Chapter 2: The Drunken Banjo Player

Father Patrick is the wild-haired radical priest who plans to harbor Paul Couming, but how did he get this way? A very unusual pope, attending seminary during the tumult of the 1960’s, and being a born party animal may have something to do with it.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Evolution and war have both been described the exact same way,
endless periods of supreme boredom punctuated by brief periods of
abject terror. Change when it comes, comes in loud, sudden bursts.
One such burst, the subject of our show, happened between

(00:22):
nineteen sixty five and nineteen seventy three to a country,
to a church, and to a bunch of young Catholics.
But when it comes to change, there always lurks the
revolutionary's dilemma. Do you change things incrementally from the inside
or do you agitate from outside and smash institutions? Do

(00:44):
you be the change, as Gandhi said, or if this
were pro wrestling, do you pull a reverse Gandhi and
force the change? This show will explore both sides of
this dilemma, two sides which faithfully came together in a
rare dis unified strength to protect Paul Kome So dig

(01:07):
if you will the picture. We last left Paul standing
agog in the Brigham's Diner, next to Marianne and Sarah
helplessly looking on as Anne, Walsh and Tobin led the
marchers down Tremont Street toward the waiting Feds in front
of the Paulist Center. They were on the verge of
the first political sanctuary in a Catholic church in four

(01:30):
hundred years. To do this, to find a Catholic church
that would be willing to thrust itself between the anti
war resistance and the federal government, they would need a
man on the inside. These outside agitators needed to find
a Roman Catholic priest, an inside incrementalist, crazy enough to

(01:50):
take on the Archdiocese of Boston, the federal government, and
his own Holy Order. No priest in his right mind
would do this, except that is for Patrick, their man
on the inside, on that morning of the sanctuary, as
he stood behind the red double doors of the Polist

(02:10):
Center waiting for Paul and the others, Patrick was a
wild haired Gonzo priest who had decided to stake his
church on a crazy bet to sabotage a war. However,
only two years prior to him standing there in that foyer,
the Polis Center in downtown Boston had been just another musty,

(02:32):
old smells and bells echo chamber of a stolid Catholic past,
the kind where you'd go to church on Sunday, here,
quiet organ music as you shuffled in and a single
cough would reverberate for days. You remember what Jim Carroll,
the author from the last episode said about the place.

Speaker 2 (02:51):
And it was also a famously establishment, and it was
full of old guys.

Speaker 1 (02:55):
But Patrick, in the two years since his ordination and
subsequent assignment to the Paula Center, had somehow transformed it
into a vibrating beehive of subversive madness and progressive ideas.

Speaker 2 (03:09):
The Catholic Church was going through a revolution and the
paul Center was a main place of revolutionary firment.

Speaker 1 (03:17):
So who the hell was Patrick and how the hell
did he get this way? This divine intervention Chapter two,
The drunken banjo player. This cat scandalized his entire order

(03:58):
on a national scale and basically detonated what it means
to be a priest. But he began like they all did,
a conformist, apple cheeked nineteen fifties kid with cuffs in
his jeans and an all shocks attitude.

Speaker 3 (04:13):
Patrick was, of course an altiboy.

Speaker 1 (04:15):
Patrick's sister Joanne, he.

Speaker 3 (04:17):
Was a prized Alta boy. Everyone wanted Patrick to be
the altiboy at their weddings because he was so cute.

Speaker 1 (04:25):
Joanne is a painter and retired therapist. Soft spoken yet
ferociously passionate, she has spent many years trying to reclaim
the term hag as a thing of power, even printing
t shirts and toad bags.

Speaker 3 (04:37):
And he had this toussled, blonde, curly hair because he
was just so there, and so he would be the
altiboy at weddings and he'd get tipps and he thought
that was fantastic.

Speaker 1 (04:49):
Patrick was the second youngest of seven children.

Speaker 3 (04:51):
Some people call us Irish trains.

Speaker 1 (04:53):
Joanne was the youngest. Patrick grew up in Quincy, which
locals pronounced with a z quinn. It's next to Dorchester
on the water, which makes it sound a little fancier
than its. Patrick's father was an Irish immigrant who worked
as a machinist at the local navy yard.

Speaker 3 (05:11):
My father and Patrick built a boat in our basement.
They worked on it night after night after night, and
it turned into the most beautiful sailboat you could just imagine.
And then Patrick set it out in the water and
he just sailed all over the place with that boat.

Speaker 1 (05:32):
Eventually the neighborhood kids got jealous, so Patrick and his
father built nine more boats and then they began having
races on Boston Harbor. This kid had a unique trust
in himself, a love of charting his own course into
the unknown, and yet somehow he ended up going into
the priesthood, entering a global religious hierarchy that demanded submission

(05:57):
to authority. I did Patrick choose the priesthood. Maybe like
a lot of other parochial school kids, it was the
nuns took a shine to him, and they pulled him
aside and told him he had that priestly X factor.
Or maybe it was his parents.

Speaker 3 (06:15):
I think that it was sort of an inevitable path
given the context of our family, the Irish Catholic, the
reverence for priests. It was the highest calling that you
could ever respond to as far as my parents were concerned.

Speaker 1 (06:31):
Okay, so maybe his parents had their thumb on the scale.
But the question I'm still left with is what in
the crap would make someone want to become a priest
in the first place. I mean, I grew up, you know,
sort of Catholic. I was Catholic when I visited my
elderly aunt Mimian Scranton for the summer, Catholic enough to
know it was a really big deal. When the parish

(06:53):
priest was in your house, it felt like a celebrity
was in your dining room. Of all the houses, of
all the people, all the pews. On Sunday, here was
Father McGillicutty eating corn on the cob in hours. Of course,
now looking back, it's like you let a priest into
your house Jesus. But this was before all the scandals,

(07:15):
so you just felt anointed. But even with that rock
star status at awkward family dinners, there are still the
endless wakes and funerals and multiple masses a week. What
is the draw? This is Floyd McManus. He just sighed
because I asked him why he became a priest. He

(07:36):
and Jim Carroll were seminarians.

Speaker 4 (07:38):
With Patrick, I guess the notion of service.

Speaker 1 (07:44):
Not many priests nor former priests have a really solid
answer to that question, And as you've gathered by now,
Patrick's not around anymore. So unfortunately, we can only guess
at Patrick's true motivation to become a priest beyond pleasing
his parents. What we do know is the succession of
world events that surrounded his decision making. We know Patrick

(08:06):
came of age on the cusp of the nineteen sixties.
We also know this was the era of the two Johns,
and not John F. Kennedy, the first Catholic President not
to mention Irish Catholic was sitting in the Oval Office
after being a shot upon immigrant group for over a century.

(08:28):
It's impossible to overstate the significance of one of us
in the White House. And it's equally impossible to overstate
the significance of that one sentence on an entire generation
of young people like Patrick. But John F. Kennedy was
only one John, and maybe not even the most important
John to Patrick at the time. There was also the

(08:51):
other John, the newly appointed John, the twenty third, raising
hell in the Vatican, and that John may have had
something to do with how Patrick turned out to be
a gonzo, wild haired priest. Okay, and since this is
a show about Catholics, before we go on, here's one
of the weirder things you need to know about them

(09:13):
as you listen to this. Over a billion of these
specimens are groping around the crust of this planet, participating
in a global religious hierarchy that answers ultimately to one
guy wearing a dress who lives in his own miniature
country in the middle of downtown Rome, and this man,

(09:34):
known as the Pope, is the ultimate intermediary between a
billion people, the world they live in, and their godhead.
Popes have a metric crap ton of executive power, so
naming a new one is really a gamble because you
really never know who you're going to get until a

(09:56):
funny hat goes on. When Patrick was nineteen years old,
Pope Pius the Twelfth, who'd been pope since the week
Patrick was born, died and the cardinals of the world
dashed to Rome to choose the successor. A large crowd

(10:19):
of Catholics gathered in Saint Peter's Square and Vatican City
to wait for news of a new pope, And after
eleven days of waiting, white smoke puffed from the chimney
over the Sistine Chapel. How about us, pop, 'm we
had a new Pope. I was there.

Speaker 3 (10:37):
I was there.

Speaker 5 (10:38):
It's very funny.

Speaker 1 (10:42):
This is Bob Knnane. He was a young priest in
Rome back in nineteen fifty eight.

Speaker 5 (10:46):
We ran out of it to Saint Peter's Square when
we found out the pope. You know, the white smoke
and all that kind of stuff. Was very exciting. We
all got in the square and they said the new
Pope is John the twenty three, and everybody looked at
one another saying what.

Speaker 1 (11:00):
He was a total surprise. It turns out the pope
they chose, John the twenty third was a surprise even
to himself. In fact, he had bought a round trip
train ticket to Rome, fully expecting to return to his
duties as the Patriarch of Venice.

Speaker 5 (11:17):
Nobody expected anything from him, and of course totally he
changed the whole atmosphere.

Speaker 1 (11:24):
There were early signs for anyone paying attention that this
pope was going to be trouble. Jim Carroll describes John
as a big eared bear, hug of a man, and
a roly poly peasant pope. In one story, John the
twenty third was once asked by a child how do
people work at the Vatican and his answer was eh,
about half. He also said it often happens I wake

(11:48):
up at night and begin to think about the serious
problems afflicting the world, and I tell myself I must
talk to the Pope about this. Then the next day,
when I wake up, I remember that I'm the Pope.
This guy was a strange bird compared to every other pope,
Patrick and his generation had ever beheld as their leader,
and it was becoming clear that he had big plans.

(12:10):
One of his first acts as pope was to deliver
an appeal for world peace.

Speaker 5 (12:14):
I mean, we were used to popes going watch yourself now,
you know you sort of like that head the recruiters. Instead,
he opened the windows and he said, do you know
he kind of he changed things.

Speaker 1 (12:28):
Suddenly, this pope, the Italian son of an impoverished peasant farmer,
had entered the world stage, and his appeal for world
peace began to ring like a clarion bell for a
generation of young people like Patrick.

Speaker 6 (12:40):
He was an you might say, an oddity. He was different.
He was not like the other popes.

Speaker 1 (12:45):
This is noted American historian Howard Zinn, whom I interviewed
in two thousand and nine, a few months before he
passed away.

Speaker 6 (12:51):
He was a rebel in many ways, and I think
he became a hero to many of the people on
the Catholic left. I know Jim carl my friend Jim Carroll,
who has written so much about the Catholic Church, looks
to John twenty third as a very special historic period
in the history of the paper sit.

Speaker 2 (13:11):
The Catholic Church was going through a revolutionary and this
whole revolutionary process was just beginning in the mid to
late nineteen sixties.

Speaker 1 (13:24):
Young Catholics everywhere, Young Catholics like Patrick, were enthralled by
this new pope and his peculiar radical style.

Speaker 7 (13:33):
He opened the doors. He was a modern contemporary theologian
and thinker, and he knew the church needed to get
into the modern age.

Speaker 1 (13:44):
This is Mary Anne who he last left standing next
to Paul at the Brighams.

Speaker 7 (13:48):
And he changed it dramatically. And it was at the
same time that John Kennedy became President of the United States.
Those two hugely symbolic transformational figures came on to the
world stage.

Speaker 8 (14:04):
And it's as if they just.

Speaker 7 (14:08):
Try these incredible doors open, and a whole generation just.

Speaker 8 (14:17):
Poured through like crazy torrents of water poured through.

Speaker 1 (14:26):
What we know is that Patrick saw a fellow Irish
Catholic Bostonian in the Oval office and a mischievous change
maker in Saint Peter's Basilica. Maybe it was his natural leadership,
or the nuns at school, or his parents, or the
two Johns, or simply a sense of adventure, but whatever
it was, it propelled Patrick into a life of the cloth.

(14:52):
Patrick's next move after deciding to become a priest was
to choose the right order. If Patrick chose the wrong order,
while the only risk winding up permanently unfulfilled and misspending
his eternity. As for the priest orders, the Dominicans are
the accountant types. The Franciscans are the tree hugging hippies.
The Jesuits are the cool professors doing bong rips at

(15:14):
frat parties. The Benedictines are the nerd bomb librarians. The
Carmelites are the mystics. The Vincentians worked with the poor,
and the Poulis are kind of the ones who end
up in the av club, you know, pouches of dice,
model rockets, you know what I'm talking about.

Speaker 7 (15:34):
And so he joined the Paul's Fathers and then spent
it's eight years in the seminary.

Speaker 8 (15:39):
I mean, it's the huge commitment.

Speaker 4 (15:42):
Different orders have different missions, and for the Paulus, their
mission was North America, and the Pause were.

Speaker 7 (15:49):
Really known for communication, and you know they had TV
and radio.

Speaker 3 (15:54):
And then he went into the Paulis and vishit.

Speaker 1 (15:57):
So Patrick told his family, I'm off to the seminar.

Speaker 3 (16:00):
I'm going to set out on this path. I don't
know how far I can go, but this is what
I'm aiming toward. And everyone was so happy and supportive
and just thought, oh, this is right, this seems so right.

Speaker 1 (16:11):
Patrick's choice to join the Paulists, obsessed as they were
with communication, suggested that at this point he felt, I
have something I want to say to this world, and
I want to say it loud and clear. Now I
have to figure out what the hell it is. In

(16:37):
the fall of nineteen sixty two, Patrick, Floyd, and Jim
turned up at a place called Mount Paul Novitiate in
Jefferson Township, New Jersey to begin their journey towards ordination.
They arrived on a crisp September morning, driving down the
tree lined mile long driveway off Ridge Road to reach

(16:58):
a former hunting lodge with a little pond in several outbuildings. There,
they were each given a black cassock as a uniform
for their stay. As young men who'd grown accustomed to
wearing pants in public their entire lives, this would have
felt very unsettling for them. The boys were then told
they would live here for one year and one day

(17:19):
as novices to decide if they wanted to spend the
following seven years in seminary. They were told the rules
were strict and they'd have to learn the stern and
disciplined life of a would be priest. Television and phone
calls were things of the past. They were told they
weren't allowed to leave campus on their own for the

(17:40):
entire time they were there, And finally, they were left
to ponder the question that would haunt the rest of
their time as priests. Are you in this world to
participate in this vocation or are you in this vocation
to participate in the world. Boys, struck dumb by this decision,

(18:02):
which would determine who they would be as priests, would
then stroll around the grounds until they felt at home
and not like they'd made a terrible mistake. But Patrick
was not so easily daunted. By all accounts, he was
an irrepressible, a brilliant character from the moment he arrived.

(18:25):
He was roughly five to eight, stocky, warm, friendly and confident,
with a bit of a trickster's gleam in his eye,
and you.

Speaker 7 (18:32):
Know they tell the story about Patrick, of course, who
could not sit spiled for five minutes.

Speaker 8 (18:36):
I mean he got to the seminary and said.

Speaker 7 (18:38):
Oh, my wife to do something about this.

Speaker 8 (18:41):
So I think the first thing he did was literally
build a boat.

Speaker 4 (18:44):
He wants to build a boat.

Speaker 1 (18:49):
Floyd had grown up a Canadian farm boy and was
assigned to run the wood shop.

Speaker 4 (18:53):
And he needs some way by my equipment. I was
not very happy. But before long, not all only is
he using my but he's using me too to help him. See,
we weren't allowed out of that place. But by getting
involved in building this boat, he would have to go
out to get materials and that kind of things, which

(19:15):
took him out. Really, it seemed to be somewhat of
a consistent pattern. He would somehow be able to expand
the box that he would find himself in.

Speaker 1 (19:33):
Of Patrick, Jim Harrell would later write in his books,
this is a man I want to be with. Patrick
had a particularly hard time saying goodbye to civilian life.
In the summers prior, he had been a cape caught
milkman by day, even delivering to the Kennedy compound and
getting pinches on the cheek from Rose by night. He

(19:53):
played banjo at a high Enda's honky tonk and caroused
to his heart's content. The night before he left a seminary,
he was dumped on the lawn by his friends, where
his parents found him. The following morning, he was shall
we say a party in.

Speaker 3 (20:12):
This is another paragraph? Thank god, the summer is almost over.

Speaker 1 (20:16):
A letter from Patrick to the Quincy Heights.

Speaker 3 (20:18):
It's been quite hairy at times. On our Thursday hikes,
I sometimes see a group of guys drive by, drinking beer,
singing and raising hell. In general, you can imagine where
my mind wanders.

Speaker 1 (20:31):
He sent several sprightly letters to his sister Joanne, with
graffiti all over the envelopes, vandalizing the return address to
read call Mount Paul Novigiat for the latest in seminary.

Speaker 3 (20:42):
Ins received your letter. Very good letter. Please mail about
five a day, just kidding, four will do. I'm beginning
to get accustomed to this crazy life again. Pray, pray,
pray if some of those people at Charlie's could see
the banjo player now.

Speaker 1 (21:00):
In her reading, Joanne left out the word drunken. He
had written drunken bancho player.

Speaker 3 (21:06):
This one he signs mister O'Toole.

Speaker 1 (21:09):
He signed early letters to Joanne things like Friar Tuck,
Uncle Charlie, Billy the Kid, Lord Chesterfield, Charlie Brown and
Lee Bear Archie love, prayers, trees, houses, cows and all that.

Speaker 3 (21:20):
Pat I'm gradually becoming an introvert, and that scares the
hell out of me.

Speaker 1 (21:28):
It seems like one challenge of the seminary is to
keep the old you alive as long as possible, but
it's a losing battle. In the margins of one letter,
he added editor's note on first writing this letter, the
author was obviously disturbed, but he feels better now, so
he shall make corrections. And then he proceeded to pick

(21:49):
apart his own letter with little jokes, doing things like
circling all the eye pronouns and remarking too many eyes.
I simply adore myself. Patrick was chipper, boisterous, self effacing,
and had not an ounce of what the Germans called
Veltschmertz or world pain.

Speaker 3 (22:06):
Right at this moment, I'm a bit lonely, melancholy, nostalgic,
but still a very content and happy guy. On the back.
He wants me to send him newspaper reports of Boston
college's hockey team.

Speaker 1 (22:23):
Try as he might to keep up with the old
world he left behind. The seminary walls were closing in,
and the untroubled world he left behind in Quinsy seemed
farther away. With each new letter.

Speaker 3 (22:36):
As part of preparing to be a celibate priest, he
was always trying to get rid of those feelings that
he had.

Speaker 1 (22:44):
In one letter, he described the torment he felt about
one of his ex girlfriends who moved west. Of course,
I realized, he wrote, that if things were different and
we were both around Boston, we probably would have broken
up anyway, seeing as I hate to be tied down.
Then he continued, aware of the irony of his chosen profession.

(23:04):
This I think will be a problem that the Paulists
are going to have with Father Pat if he makes it.
Even Patrick knew the self described drunken banjo player had
a certain amount of growing up to do. Tradition is
meant to tame the heart from its desires. But the
heart is always a threat to tradition. But Catholic tradition

(23:29):
was about to be absolutely detonated in Rome by one
Pope John the twenty.

Speaker 9 (23:35):
Third, Well Pope John undoubtedly this is the greatest day
of his pumpaving hid the convening of this General Assembly
of the Roman Catholic Church.

Speaker 1 (23:54):
On October eleventh, nineteen sixty two, only a month after
Patrick's arrival at Mount Pin, Pope John the twenty third
upended centuries of church dogma by convocating the Second Vatican Council.

Speaker 10 (24:08):
This is the first ecumenical council in ninety two years,
and only the second in four hundred years. It as
solemnly opened this Pope John twenty third is carried into
Saint Peter's on his portable throne.

Speaker 1 (24:19):
All the Church's bishops from all over the world headed
for Rome in a once in a century convening to
decide on major church business. This was a huge ecumenical council.
There have been about twenty in all of history, and
from your tenth grade World history class you might vaguely
recall the Council of Nicea, or maybe the Council of

(24:40):
Trent if you were in ap history. This one was
called the Second Vatican Council because there had been a
first Vatican Council in eighteen seventy and at that one
you may remember if you took religious studies. They defined
papal infallibility. Anything in everything the Pope decreed was automatically
perfect by virtue of the Hope having decreed it. After

(25:02):
the First Vatican Council, popes now had supreme executive power,
and no pope in their right mind would possibly give
that up Until John the twenty third took office. He
declared it was time for the Church to enter the
modern age, so he announced a second Vatican Council. Less

(25:30):
than a month after Patrick, Floyd and Jim arrived at
their seminary to become priests. They were herded into the
common room and an old Filko television was rolled in
for them to watch the momentous opening ceremony for Vatican Two.
They sat on couches and the ends of couches as
the very church they had decided to devote their lives

(25:50):
to began to molt right in front of their eyes.

Speaker 11 (25:55):
Pope John enters the Pasilica as the bells toll for
the largest assembly in the.

Speaker 1 (26:02):
History of the Roman Church in the halls of the Vatican.
All the old brass thought the Pope was crazy for
convening this council, which would undoubtedly force him to relinquish
some of that absolute executive power the papacy had been
granted one hundred years earlier, but to John the twenty third,
yielding some papal power was precisely why Vatican Two had

(26:22):
to happen well.

Speaker 2 (26:23):
Vatican Two was the Catholic Church's response to the Church's
failure to oppose the murder of six million Jews.

Speaker 1 (26:29):
This is Jim Carroll, who watched these proceedings along with
Patrick and Floyd in.

Speaker 2 (26:34):
The Catholic Church in particular, had failed miserably in its
obligation moral obligation to stand up forthrightly in opposition to
the genocide of the Jewish people.

Speaker 1 (26:45):
Jim argues that in the years following World War Two,
Christians and Catholics began to recognize that Hitler's actions had
depended on thousands of years of anti Semitism perpetrated by
Christian ideas.

Speaker 2 (26:57):
Like the Jews murdered Jesus, the Jews were replaced in
God's favor as the chosen people by the Church. The
Jews had no theological reason to continue existing after they
rejected Jesus. It was a small step from that to
saying they had no reason for physical existence either. So

(27:19):
confronting the sources of the Holocaust was the hidden engine
of what Pope John the twenty third saw when he
became pope in the late nineteen fifties.

Speaker 1 (27:30):
See when John the twenty third was still Archbishop Angelo Roncali.
He watched in horror when in nineteen forty three Nazis
rounded up the Jews in Rome and Pope Pious the
twelfth said nothing. Roncoli meanwhile, actively resisted the Holocaust by
falsifying thousands of baptismal records for Jews making their escape.

(27:53):
Then after the war, in nineteen forty nine, Roncali watched
as Pious the twelfth Samaria excommunicated all Communists, demonstrating a
capacity for strong stances that had been absent during the war.
So when Roncali became John the twenty third, he was
crystal clear that it was time for a change, and

(28:17):
his first target was the very language of the faith itself.
The word Catholic with a lower case C means universal.
The box office draw for the Catholic Church in the
eyes of the Vatican has always been that it's one
gigantic organization. So starting around the fourth or fifth century AD,

(28:41):
the Church decided that all masses should be set in
Latin because it was a universal language and basically everyone
had to take it in school. In fact, the ATMs
in Vatican City still have a Latin option in their
language preferences. When Vatican two began, Latin had been the
official church language for roughly fifteen hundred years. Patrick dreaded

(29:05):
the Latin part of the job. You went to Mass
on Sunday and the priests droned on in a dead language,
like he was literally casting spells, and the priest faced
away from you. So you just sat there witnessing this ceremony,
having no idea what was going on. They kept a
very mysterious paul cooming.

Speaker 12 (29:23):
It gave more power to the church, and it gave
more power to the priests up front. You wouldn't challenge
their words because you didn't understand their words. It was
a sacred, veiled service that went on.

Speaker 1 (29:36):
In other words, celebrating Mass in Latin was the Church's
mechanism to cling to priestly power. So the first proposal
on the Vatican two docket was to put mandatory Latin
on the chopping block and allow priests to give masses
in the local language of a given church. This was
a massively volatile decision with extremely passionate opposed camps. Jim

(30:01):
Carroll would later note in his books the significance of
this debate. The conservatives in the Vatican knew. This vote
terrified most of the cardinals because it symbolized ceding power
to the people and away from the clergy. And as
this first dramatic ballot of this once in a century
council was about to take place, the progressives John the

(30:24):
twenty third among them, did not have the votes.

Speaker 11 (30:29):
There are twenty six hundred attending bishops, twenty two hundred
of them have taken their places, and two grand fans
on either side of the nave.

Speaker 1 (30:38):
And for the boys at Mount Paul, watching on the
philco and their common room, the fate of their church
hinged on one vote they were about to witness on
live TV. But then the fate of Latin Mass was
put on hold by major world events. Because less we
forget this was October of nineteen nineteen.

Speaker 10 (31:01):
Sixty two, world peace was threatened by the most critical
period in history since the end of the war.

Speaker 1 (31:06):
While the bishops were having their stare down over Latin
and Rome, President Kennedy was being presented pictures of missile
installations on the island of Cuba, installations first noticed by
Jim Carroll's father, who was director of the Defense Intelligence Agency.
Kennedy immediately established a naval embargo surrounding Cuba, as Russian

(31:26):
tankers loaded with more missiles steamed across the Atlantic, setting
up a showdown that could very likely have meant the
end of the world.

Speaker 13 (31:35):
Arms blockade of Cuba, and later.

Speaker 1 (31:38):
On October twenty second, JFK addressed a stunned nation, including Patrick,
Floyd and Jim crowded once again around the film coat.

Speaker 13 (31:45):
This government, as promised, has maintained the closest surveillance of
the Soviet military build up on the island of Cuba.
The purpose of these bases can be none other than
to provide a nuclear strike capability against the Western Hemisphere.

Speaker 1 (32:02):
Kennedy and Khrushcheff were locked in a deadly game of chicken.
The citizens of Earth held their collective breath and prayed
for a dais ex Machina at Mount paul I pictured
the autumn mornings getting crisper as the boys stood in

(32:24):
their cassocks at Pond's edge. Watching the leaves fall, the
odd quiet in the woods as they stared at the
windows of distant living rooms, illuminated with the glow of
this unfolding horror. On the nightly news, there were B
fifty two's in the air carrying nuclear weapons, one hundred

(32:45):
thousand troops stationed in Florida ready to invade Cuba. For
thirteen days, life on Earth hung by its fingernails. But
then incredible thing happened. Pope John the twenty third had
secret contact with both Washington and Moscow. On October twenty fifth,

(33:09):
Pope John, following a plan he had hatched with Kennedy
and Khruschef, made an appeal for peace on Vatican radio.
Nusuprian TuS le gouverna girl. We beg all rulers not
to be deaf to the cry of.

Speaker 5 (33:26):
Humanity zecut lucri a guassi bey bee.

Speaker 1 (33:32):
Kruzchef made sure that the Pope's appeal ran in the
state newspaper above the fold in Moscow. Three days later,
he issued a public statement that the Soviet missiles would
be dismantled and removed from Cuba. Kennedy, the first Catholic
president who was already sensitive about looking like he was
taking orders from the Pope, got to look tough. Khrushcheff

(33:54):
got to look human, and a priest had saved the world.
Emboldened by John the twenty Third's courage, the progressive cardinals
back of the Vatican rallied a coalition and voted to
remove Latin masses in a landslide decision. Vatican two would

(34:15):
now proceed with its promise of monumental church reforms. The
traditions of the Catholic Church had always been its strength,
but suddenly sweeping changes had begun to take hold. The
next Easter, John the twenty third issued a papal encyclical,
which is an open letter to the bishops of the world,
called patchem in Terras or Peace on Earth. In it,

(34:39):
he indicated that the burgeoning women's movement was a positive
sign of the times, and he said, most preciently, at
the dawn of the Vietnam conflict, it's hardly possible to
imagine in the atomic era that war could be used
for justice. And for Patrick, Floyd and Jim, seeing what
Pope John did, how he was in his vocation to

(35:02):
participate in the world. Let the boys know that the
demands of this job were enormous, Far beyond learning Latin
and being an impressive dinner guest. Suddenly being Catholic felt very,
very significant, and the promise of their priesthoods, the very

(35:22):
scope of their vocations, felt infinite. But these events also
set a conflict in motion for them that would come
to define their priesthoods. There is what tradition wants, and
there is what the times demand. For the next year,

(35:42):
as a novice, Patrick roamed the campus of Mount Paul
Novitiate in his black cassock with a white linen collar
that went all the way around his neck. In a breeze,
a group of his fellow novitiates looked like a murder
of crows or a chorus of black swinging handbells. It
was now clear that he had entered the Seminary in

(36:03):
no ordinary times. The walls of the seminary had, for
centuries shut the world out so young men could attune
themselves to the faint frequency that contained the presence of
God and with time make it louder. But as the
boys made their move to the Seminary proper in Washington,

(36:23):
d c. And began their lives of relative monotony and
rigorous study. It became clear that the world outside those
walls was starting to change and unless they watched it carefully,
would leave them behind. So Patrick got an.

Speaker 7 (36:40):
Idea seminary said, this is not going to work out.

Speaker 3 (36:45):
To just stay here, that's not going to work.

Speaker 4 (36:48):
He started up a singing group called the Roman Callers
or something. I was never involved in that because I
couldn't carry a note on a will. Barily, you know, we.

Speaker 14 (36:56):
Can take time, I think to introduce fifth member of
our group. Pat is from Quincy, Massachusetts.

Speaker 3 (37:03):
He's a deacon.

Speaker 14 (37:06):
Maybe you don't know what a deacon is. He's almost
a priest. I'd like to do a Simon and Garfunkle
special fil called Missus Robinson.

Speaker 7 (37:16):
Because Pauls were all about communication and evangelism and all
of that, he convinced them that he should start a
singing group and that they could go to college campuses
across the country and recruit basically or evangelize or spread
the gospel.

Speaker 1 (37:32):
They called themselves the Roman callersa m I n apostrophe.

Speaker 4 (37:37):
They went all over hec's have agar with that, various
campuses and so forth, singing away. Whereas the rest of
us were droning away in the seminary.

Speaker 7 (37:46):
You know, he was a tenor and Patrick had a
beautiful voice, a very really clear voice, and they traveled
all over the country and they did it for years.

Speaker 3 (37:55):
They did it for years.

Speaker 15 (37:58):
This really Roman Folars and that hasn't been our name
all the time. And we had a contest in the
seminary where we come up with some names that we
thought were kind of meaningful, that it kind of said
what we were all about. But second prize was the
Groove in Gurus, and the name that I really wanted

(38:21):
was called the Expectant Fathers.

Speaker 16 (38:29):
That's the wop their singing group and this group of
nuns who had a singing group sang at Carnegie Hall,
and Patrick had a solo where he sings, I.

Speaker 7 (38:40):
Believe in One God or something like that, and you
can hear him and it was his proudest moment that
he's sang at Carnegie Hall.

Speaker 12 (38:47):
I believe in One God.

Speaker 4 (38:51):
You know, he wouldn't have been viewed as, oh, there's
somebody who is a rebel or wants to get away
or anything like that, but he would position himself to
be able to do that in a way that I
don't think was very common.

Speaker 1 (39:06):
Patrick had found a furtive way to keep his thumb
on the pulse while his seminary superiors contended with keeping
the tumult of the nineteen sixties away from the door.
But they would, of course fail That Philco Television in
the common room quickly became a portal for the boys,
through which they watched in awe as a relentless decade

(39:28):
of incredible world events transpired outside their seminary walls to
starting on June third, nineteen sixty three, when Pope John
the twenty third, the peasant Pope who had dared to
reboot a musty hierarchy, died of a cancer he'd kept secret. Then,

(39:53):
the following Tuesday in Sagone, as the Vatican deliberated a
successor to Pope John, a Buddhist monk named Tik Kwang
Douk sat down in the middle of an intersection. Two
young fellow monks poured gasoline and jet fuel over the
elderly man, and then he dropped a match into his lap.

(40:14):
Vietnamese President No Dindem, a Catholic mystic installed by the CIA,
had been mercilessly cracking down on the Buddhists. Tik Kwangduk
had immolated himself in protest of this violent oppression. A
photograph of the immolation ran on the front page of
newspapers around the world. When President Kennedy saw the picture

(40:36):
in the Oval Office, he yelled Jesus Christ and immediately
ordered a review of his Vietnam policy. For Patrick, seeing
that photo, as a young seminarian, I can only imagine
his first thought might have been, this man was a
member of the clergy just like me, and in this job,
the world may drive me to lengths I'm not yet

(40:59):
prepared for. Ten days after that, on June twenty first,
nineteen sixty three, the boys were once again herded into
the common room because Paul the sixth would now be
their pope. From the scuttle butt on the seminary faculty,
the boys gathered this new pope was a conservative and
would immediately begin rolling back all the exciting progress the

(41:22):
institution had taken.

Speaker 6 (41:23):
One they did until they every heel and mounting should.

Speaker 1 (41:28):
Be made a lot of the reply. Two months later,
on August twenty eighth, nineteen sixty three, the young Seminarians
gathered once again to watch the Reverend doctor Martin Luther
King give his eye have a dream speech. It was
there Jim would later write that he learned there were
two types of preachers, those who tell you what you
already know, and those who tell you things you'd never

(41:50):
heard before. Just three months after that, on November twenty second,
nineteen sixty three, President John F. Kennan was assassinated in Dallas.

Speaker 13 (42:03):
Kennedy died at one pm Central Standard time.

Speaker 1 (42:09):
Patrick rode to his sister Joanne, he sure represented a
real guy in my mind, kind of like a symbol
of American youth. His death simply gagged me, and I'm
going to miss him in a personal sort of way.
I can't figure it out. Three question marks. With both
John's gone. Whatever birth of inspiration that led the boys

(42:31):
into the seminary was now harder to find. Life was
getting very serious and feeling very grown up. Summer nineteen
sixty four, in the Gulf of Tonkin, off the coast

(42:53):
of Vietnam, some North Vietnamese patrol boats played basically what
amounts it to a game of chicken with a US destroyer,
and this was all the Hawks in the Johnson administration
needed to pounce on the opportunity for a winnable symbolic
fight against communism.

Speaker 9 (43:08):
Viewed hostile actions have today required me to order the
military forces of the United States to take action and.

Speaker 1 (43:17):
Reply, leading to the official opening of the Vietnam conflict, at.

Speaker 2 (43:21):
Which point Patrick and I are still in the seminary,
wet behind the ears. Jim naive about many things, including
the war in Vietnam not resisting at all.

Speaker 1 (43:32):
Yet Throughout the fall of nineteen sixty four, tensions grew
in Indo China. People who voted for Johnson thought he
could get the Vietnam situation under control.

Speaker 2 (43:42):
The election in nineteen sixty four, Lyndon Johnson, the peace candidate,
had just been elected. We thought that the resolution had
just taken place. But in February of nineteen sixty five, Johnson,
newly inaugurated for his own term as president, launched the
war in Vietnam effect with a campaign called Operation Rolling Thunder.

Speaker 1 (44:03):
A bombing campaign of North Vietnam that was intended to
last eight weeks, but that went on for three years.
Many many people would later describe Rolling Thunder as the
germ of their personal radicalization. Then one week into the
bombing campaign, on March ninth, nineteen sixty five, Johnson authorized napalm,

(44:28):
a combination of gasoline and melted styrofoam, which created a sticky,
flammable jelly that burst from the bombs and tortured anyone
it landed on. Napalm burns hotter and longer than gasoline alone,
and is particularly effective as what the military calls an
anti personnel weapon. In their common room, watching the first

(44:51):
televised war, napalm was probably a big problem for Patrick,
Floyd and Jim. The American bishops, led by card Spellman
of New York, the de facto most powerful Catholic authority
in the United States, had already come out in favor
of the war, but with napalm, it quickly became clear

(45:12):
that over in Vietnam, because of Rolling Thunder, this shit
was sticking to children and burning them alive. And for
the boys, it was probably really hard not to think
maybe perhaps the Church was wrong on this one, and
in Patrick's brain, the first molecule of descent beat to life.

(45:44):
In November of nineteen sixty five, Americans began setting themselves
on fire.

Speaker 2 (45:50):
Roger Lapourte Jim, who was a young Catholic worker in
New York. He set himself aflame and he said to
a bystander, as he was about to be immolated, Catholic worker,
I did this as a religious act, and then he died.

Speaker 1 (46:04):
Roger Laporte was twenty two years old when he brought
a can of gasoline to the United Nations Building, sat
in the lotus position just like Tik Kwong Duk, and
set himself on fire. The uproar was immediate.

Speaker 6 (46:18):
Now those of us who were involved in the anti
Wah movement, Howard Zinn became conscious of these Americans who
immolated themselves. They would sacrished their lives in order to
bring to the attention of the American people that we
were burning people in Vietnam. You know, while some people
might have said, oh, well, this was a feutile gesture,

(46:40):
or this was silly or wrong, or criticism made of
people who did this, and yet they had a profound
effect on many people. They had a profound effect well
on Daniel Berrigan.

Speaker 1 (46:54):
Dan Berrigan was a forty four year old Jesuit priest
in New York known at a time for his poetry.
Berregan was invited to officiate Roger Laport's memorial service, and
doing so caused an uproar. Here he is speaking about
it on democracy now.

Speaker 15 (47:11):
And in the course of it, I cast doubt upon
the judgment of the cardinal that there had been suicide.

Speaker 1 (47:17):
Roger Laporte's self immolation would thrust Dan Berigan into the
center of the anti war movement. Patrick was in the
seminary starting to hear about this rebel priest thumbing his
nose at the most powerful cardinal in the United States.

Speaker 15 (47:31):
And there was panic in the authorities of the Archdiocese
of New York.

Speaker 1 (47:36):
And in my order, it must have been like watching
a fearless classmate talk back to a terrifying Vice Principal.

Speaker 2 (47:41):
Daniel Bergan refused to condemn it, and he prayed at
Roger Laporte's funeral service, which was enough to get Cardinal
Spelman enraged at him, and Cardinal Spelman pressured the Jesuits
to send Berggin into exile. That made Berrigan famous.

Speaker 1 (48:00):
With Berrigan and other young priests on one side and
Cardinal Spelman and the rest of the pro war American
bishops on the other, Patrick saw the church splitting in
half over this war.

Speaker 6 (48:10):
Their actions influenced people to think about the war and
then to join the anti war movement.

Speaker 1 (48:18):
One thing was clear. All over the world people were burning.

Speaker 2 (48:26):
By November of that year, an anti war movement is beginning,
just in its first phase.

Speaker 1 (48:31):
With their ordination around the corner, the boys felt themselves
on a collision course with the world they no longer understood.
By October of nineteen sixty seven, as the Church was
tearing itself in half over the war, Patrick, Floyd and
Jim had begun to radicalize and land decisively on the

(48:52):
Daniel Berrigan side of the argument that lone beeping molecule
of descent had started to flourish.

Speaker 8 (49:01):
They were of the time. They happened to be in seminary,
but they were deeply.

Speaker 7 (49:05):
Of the time, and they had this extraordinary vehicle of
the church to actually manifest what they were wanting.

Speaker 3 (49:16):
To do in the world.

Speaker 8 (49:17):
It was pretty extraordinary.

Speaker 1 (49:18):
Paul the sixth would eventually encapsulate perfectly this feeling the
boys were having with his famous exhortation, if you want peace,
work for justice.

Speaker 7 (49:29):
I guess they really did think of themselves as real
change agents. And I think even before they got ordained,
they were already starting to understand the role that they
could play, and they were starting to chomp at the bit.

Speaker 8 (49:42):
And they knew that they were.

Speaker 7 (49:44):
Coming into their own and coming into being priests at
a time, a time like no other time, certainly like
no other time in the church. They could step in
in terms of their own leadership and have a phenomenal impact.

Speaker 8 (49:58):
And I think they knew that.

Speaker 1 (50:01):
On October third of sixty seven, Sergeant Shrever, the brother
in law of JFK and Bobby, went to see Patrick
perform with the Roman Callers on the Berkeley campus. On stage,
Patrick gave a speech about the word love, and the
next day Shriver quoted Patrick directly.

Speaker 17 (50:18):
Of course, the trouble with the word love is that
people use it for all the wrong things.

Speaker 1 (50:23):
What you're hearing is archival footage from the Sergeant Shriver
Peace Institute. This is Sergeant Shriver's voice speaking at Berkeley
after the Roman Caller's concert, quoting Patrick.

Speaker 17 (50:34):
Pat said, the people over thirty years of age took
a great word love and turned it ugly. They used
it for dogs and toothpaste, and cigarettes and coffee and
tennis and cars and lipstick.

Speaker 1 (50:46):
Kill. Love lost its meaning for Patrick, hearing his words
come out of the mouth of a Kennedy in law
and watching their effect on the audience must have been
absolutely transformational.

Speaker 17 (50:59):
Buddy went on to say, they have yet to contaminate service.
It's so contradictory to what they hold to be important.
Service has no money in it. Service is so slavey,
Service is so degrading. Service will never get you anywhere.
Can service support a family? Can it buy a car?

(51:24):
But service is the most noble of words, he said,
because its meaning has not been destroyed.

Speaker 1 (51:31):
After hearing Sergeant Schreiber recite his words to a crowd
at Berkeley, the fuse that had been lit inside of
Patrick now detonated something inside of him, turning him into
a wild haired priest ready to take on the world.

Speaker 17 (51:49):
It is.

Speaker 9 (51:51):
I shall not see and I will not accept denomination
of my party.

Speaker 1 (51:55):
For March thirty first, nineteen sixty eight, Johnson announced he
would not seek re election. Four days later, the Reverend
doctor Martin Luther King, Junior was assassinated in Memphis Good Evening.

Speaker 9 (52:12):
The Reverend doctor Martin.

Speaker 15 (52:13):
Luther King, twenty minutes ago died.

Speaker 17 (52:17):
Martin Luther King was shot in and was killed tonight
and remembered.

Speaker 1 (52:25):
Two months after that, on June fifth, nineteen sixty eight, Patrick,
Floyd and Jim were made deacons, the last step before
becoming priests. Soon they would be seen as authority figures
in a world that was coming up heart at the seams,
where once again a clergyman had died for his beliefs.

(52:48):
That night, Bobby Kennedy was shot dead in Los Angeles.
His last words were, it is everybody all right? Is
everybody all right?

Speaker 17 (53:05):
You know?

Speaker 2 (53:06):
Nineteen sixty eight happened to death of doctor.

Speaker 7 (53:09):
King and the assassination of doctor King was assassinated, He
was assassinated.

Speaker 8 (53:14):
It was it was just yellmen. He just couldn't take
it all in heartbreaking and dark and scary, and that
year was one thing after another.

Speaker 3 (53:24):
Of horrifying event.

Speaker 1 (53:41):
One night, Patrick found himself alone in the seminary garden
and decided to allow doubt with a capital D to
flood his system.

Speaker 8 (53:50):
He didn't know if he should really make the commitment.

Speaker 3 (53:52):
He didn't know if he could do it.

Speaker 8 (53:54):
I mean, just was so huge.

Speaker 7 (53:55):
He couldn't believe he could really make this kind of
commitment to celibacy, to the life, to the whole thing.

Speaker 1 (54:02):
His ordination was coming up in February, and it suddenly
started to feel like the edge of a terrifying cliff.

Speaker 7 (54:08):
He was sitting in the garden there and like really
sort of pleading with God that he needed a sign
or something because he couldn't make the decision. And he said,
honest to God, as soon as he sort of said
that pleading prayer, every light in the place goes on on.

Speaker 1 (54:32):
With such an unmistakable sign from the man upstairs. Patrick
could plunge headlong into a life.

Speaker 8 (54:37):
Of the cloth and come to find out somebody had
leaned against a switch that flipped on the lights that
lit the hole outside.

Speaker 1 (54:48):
Or maybe it wasn't a sign, but he took the
plunge anyway.

Speaker 7 (54:53):
He decided to make the commitment and to do it.

Speaker 1 (55:00):
And finally, on February twenty third, nineteen sixty nine, Patrick, Floyd,
and Jim were ordained into the Congregation of Saint Paul.

Speaker 4 (55:15):
So off to New York.

Speaker 1 (55:16):
We went to Floyd.

Speaker 4 (55:17):
You know, you signed a certain seat and you're called up.

Speaker 1 (55:22):
All the soon to be priests lay on their stomachs
with their arms outstretched.

Speaker 3 (55:26):
I remember being there.

Speaker 1 (55:28):
Patrick's sister Joanne, and.

Speaker 3 (55:30):
I remember the solemnity of it. It seemed so huge,
that something so big was happening.

Speaker 4 (55:40):
And we're called one by one, and the Bishop puts
his hands on our heads.

Speaker 3 (55:46):
Like the sense of the ancient Church's history, all the
blessings that could ever come to a person get ministered
to the one to be receiving the ordination.

Speaker 4 (56:00):
And says certain prescribed prayers which ordains this.

Speaker 1 (56:11):
It was snowing outside Saint Paul the Apostles Church, two
blocks from Columbus Circle in New York City. Inside, laying
face down on the floor, Patrick had no way of
knowing what the future held. He had no idea he
would be sent to the Polist Center in downtown Boston
with a mandate from the Order to make change, only

(56:31):
to find a building full of old priests who in
fact hated change. All he knew was that the bishop
was about to place his hands on Patrick's head and
turn him into a Roman Catholic priest.

Speaker 3 (56:54):
When the hands of the Bishop are laid on Patrick,
it was just as if all of the history of
the Church and everything descends, and there is this palpable
feeling of presence that this is what is coming to bear,
that this is the line that he has entered into

(57:15):
this line that went all the way back to well,
I suppose Jesus Christ. It's very powerful and it was
so very serious, and he took it, absorbed it. He
just had that feeling like he became that witch, he

(57:44):
that which he worked for, you know, aimed for.

Speaker 18 (57:49):
And really thought he was unworthy. And then it was
so empowering because then he absorbed it and became that,
you know, and I think it just accentuated the power
of who he was already, So it made him stronger

(58:12):
and deepened his courage. I was thinking of his courage
this week because he seemed to have so much courage,
just the sailing alone, just going out, depending on your
ability to capture the wind.

Speaker 1 (58:45):
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 Unwavering producers Our Carmen
Borca Korea, Abby Delk Palomo Moreno, Jimenez, Grace Lynch, and myself.

(59:05):
Our editor is the Unstoppable Grace Lynch for Wonder Media Network.
Our executive producers are Emily Rudder and Jenny Kaplan for
iHeart podcasts. Our executive producer is Christina Everett for Dwight
Street Book Club. Our executive producer is Rolin Jones. Vocal
arrangements and special performance of Silent Night by the brilliant
Morris Miley, Kai Fukuda and friends. Thanks to the Sergeant

(59:28):
Schrever Peace Institute for their collaboration. Our theme and end
credit music was composed and performed by the glorious Tanya Donnelly.
It was mastered by Ben Errens. This is Brendan Patrick Hughes.
Thank you for listening to Divine Intervention.