FBI got there before he did.
Speaker 8 (33:12):
And so we get ourselves into Brighams.
Speaker 1 (33:16):
Brighams, if you're not from Boston, was a ubiquitous chain
of diners in the sixties and seventies, and their coffee
tasted like payment.
Speaker 4 (33:24):
And we get ourselves a cup of coffee and we're stunned.
I mean, we're flummoxed.
Speaker 8 (33:30):
What are we going to do?
Speaker 4 (33:30):
Were we going to make a break for it and
just saunter up there Paul in his girl coat and
get him in the door.
Speaker 1 (33:37):
Meanwhile, Paul's father was in the courthouse facing the judge
in his son's place.
Speaker 2 (33:43):
There was probably one hundred people in the courtroom expecting
me to be on trial then there to support me.
But I wasn't there. But my father and mother were there.
The judge, Charles e.
Speaker 5 (33:53):
Isisansky Jr.
Speaker 2 (33:55):
I remember his nigh very well. He was the chief
goudge of the Federal District. He asked if there was
anybody there that knew where Paul was.
Speaker 4 (34:04):
His father was going to be at the courtroom and
read the statement to the judge.
Speaker 2 (34:10):
My fatherly gets up and says, your honor, Paul is
not coming to trial today. Paul is being offered sanctuary
in the church nearby and will stay there and is
refusing to come to trial to participate in this process.
I think he was shaking in his boots all the
time he was talking. And the judge of journal meeting
(34:32):
and he ordered the federal marshals to take every precaution
not to disrupt the church. He ordered that from the bench.
Speaker 1 (34:41):
At that moment, the assembled supporters stood in Unison, began
singing and marched towards the Paula Center.
Speaker 2 (34:50):
They walked from the courthouse, which was probably a good
seven er or ten blocks away, somewhere in that vicinity,
marching and singing all the way with my father and
mother the parade, singing on anti wa songs. They did
that for the several blocks, right through the streets of Austin.
Speaker 1 (35:12):
From where they stood at the window of Brigham's, Mary Anne, Paul,
Sarah and the kids could see down Tremont Street that
the singing marchers were headed straight for the Paula Center
and they were going to go inside and start the
sanctuary without Paul in the building.
Speaker 4 (35:28):
Now, our job had been to get Paul there before
anybody else got there, but what with the FBI up
and down the road, that wasn't working out.
Speaker 1 (35:37):
The marchers were about to round the corner onto Park
Street and head straight for the FBI, with Paul trapped
in Brighams watching on this season of Divine Intervention, a
(36:06):
generation of young Catholic radicals enters the resistance.
Speaker 4 (36:11):
They just cried, these incredible doors open, and a whole
generation just poured through.
Speaker 8 (36:23):
It was definitely our time.
Speaker 11 (36:25):
This kind of time that you think, well, things are
never going to be quite the same anymore, and they weren't.
Speaker 12 (36:30):
Many of the things that we were about to do
we're not considered legal or patriotic.
Speaker 1 (36:35):
And attempts to sabotage a war by any means necessary.
Speaker 8 (36:39):
It was a real comedy of eras that we pulled off.
Speaker 2 (36:41):
They've not committed just a crime that wasn't simply breaking
an entry.
Speaker 1 (36:45):
They were committing acts of civil dish obedience. It took
a lot of God.
Speaker 9 (36:48):
We had a very modest name. We called ourself the
East Coast Conspiracy to.
Speaker 1 (36:52):
Save lives as they faced down j Edgar Hoover's FBI.
Hoover was crazy about us.
Speaker 8 (36:58):
He wanted to have kind of dyed everybody.
Speaker 5 (37:00):
It was an agent behind them.
Speaker 2 (37:01):
Burn nailbox and when the verdict of the jury was announced,
people stood up in the courtbrook and sang amazing grace,
and the jury stood up.
Speaker 1 (37:09):
With and attempted to smash one institution after another.
Speaker 5 (37:13):
The Catholic Church was going through a revolution and the
Paul Center was a main place of revolutionary firment.
Speaker 12 (37:20):
That's what makes liberation theologies so threatening, I think, is
the people get to call on the leaders.
Speaker 11 (37:26):
It was more equal, and it was a new concept.
Speaker 1 (37:30):
While navigating the unbridled chaos of being young and in love.
Those movements come out of love.
Speaker 2 (37:36):
They come out of people's love for their fellow men
and women.
Speaker 4 (37:40):
Just throwing yourself on the mercy of the universe and
just hope to Christ you're going to land on your feet.
Speaker 12 (37:46):
He wanted so much in his life that somehow the
priesthood refused to alloe.
Speaker 8 (37:51):
I picked up the phone.
Speaker 4 (37:53):
And my thought was, this is the most important phone
call I'll ever make in my life.
Speaker 8 (37:57):
I couldn't believe it. I mean, it was Divine Intervention.
Speaker 1 (38:09):
Divine Intervention is a production of iHeart Podcasts. It's produced
by Wonder Media Network. It was created and written by me,
your host, Brendan Patrick Hughes. Our indefatigable producers Our Carmen
Borca Correo, Abby Delk Palomo, Moreno, Jimenez, Grace Lynch, and myself.
Our editor is Towering Figure of Strength Grace Lynch for
(38:32):
Wonder Media Network. Our executive producers are Emily Rudder and
Jenny Kaplan for iHeart Podcasts. Our executive producer is Christina
Everett for Deuyt Street Book Club. Our executive producer is
Rolin Jones. Vocal arrangements and special performance of We Shall
Overcome by Morris Smiley, Kai Fukuda and friends. Our end
music was composed and performed by Tanya Donnelly. This is
(38:56):
Brendan Patrick Hughes. Thank you for listening to Divine Intervention.
So wanted me to start very simple in to sort
because you say your name and where you're from.
Speaker 2 (00:04):
Oh, okay, my name's Paul Koming. I'm from Rochester, mass
originally great okay, so I made some of those nuts.
Speaker 3 (00:13):
So little.
Speaker 1 (00:14):
What did you want to talk about to start off
the end?
Speaker 4 (00:16):
Oh?
Speaker 2 (00:17):
Kind of my how it was. I came to be
the kind of person I was outspoken from a rather
quiet person because I never usually spoke out about much
of anything when I.
Speaker 4 (00:27):
Was a kid.
Speaker 1 (00:31):
Two miles before you get to downtown Boston on the
Southeast Expressway, you pass a giant gas tank right at
the edge of Boston Harbor, covered in a rainbow of
colorful stripes. Seeing this gas tank means you're passing the
neighborhood of Dorchester, where much of our story takes place,
or at least where most of the characters seem to
(00:51):
have apartments. It's the largest neighborhood in Boston, making up
the southern half of the city. For a brief period
in the nineteen eighties, it had a bookstore and a
movie theater, but unfortunately they didn't last. It is perpetually
right on the verge of gentrifying, but fortunately it never does.
(01:12):
I'm your host. Brendan Patrick Hughes. I grew up there,
and so did Rose Kennedy, eighty percent of new kids
on the Block, John King, who does the Magic Wall
on CNN, and Iowa Debris from the Bear. Dorchester is
where Boston has its morning. The sun is too bright,
(01:33):
the wind is too strong, the trees never have leaves,
and describe crooked witch finger silhouettes against Newport meantal billboards
featuring laughing people who'd never set foot here, and they're
slush on the floor of Dunkin Donuts. Dorchester has four
subway stations, all on the Red Line, far more than
its share of break service and autobody shops, triple deckers,
(01:56):
package stores, burgeoning Vietnamese and Cape Verdean commune these African Americans,
Irish Catholics, and a long history of apartments full of activists,
Activists like Paul Komick. Paul was born in the salad
(02:17):
days of post World War two.
Speaker 2 (02:18):
I was born in forty eight. So the war ended,
and there's a lot more opportunities there, and there's a
lot more hope in the nation as a whole. Dad
went a lot to what kind of person I became
you know, and I was quiet, but I was very
open to the things being hopeful.
Speaker 1 (02:33):
Okay, before I unleash all these accents on you. Something
that's always driven me crazy. When you see a movie
about Boston, there's always some character walking around being like kid.
If you see Tommy Sullivan at Doyle's, tell that chuckle, fuck,
I need a ride back to Revere. These ridiculous accents.
We're not all hit in the package store for fat
(02:54):
mouth makys and scratch tickets. It's not really like that.
I mean, I guess it is kind of sometimes a
little bit in some places. Yes, in Dorchester, certain pockets,
but there's also everything else. Everyone I grew up with
became a teacher who worked in a nonprofit nonprofit. The
(03:17):
point being the image of Boston in the American imagination
is incomplete, but I will say there is something strange
about the city and the overly colorful people it relentlessly produces.
Take that giant gas tank with the colorful stripes out
on ninety three. You can't miss it. It's a huge,
(03:38):
kind of half of a pill capsule dome top cylinder
tank thing, fourteen stories tall in brilliant blazing white with
these incredibly dramatic hand painted splashes in rainbow colors running
over the top. And it turns out it has a name,
Rainbow Swash. It was created in nineteen seventy one by
(03:59):
Sister Karita Kent, and when it was painted, it was
the world's largest copyrighted piece of art. Sister Kurita was
a peace activist, a Roman Catholic nun, and a prolific
abstract painter. In nineteen seventy one, she was commissioned to
brighten up this giant industrial behemoth of a gas tank
that would block the view of the harbor for miles around.
(04:22):
Like some Catholics, she strongly opposed the war in Vietnam,
and she would later deny that she had secretly painted
Ho Chi Min's profile into the left side of the
blue stripe as a protest and at the risk of
conveying too cute a metaphor too early in a podcast,
There's something I really love about Dorchester's largest monument being
(04:46):
an explosive cauldron of colorful subversion. This is divine intervention.
This is a story about radical nuns and combat boots
and wild haired priests trading blows with j Edgar Hoover's
FBI in a hell bent effort to sabotage a war.
(05:07):
It's got heist's tragedy, a trial of the century, and
the god damnedest love story you've ever heard. When Paul
was growing up, his family had a strong tradition of
caring for the welfare of people you didn't know. Beginning
with his grandmother.
Speaker 2 (05:28):
She went overboard. No matter who came to the back door,
people would come, She'd always have it open and serve
them sup.
Speaker 5 (05:35):
Their strongest beliefe.
Speaker 2 (05:37):
Were to help other people. My father worked as a
janitor in a housing project at Columbia Point. He's saw
it as a pleasure to serve the poor. He's sorry
as a Christian honor to be able to do that.
Speaker 1 (05:52):
Like many Catholics of the fifties and sixties, the church
was the centripetal force in their lives.
Speaker 2 (05:57):
One of the things about living right next to the
church that we open up our kitchen to anybody from
the church who want to come over, and we had
this big urn of coffee, and we'd have coffee and
donuts for anybody that wanted to command. And they used
to be a crowd of twenty twenty five people who
would come over every Sunday after the church, and that
would be the more progressive wing of the parishioners.
Speaker 1 (06:19):
Paul grew up in the Franklin Hill housing projects near
Bluehill Avenue.
Speaker 2 (06:23):
I was very much going to join the Marines and
fight for freedom.
Speaker 5 (06:28):
I was religiously.
Speaker 2 (06:30):
I would always put the American flag out.
Speaker 1 (06:33):
By the time he was in his early twenties, the
Vietnam War had hit Dorchester hard. A mile north of
the gas tank on Morrisey Boulevard, a memorial stands for
the eighty Dorchester servicemen that were killed in Vietnam in
our neighborhood. By nineteen seventy one, the once innocuous act
of checking your mailbox had become a game of Russian
(06:56):
Roulette for mothers and sons from Ashmont to Savin Hill
for going on seven years, and more draft notices were
landing in Dorchester mailboxes than in the wealthy suburbs surrounding Boston,
whisking young men to what felt like certain death in
an unfamiliar hemisphere. And sure enough, every few months for
(07:16):
the last five years, another body bag had landed at
Logan on its way to another devastated Dorchester family, and
those families, like families all across America, were watching a
war broadcast on their TV screens for the first time
in history.
Speaker 5 (07:33):
Casualty figures to a new high.
Speaker 1 (07:36):
Every night Americans received horrifying images of the government's vain
attempt to pound a tiny agrarian nation into submission. And
as these nights drew on into weeks and months and years,
and as veterans came home and broken states of sorrow,
Americans like Paul began to wonder why the hell are
(07:58):
we doing this? And the funny thing is, if Paul
hadn't grown up Catholic, he might never have ended up
resisting the war and wanted by the FBI, which is
particularly strange because Catholics are known for their love of authority,
so much so that j Edgar Hoover, then the director
(08:19):
of the FBI, would regularly recruit new agents from Catholic
universities like Notre Dame in Boston College. Yet when Paul
found himself progressing from finding the war troubling to feeling
genuine dissent to finally committing active forms of resistance, there
were other young Catholics ready to welcome him in the movement.
(08:41):
Paul would eventually become known as Little Big Man, owing
to the combination of his height and his utter disregard
for his own safety. And in nineteen seventy one, as
Rainbow Swash was being painted onto the gas tank, Paul
was on the run from the FBI, and he was
hiding out and he already very full Dorchester apartment of
(09:02):
a young woman named mary Anne.
Speaker 4 (09:07):
Paul comes to Florida Street with me and Sarah and
the kids.
Speaker 1 (09:13):
If it's five am in Dorchester, where she still lives
with Prince by sister Careita hanging in her pantry. Mary
Anne is sitting in her living room reading books about
spirituality and leadership. In January of nineteen seventy one, however,
she had just left her first husband and was living
on welfare with her best friend Sarah and her two children,
(09:34):
Chrissy and Jojo. Chrissy was four.
Speaker 6 (09:37):
Paul, I remember, like I thought Paul was mine, Like
I thought he was like my friend, so funny, so
fun the most outrageous laugh. I can't even describe to
you how bizarre his laugh was.
Speaker 1 (09:51):
Paul's laughs. Okay, that brings up an important point and
we have to stop ever everything right here and get
something out of the way. I listen to serious podcasts
all the time. I listened to NPR. I know how
this is supposed to go. I put my mouth really
(10:11):
close to an expensive microphone and speak softly, with hushed
patrician enthusiasm about lofty things. But it's really hard to
do that if you're talking about Irish Catholics, especially if
culturally you are one as well. I'm not per se Catholic,
but every single one of my ancestors was, going back
(10:32):
to the fifth century. I won't insert myself much in
this story, but very quickly, half of my family is
from Scranton, the other half is from Dorchester. So you
know the whole Joe Biden thing they used to make
fun of him for about being too close and hugging
people and stuff like that. That makes perfect sense to me.
When I went to my grandfather's wake in Scranton, I
(10:52):
could barely hear myself think over the backslapping. And I
will do my best to deliver for you a serious
podcast where yes, everything is thoughtful and considered and pairs
well with a gluten free brand muffin and the Sunday
New York Times. But I grew up knowing all these people,
and it's important for you to understand that. Throughout every
ordeal I'm about to share with you, they all roared
(11:15):
with laughter and slapped each other's backs and grabbed each
other's cheeks, and they were thrilled to see each other
and yelled their greetings too loud. For instance, here's Marianne
again on speakerphone, talking about her friendship with her roommate, Sarah.
Speaker 3 (11:29):
You have no idea how I wish, Oh my god,
because we were both really funny. I mean we would
scream laughing, scream laughing. I remember one time we're walking
down to the Newman Center and we're laughing so damn hard.
We're like like literally bending over, and Mike Hunt yelled.
Speaker 7 (11:51):
On the street.
Speaker 8 (11:52):
Do you two know wars going on?
Speaker 1 (11:56):
Legend has it? Sigmund Freud once said of the Irish
that they are the the only people in the world
completely impenetrable to psychoanalysis. So with that caveat out of
the way, that this is going to be a fucking
mess because Catholics are involved, let's continue with Chrissy describing Paul.
Speaker 6 (12:13):
And I remember like everybody whenever he would let would
stop whatever they were doing, like in a restaurant or
at the Paula Center, or just like walking down the street.
He just was special. He was really special and small
and elfin and always had rosy cheeks.
Speaker 1 (12:27):
So why did sweet little Paul, he of the world's
most wholesome upbringing, have to go under ground in the
first place? And by that I mean hide from the
FBI by moving into a one bedroom apartment that already
had four people in it.
Speaker 7 (12:40):
Paul Koombing had signed up as a conscientious objector.
Speaker 1 (12:43):
This is Anne Walsh, who at the time was a
nun living on Claiborne Street in Dorchester. In those days,
she was known as pretty h core and was often
seen wearing combat boots and rocking up Pat bennetts ar haircut.
She had just rebelled against her mother's superior and was
in the midst of starting a renegade order of nuns
in Dorchester. When Anne met Paul, he'd already gone before
(13:06):
the Selective Service Board and been given conscientious objector status.
This was a rare designation, reserved for someone who could
not fight in a war on religious grounds.
Speaker 2 (13:16):
They grilled me on whether I would defend my mother
she was being attacked on the street. I said, I
would do everything in my power to stop that from happening,
but I would not kill the person trying to do it.
Speaker 1 (13:28):
If you're granted conscientious objector status, you still have to
perform some sort of alternative service during the time you
would have been in the army.
Speaker 7 (13:35):
And he was assigned for alternative service to be an
orderly at the Newton Wellesley Hospital.
Speaker 1 (13:43):
But Newton and Wellesley are fancy suburbs full of rich people,
and it's hard to get to on the tee.
Speaker 7 (13:48):
And this is Paul Combing grew up in Dorchester between
the Franklin Hill Project and Saint Leo's Parish, and so
he said, you know, I'll go to City Hospital if
you want, where poor people would be served. But I'm
sure I'm not going to go to Wellesley. So they said, no,
you're going to go to Wellesley. You don't get any choice.
Speaker 1 (14:05):
So Paul never showed up in Newton, which people in
Dorchester call Snewton, and in doing so forfeited his sought
after CEO status. And then he took it one step further.
Speaker 2 (14:15):
Filar at the time said that you had to carry
your classification card and your registration card on your person
at all times if you were over the age of eighteen.
Speaker 1 (14:24):
Not satisfied with merely flouting his orderly assignment, Paul wanted
to make sure he was in direct violation of federal law.
Speaker 2 (14:31):
I took my cards and put him in an envelope
and mailed them back to the Draft for telling them
to do was against my religion to continue to hold
these cards to participate in the draft. So I sent
them back with the statements similar to that, and they
kept them.
Speaker 1 (14:45):
He was basically jumping up and down and waving his arms,
yelling at the government to come get him, and sure enough,
the long arm of the law eventually did.
Speaker 2 (14:56):
A few years later, they charged me with not having
them on person. Yeah, I got a summons from the
court that I was being charged with three counts of
violation of Select Service Act.
Speaker 1 (15:07):
Paul was facing fifteen years for not carrying his draft
papers on his person.
Speaker 2 (15:12):
They knew I didn't have mommy, because they had them
in their hands.
Speaker 1 (15:16):
As you can imagine, he found this pretty depressing.
Speaker 2 (15:18):
I was just going to end up going to jail
for a while, and I was really just bummed out
about the whole process.
Speaker 1 (15:23):
He started looking at every option.
Speaker 2 (15:25):
My brothers all three years I mentioned were in the service.
We're all trying to convince me to go to Canada.
Speaker 1 (15:33):
But Paul knew he only had one choice to stand
up to the government when he knew it was wrong,
because sometimes the only way to be a good citizen
is to do something illegal. Then a Kakamami idea developed
among the Catholic activists in the Dorchester Resistance.
Speaker 4 (15:54):
There was some tauk Mary Anne amongst the community Claiborne Street.
Speaker 2 (15:58):
Kind of action around on my refusing to carry my
draft cards in my trial.
Speaker 4 (16:03):
That Paul wanted to take this action that he wasn't going.
Speaker 2 (16:08):
To show up for Corey Ann Walsh grabbed me by
the call of one day and said, look, I want
you to go down to the Poula Center. I want
you to meet some people.
Speaker 1 (16:15):
The Paulist Center was a church in downtown Boston that
was beginning to make a name for itself as a
hotbed for a very new kind of youthful Catholic unrest.
Speaker 2 (16:25):
And talk to them about your situation.
Speaker 7 (16:28):
I don't know who came up.
Speaker 8 (16:28):
With the idea.
Speaker 1 (16:29):
Anne Walsh.
Speaker 8 (16:30):
What we came up with this idea.
Speaker 7 (16:32):
We were hoping that the Paulist Center community would put
Paul in sanctuary.
Speaker 1 (16:37):
Sanctuary meaning Paul would turn himself over to the authority
of the religious leaders inside a church instead of federal
law enforcement. The Catholic Church had adopted this practice at
the First Council of Orleans in five eleven AD for thieves, adulterers,
and fugitive slaves to seek refuge in churches from capital
punishment until an oath was sworn to do them no harm.
(17:00):
But it had long since been abandoned.
Speaker 4 (17:02):
So the question was could they find a Catholic church
in which to take sanctuary. So Anne Walsh approached an
Tobin at the Paula Center.
Speaker 1 (17:12):
So now we have an Ann, an Ann, and a Marianne.
This is, as I warned you, a story about Catholics.
Here's an Tobin who everyone called Tobin.
Speaker 9 (17:22):
I would meet people and they would say, oh, what
are you studying. I'd say, oh, theology, and they oh,
geology or isn't that interesting?
Speaker 1 (17:29):
I say no not. Rocks Tobin was diminutive like Paul.
She had a master's degree in theology and its great
at keeping housecats. Alive well into their twenties. Tobin had
recently and controversially been named female lay minister at the
Poula Center. Once she got a call from Anne Walsh.
Speaker 9 (17:48):
And she called me one day and said, could you
come and meet me. I have somebody I want to
introduce you to and we want to discuss something with you.
Speaker 1 (17:58):
That night, Anne Walsh, Paul Cooming and a Tobin met
at a Peter Pan restaurant near Boston University.
Speaker 9 (18:04):
She had this young man with her. She introduced me
to him and she said, this is Paul Cooming. He's
been drafted and he's not going to go. He's going
to resist. And she said, we want to know if
we could have a sanctuary at the Paula Center. And
I said, well, yeah, sure, why not? And she said,
(18:27):
well clearly, she said, you don't know much about sanctuaries.
She said, there have been several sanctuaries in Boston and
they have been very violent situations because of the police
in the National Guard, and so she gave me an example.
Speaker 1 (18:42):
Anne Walsh then explained to Tobin that there had recently been
a sanctuary at a Protestant church across Boston Common from
the Paulist Center. Here's how Tobin and Paul remembered it.
Speaker 9 (18:52):
Federal marshalls broke into the chapel and beat people up,
and people were hurt, and there was a lot of
damage done to the Arching Street. Church.
Speaker 2 (19:02):
Police had gone in a riker and smashed heads with
billy clubs and drag the soldiers that were a wall
basically out into the street and the rest. And there's
a lot of injuries.
Speaker 8 (19:13):
Is it all? I see? Well, that's okay.
Speaker 9 (19:18):
We'll do it anyway, you know, we'll do it.
Speaker 8 (19:20):
We'll figure it out.
Speaker 1 (19:22):
The thinking was that maybe in a Catholic town like Boston,
where the police force was filled with Irish Catholics just
like them, they could avoid a visit from the goon squad.
Speaker 2 (19:32):
The sanctity of the Catholic church was just a much
more really you know, chose of prejudice against other religions,
I guess, but it was much more secure than any
other church that would offered.
Speaker 1 (19:44):
Or at least the action would create a pr nightmare
for the authorities.
Speaker 2 (19:48):
We felt that for sure the FBI would want to
try to stop me from going into the church, rather
than having to dragged me out of the church.
Speaker 1 (19:55):
But their other problem was that this would put the
Police Center at odds with the Catholic Church at large, and.
Speaker 2 (20:02):
A Catholic Church had not done that during the Vietnam
Antaiwan movement as far as I know at that time, because.
Speaker 10 (20:07):
It really a Catholic Church had never had a sanctuary
for a conscientious subjector ever in the history of the
Catholic Church ever anywhere in the world before. It was
a first, like all through World War Two, no nothing, zero, zippo.
Speaker 1 (20:19):
It won't generally sound like it because a lot of
what I'm going to tell you is hard to believe.
But this show is in fact fact checked and we
found nothing to disprove this claim. In fact, there hadn't
been any instance of political sanctuary in a Catholic Church
since the sixteenth century, and for that matter, the American
Catholic bishops, led by Cardinal Spelman of New York, were
(20:41):
staunch supporters of the war in Vietnam. But Tobin's church,
the Polish Center, was a huge flagship chapel for the
Order of the Polish Fathers. It was the perfect place
for this crazy scheme because it had just fallen into
the hands of two young priests who had transformed it
into a headquarters of do gooding and hell raising. The
(21:06):
police Center sits right below the Golden Dome of the
State House at number five Park Street, smack in the
middle of downtown Boston. Park Street is the shortest side
of the confusingly five sided Boston Common, and it's where
you'll find two sets of red double doors that mark
the entrance to the Paulis Center Chapel. It was dedicated
in nineteen fifty seven, but because of anti Catholic prejudice
(21:29):
in Boston at the time, Cardinal Cushing had to have
a Protestant friend by the building and then turn it
over to the Polists. The Polices are one of many
orders in the Catholic Church, like the Jesuits, the Benedictines,
the Josephites, and the Dominicans. They were the first order
formed in the United States, and they have a uniquely
American focus. The mission of the Polis is outreach to
(21:52):
non Catholic.
Speaker 5 (21:53):
I remember being overjoyed that I was assigned to Boston.
Speaker 1 (21:56):
That's Jim Carroll, who at the time was a Polis
priest working at BA You with Anne Walsh. He's also
the author of several books, including Practicing Catholic Prince of
Peace and an American Requiem God, My Father and the
War that Came Between Us, which won the National Book Award.
Speaker 5 (22:12):
And I was assigned to Boston University, which also pleased me.
I didn't want to go to the Paula Center. Why not, Well,
it was a church, and it was also a famously establishment,
and it was full of old guys, and it was
going to be hearing confessions and saying masks. But it
was a church.
Speaker 1 (22:32):
Two of jim seminary brothers, Patrick and Floyd, had been
assigned to the Paula Center when they were all ordained.
Patrick was a wild man. Electric shocks of curly hair
flew from his head as he merrily kreemed down the
halls of the place from one urgent meeting to the next.
Speaker 8 (22:51):
And he never wore his caller.
Speaker 1 (22:53):
This was a Roman Catholic priest, the ones that wear
the all black habit with a cardboard collar, putting a
telltale white square at their Adams apple to signal to
the world. I am a man of the cloth. But
Patrick just wasn't into it because it.
Speaker 8 (23:06):
Was the new church. And they never did I think,
he said. He wore it three times in his whole
time he was a priest.
Speaker 1 (23:12):
Patrick was a kook and a revolutionary. He was on
a mission to reinvent what it meant to be a
priest in the world, starting with not taking himself so
goddamn seriously all the time.
Speaker 11 (23:24):
He would come really through a doorway and he would
take one foot and put it in front of the
other and cause himself to trip, like just to make
people laugh, like he was a natural clown or something
like that, and he had the ability to do that,
and everybody.
Speaker 8 (23:41):
Would laugh, and he would laugh too. He just thought
it was hysterical. Every time.
Speaker 11 (23:46):
He thought it was as funny as the time before,
and it really was.
Speaker 1 (23:48):
Patrick had only been ordained two years prior, and he
and Floyd had spent those two years trying to drag
the Poulas Center kicking and screaming into the twentieth century,
and through a bizarre series of events which we'll soon
learn about, Patrick had been placed in charge of this
entire place at only thirty years old. He was the
one that appointed Ann Tobin to be female lay minister,
(24:12):
something in the Catholic Church at large found absolutely scandalous.
But hell or high water. Patrick and Floyd were going
to make changes.
Speaker 4 (24:19):
They were going to do it by renewing the church
from head to foot, including Floyd getting a screwdriver and
going into the chapel and literally starting to unscrew all
the mealers because that was ridiculous.
Speaker 8 (24:33):
That was part of the old church.
Speaker 1 (24:35):
And now Patrick, Floyd and Tobin were running the place
in an avant garde, non hierarchical Berkeley food co op structure.
So of all the Catholic churches in all of Boston,
this was the one that could wedge itself between the
anti war movement and the Department of Justice. And so
Tobin started putting the wheels in motion.
Speaker 4 (24:56):
And Tobin calls me and Sarah and says, you're not
going to believe.
Speaker 1 (25:02):
This is Mari Anne, what just happened.
Speaker 4 (25:04):
So we were beside ourselves with excitement about the possibility
of doing this because it would be so powerful, and
Tobin had to bring it to the team.
Speaker 9 (25:16):
The only problem was when I went back to the
Paula Center.
Speaker 1 (25:19):
That night Tobin after her meeting with Anne Walsh and
Paul Cooming, I.
Speaker 9 (25:23):
Ran into Patrick and I got off the elevator upstairs
and I said Oh, Patrick, this is the most exciting thing.
I said, We're going to have a sanctuary that. Don't
say anything else about it. I don't want to know.
He said, don't tell me anything else about it. I said, oh, okay.
Speaker 1 (25:42):
When this conversation happened, Patrick was going through some serious
shit with the Paula's Brass, so basically the last thing
he could think about was unilaterally pitting the might of
the church against the might of the federal government. So
Patrick wanted to help paul at the Paula Center on
Park Street at the behest of Anne Anne and Mary Anne.
But he was frankly pretty slammed.
Speaker 9 (26:03):
That was really kind of shocking to me. So I
called Anne and I said, well, there's a little bit
of a problem. I said, Patrick is probably the most
liberal person on the team, and so I'm not sure
about the reaction of the others.
Speaker 1 (26:19):
What were the stakes, though, would it be could they.
Speaker 10 (26:21):
Have been maybe they shut down that, Yeah, Mary Anne,
they could have maybe shut down the follow Center or whatever.
Speaker 5 (26:26):
Did Rome have that authority to do that?
Speaker 10 (26:29):
Well, Boston archdioceis could have Yeah, they could have said
you're no longer welcome in the Boston Archdioces.
Speaker 1 (26:34):
Patrick had only taken over the Paula Center about eight
months prior and was in the middle of trying to
rescue the church at large from itself. He was an innovator,
holding crazy multimedia liturgies that bore no resemblance to the
Catholic Mass one thinks of today. But he had thus
far avoided too much direct anti war activity, focusing instead
on issues of hunger and justice. Staging the first political
(26:57):
sanctuary in a Catholic church in four hundred years and
thrusting the Polist Center directly into conflict with the government
would threaten the existence of everything he had built in
that short amount of time. But Tobin, Paul and Marianne
and her roommate Sarah pressed their case to Patrick and Floyd.
Speaker 2 (27:15):
The group came around to it. I think it probably
took quite a few conversations.
Speaker 1 (27:20):
Somehow they managed to convince Patrick and Floyd that it
was better to beg forgiveness than ask permission, that if
you play two behemoth institutions like these against one another,
it can create enough confusion to get away with anything.
Speaker 8 (27:35):
And they said yes, so, oh God, that was bad.
Speaker 7 (27:40):
Although I loved him to death, I feared the ramifications
of it, like the federal agents, you know, bashing people.
Speaker 4 (27:48):
So the decision was made amongst all of us that
we were going to do it.
Speaker 1 (27:52):
And so they began making preparations.
Speaker 4 (27:55):
And there were hundreds of people involved in this, from
the whole community. The Newman House would be you all
of us at the Paula Center, the whole Catholic left
community up and down the East coast.
Speaker 8 (28:08):
There were hundreds of people involved.
Speaker 2 (28:10):
We were planning us for about a month. I believe
the peace community within the Poula Senate was so advanced.
Speaker 4 (28:17):
The groundwork that had happened prior to this was getting
the church ready for sanctuary because we knew, you know,
there would be many people who would stay inside the
church with Paul, including me, the two kids, Sarah, and
one hundred other people.
Speaker 2 (28:33):
We were sure that the word had gotten out that
this sanctuary was going to happen.
Speaker 1 (28:39):
By this point, j Edgar Hoover's FBI was being incredibly
aggressive with the anti war movement following Paul and his friends,
harassing everyone's parents and even conspicuously searching through their parents'
neighbors trash pins.
Speaker 4 (28:53):
Because the FBI was so vigilant. There was concern that
Paul would be arrested.
Speaker 2 (28:59):
Because we knew that were parishionists who had brothers or
relatives in the FBI.
Speaker 8 (29:03):
And that they would find out about this ahead of time.
Speaker 2 (29:05):
We fell for sure that they knew.
Speaker 4 (29:07):
So the question was where could Paul go quote unquote underground?
Speaker 2 (29:11):
I and mary Anne and Sarah and others Anthobin and
Patrick decided the idea.
Speaker 8 (29:18):
Was could he come and stay at Florida Street with.
Speaker 2 (29:20):
Us, pretty low income building that was not well kept up.
Speaker 8 (29:24):
Why we were thought to be underground? I have no idea,
because maybe because of the kids.
Speaker 2 (29:29):
Okay, I had a crush on Sarah Toci, So I
think I was the one that brought up the idea
that a good place for me to hide out was
their apartment. So Paul moves in with us, and the
fact that there was no place other than a floor
space for me to be didn't make any difference.
Speaker 8 (29:47):
You know, three rooms.
Speaker 2 (29:49):
Christy and Jojo.
Speaker 8 (29:50):
Had one bedroom, kids had the bedroom.
Speaker 2 (29:52):
There was a kitchen, and there was a living room
and that's all there was to this apartment.
Speaker 8 (29:55):
Paul's got a bid roll. Sarah and I are on
the day bed pullout.
Speaker 2 (29:59):
Coach on the flos and did that for two weeks.
Speaker 6 (30:02):
One thing I remember about Paul was sitting.
Speaker 1 (30:06):
On him Chrissy again, Mary Anne's daughter, who was four.
Speaker 6 (30:10):
He just loved him, sitting on his lap, holding his
hand while he was doing his crazy laugh, feeling his
body's shape.
Speaker 1 (30:16):
This was a group of people who knew first and
foremost how to have a good time, a distant second
how to be criminals. Mary Anne would come to refer
to them all as the ganger couldn't shoot straight after
a screwball Jerry Orbach gangster comedy running in cinemas at
the time. They were about to break the law, they
were about to take on the Department of Justice, they
(30:39):
were about to throw a Catholic church into the anti
war movement, and god damn it, they were going to
have fun doing it soon enough, and too soon as
far as they were concerned, Because time, as we all know,
is a motherfucker. The day of the sanctuary arrived.
Speaker 4 (30:57):
Now we're all living together at Florida Street, and we're
all involved in getting the sanctuary organized and then getting
him in town without being seen. And I will never
ever ever forget the morning we're going to go to
take sanctuary. He's supposed to show up at court at
nine o'clock.
Speaker 2 (31:17):
I had a quick date. I was supposed to show
up for a trial to answer questions and ask questions
because I was defending myself.
Speaker 1 (31:24):
But instead the plan was Mary Anne, Sarah and the
kids would spirit Paul into the Paula Center while the
trial was underway.
Speaker 2 (31:32):
There was a lot of pressure from my family not
to do it this.
Speaker 1 (31:36):
Way, but despite their preference for Paul to escape to Canada,
Paul's parents agreed to appear in his stead at the trial.
Marianne and Sarah knew meanwhile that the FBI was on
the lookout for Paul, and so they had to somehow
go incognito.
Speaker 4 (31:51):
So the morning of the sanctuary we all get up
at the crack of dawn.
Speaker 8 (31:55):
We had a long brown coat with a hood.
Speaker 6 (31:59):
I remember the cape. They had to dress him up
in a costume, and I think it was like a
cape with a hood. Again seventies.
Speaker 4 (32:08):
The styles of the winter coats at that time, they
almost looked like monk's habits.
Speaker 2 (32:13):
I either looked like a woman or I look.
Speaker 5 (32:15):
Like a monk.
Speaker 6 (32:15):
I remember. I think it was my mom putting a
little bit of makeup on him.
Speaker 2 (32:19):
I think I even put on a little bit of makeup,
lipstick or something to emphasize the fact that I.
Speaker 5 (32:24):
Was a woman.
Speaker 6 (32:24):
Joe and I were part of the cover because we
held his hands.
Speaker 4 (32:28):
And we have the kids. We've got Jojo in the carriage.
We're carrying backpacks.
Speaker 8 (32:34):
Because we know we're going to stay.
Speaker 4 (32:36):
And Kristen and Sarah, Paul and I and Jojo all
go to Ashmont station.
Speaker 8 (32:42):
It's snowing.
Speaker 6 (32:43):
I mostly remember the subway ride being anxious.
Speaker 4 (32:49):
When we get off at Park Street, we look up
Park Street and we see that there's activity outside Park
Street and it looks like the FBI.
Speaker 8 (33:01):
It looks like Park Street is being covered.
Speaker 6 (33:04):
When the sanctuary started, Paul was not in the Paula Center.
The FBI got there before he did.
Speaker 8 (33:12):
And so we get ourselves into Brighams.
Speaker 1 (33:16):
Brighams, if you're not from Boston, was a ubiquitous chain
of diners in the sixties and seventies, and their coffee
tasted like payment.
Speaker 4 (33:24):
And we get ourselves a cup of coffee and we're stunned.
I mean, we're flummoxed.
Speaker 8 (33:30):
What are we going to do?
Speaker 4 (33:30):
Were we going to make a break for it and
just saunter up there Paul in his girl coat and
get him in the door.
Speaker 1 (33:37):
Meanwhile, Paul's father was in the courthouse facing the judge
in his son's place.
Speaker 2 (33:43):
There was probably one hundred people in the courtroom expecting
me to be on trial then there to support me.
But I wasn't there. But my father and mother were there.
The judge, Charles e.
Speaker 5 (33:53):
Isisansky Jr.
Speaker 2 (33:55):
I remember his nigh very well. He was the chief
goudge of the Federal District. He asked if there was
anybody there that knew where Paul was.
Speaker 4 (34:04):
His father was going to be at the courtroom and
read the statement to the judge.
Speaker 2 (34:10):
My fatherly gets up and says, your honor, Paul is
not coming to trial today. Paul is being offered sanctuary
in the church nearby and will stay there and is
refusing to come to trial to participate in this process.
I think he was shaking in his boots all the
time he was talking. And the judge of journal meeting
(34:32):
and he ordered the federal marshals to take every precaution
not to disrupt the church. He ordered that from the bench.
Speaker 1 (34:41):
At that moment, the assembled supporters stood in Unison, began
singing and marched towards the Paula Center.
Speaker 2 (34:50):
They walked from the courthouse, which was probably a good
seven er or ten blocks away, somewhere in that vicinity,
marching and singing all the way with my father and
mother the parade, singing on anti wa songs. They did
that for the several blocks, right through the streets of Austin.
Speaker 1 (35:12):
From where they stood at the window of Brigham's, Mary Anne, Paul,
Sarah and the kids could see down Tremont Street that
the singing marchers were headed straight for the Paula Center
and they were going to go inside and start the
sanctuary without Paul in the building.
Speaker 4 (35:28):
Now, our job had been to get Paul there before
anybody else got there, but what with the FBI up
and down the road, that wasn't working out.
Speaker 1 (35:37):
The marchers were about to round the corner onto Park
Street and head straight for the FBI, with Paul trapped
in Brighams watching on this season of Divine Intervention, a
(36:06):
generation of young Catholic radicals enters the resistance.
Speaker 4 (36:11):
They just cried, these incredible doors open, and a whole
generation just poured through.
Speaker 8 (36:23):
It was definitely our time.
Speaker 11 (36:25):
This kind of time that you think, well, things are
never going to be quite the same anymore, and they weren't.
Speaker 12 (36:30):
Many of the things that we were about to do
we're not considered legal or patriotic.
Speaker 1 (36:35):
And attempts to sabotage a war by any means necessary.
Speaker 8 (36:39):
It was a real comedy of eras that we pulled off.
Speaker 2 (36:41):
They've not committed just a crime that wasn't simply breaking
an entry.
Speaker 1 (36:45):
They were committing acts of civil dish obedience. It took
a lot of God.
Speaker 9 (36:48):
We had a very modest name. We called ourself the
East Coast Conspiracy to.
Speaker 1 (36:52):
Save lives as they faced down j Edgar Hoover's FBI.
Hoover was crazy about us.
Speaker 8 (36:58):
He wanted to have kind of dyed everybody.
Speaker 5 (37:00):
It was an agent behind them.
Speaker 2 (37:01):
Burn nailbox and when the verdict of the jury was announced,
people stood up in the courtbrook and sang amazing grace,
and the jury stood up.
Speaker 1 (37:09):
With and attempted to smash one institution after another.
Speaker 5 (37:13):
The Catholic Church was going through a revolution and the
Paul Center was a main place of revolutionary firment.
Speaker 12 (37:20):
That's what makes liberation theologies so threatening, I think, is
the people get to call on the leaders.
Speaker 11 (37:26):
It was more equal, and it was a new concept.
Speaker 1 (37:30):
While navigating the unbridled chaos of being young and in love.
Those movements come out of love.
Speaker 2 (37:36):
They come out of people's love for their fellow men
and women.
Speaker 4 (37:40):
Just throwing yourself on the mercy of the universe and
just hope to Christ you're going to land on your feet.
Speaker 12 (37:46):
He wanted so much in his life that somehow the
priesthood refused to alloe.
Speaker 8 (37:51):
I picked up the phone.
Speaker 4 (37:53):
And my thought was, this is the most important phone
call I'll ever make in my life.
Speaker 8 (37:57):
I couldn't believe it. I mean, it was Divine Intervention.
Speaker 1 (38:09):
Divine Intervention is a production of iHeart Podcasts. It's produced
by Wonder Media Network. It was created and written by me,
your host, Brendan Patrick Hughes. Our indefatigable producers Our Carmen
Borca Correo, Abby Delk Palomo, Moreno, Jimenez, Grace Lynch, and myself.
Our editor is Towering Figure of Strength Grace Lynch for
(38:32):
Wonder Media Network. Our executive producers are Emily Rudder and
Jenny Kaplan for iHeart Podcasts. Our executive producer is Christina
Everett for Deuyt Street Book Club. Our executive producer is
Rolin Jones. Vocal arrangements and special performance of We Shall
Overcome by Morris Smiley, Kai Fukuda and friends. Our end
music was composed and performed by Tanya Donnelly. This is
(38:56):
Brendan Patrick Hughes. Thank you for listening to Divine Intervention.
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