The newspapers the next day made much of the fact that at the very moment Michael Maguire was confronting the army general in front of twelve thousand people, the FBI was searching for him in New York rectories. As of noon that day he had become a fugitive priest.
It was a powerful myth for Catholics of the old school. The priest on the run, the outlaw celebrant, the Jesuit with a price on his head. Fugitive priests had founded the Church in the Catacombs while Caesar's legions hunted them. Fugitive priests had kept the last flicker of the true faith alive in Elizabethan England while the queen's men stalked them. They hid in priest-holes, in secret rooms behind fireplaces. They went about disguised as lawyers or teachers, and the people revered them. Their legends grew even while they lived, and when at last they were caught and martyred, the Church remembered them as saints. They were Thomas, James and Peter, Edmund Campion, Robert Southwell and John Fisher. There were fugitive priests in Ireland and then, in our own time, in Europe under the Nazis, in China under Communists, and in Latin America under military regimes. As children my generation of Catholics read comic books about them, and articles in Our Sunday Visitor. We celebrated their feast days and prayed to grow up with their courage and their willingness to risk everything for God. We sang how sweet 'twould be if we "like them could die for Thee." Now there was a priest-fugitive in our own country, hounded not by Caesar or the queen, Hitler, Stalin, Mao or some generalissimo, but by that other company of our heroes, the FBI.
Michael taunted them. Within a week of having "gone underground" he began the dramatic series of surprise appearances at rallies and in churches, making speeches, preaching sermons, and giving interviews, stealthily, to reporters. A network of dozens of people from Washington to Boston sprang up to help him, to hide him, to arrange his meetings with students and with antiwar and church groups. Brave strangers drove him from one rendezvous to another.
Carolyn and I were not among that network and neither were his other close friends. For the most part, during his months underground, we did not know where he was. Obviously we were being watched and our phones were surely tapped. Michael was in the hands, mainly, of Jewish professors, ironically, and that was why he succeeded beyond anyone's expectation. The FBI, lumpishly, concentrated on us Catholics.
Still, we heard stories about him. Not many days would pass without some report from that unlikely outlaw subculture about his latest escapade. There we were, sophisticated academics, journalists and professionals all up and down the East Coast, but we were like kids with ears to the radio. Gangbusters! The FBI in Peace and War! The Shadow! In the snatches of what we heard we knew that a legend was being made. A legend, unbelievably, for the likes of us.
In Washington in late January there was a meeting of top leaders from around the country of CALC, Clergy and Laity Concerned About Vietnam. About seventy of them, men and women of various denominations, gathered to coordinate plans for the upcoming campaign to lobby congressmen to cut off funds for the war. They were meeting in the basement auditorium of a Baptist church in Northeast Washington, not far, ironically, from Catholic University where Michael had done his training. At the start of their morning session the chairman melodramatically promised the group that before the meeting adjourned that day they would be hearing from, as he put it, "the priest-prophet of the peace movement." No one at that meeting had to have it spelled out that that meant Michael Maguire, and the anticipation that even those hard-boiled activists felt at the prospect of his coming was a distraction of the first order all day.
Sure enough, late in the day, after their workshops and small group meetings, the people reassembled in the auditorium. Word had spread to other local clergy and activists. Even seminarians from Catholic U. showed up, filling the corridors and stairwells outside the basement hall. The uninvited overflow were ushered into the unheated church upstairs, and soon even it was full. There the people stared at an empty sanctuary, the cold air showing the vapor of their breath, and they listened closely to the proceedings downstairs through the squawky sound system. The CALC meeting had turned into an ad-hoc rally. A folksinger led choruses of "Blowin' in the Wind" and "If I Had a Hammer." A black poet in Muslim dress read verses that asked questions of the Vietnamese. (Do you not curse us in your sleeping and your waking?) A gospel choir sang three rousing numbers. A minister from Indian Territory in South Dakota spoke feelingly about the old American custom of genocide. And then silence fell over both groups, down and up, as the CALC chairman took the podium.
No sooner had he introduced Michael than Michael's voice, cutting short the applause, filled the auditorium and the church with heartfelt exhortations addressed expressly to the organizers. "CALC exists to save lives!"
No sooner had his speech begun than half a dozen men, some bearded and wearing fringe-leather jackets and some clean-shaven, dark-suited, looking like clerics, left the pews of the upper church hurriedly. They dashed down the stairs to the auditorium and burst into it, with guns drawn, crying, "Freeze! FBI!" Their FBI colleagues who had infiltrated the auditorium ahead of them looked sheepishly back from their chairs. Those agents hadn't moved because they knew the truth, that Father Maguire's ringing antiwar speech, which had not stopped or slowed or broken cadence despite the interruption, was even then being delivered by a large, reel-to-reel tape machine balanced precariously and quite visibly on the otherwise vacant podium.
Another time Michael appeared at a so-called Celebration of Resistance at the University of Connecticut at Storrs, a typical college town in the farming area north of Hartford. The weekend festival, with music, speeches, "political theater," slide-shows and movies, was held in the huge university fieldhouse. The place was packed for the Saturday night rally because Jane Fonda was appearing. That Father Michael Maguire unexpectedly joined her was like Mick Jagger showing up at a Janis Joplin concert. Fonda embraced the renegade priest chastely when he walked onto the stage. When she turned then and introduced him to the crowd, most of whom had recognized him and were already cheering, the seven widely scattered, overweight and nervous campus policemen got orders from their chief through their walkie-talkies to converge on the platform and arrest him. Students saw the cops moving and spontaneously, good-naturedly, spilled into the aisles, slowing them. Michael spoke only for a moment—"Resistance, yes! Violence, no!"—and then disappeared backstage. Fie made good his escape inside one of the giant puppet heads of the mime troupe that had preceded Jane Fonda on the evening's program. The papier-mâché head that enabled him to slip by the police was, in fact, a dreary, gray monster, the writhing face of death.
Between these dramatic, much-discussed appearances, Michael shuttled from place to place driven by strangers, people whose names he made a point not to know. In the cities, his movements and contacts were orchestrated by a handful of organizers, four or five at the most, whose identities I never knew. Obviously, given his success, they were people Michael had reason to trust. The longer he was at large—and it had never occurred to them in the beginning that he would elude capture for so many months—the more smoothly the network functioned. He hid out in little attic rooms or apartments over garages. His attitude toward the strangers who harbored him was one of utter trust, a kind of abandon, although he refused to stay with families with young children, who would not understand why their parents and a priest would break the law. He did not go out in daylight even when he was in small towns that seemed far removed from the controversies of the day. Mostly he was sheltered in the nicer suburbs where lived the professors, ministers, rabbis, psychiatrists and social workers his hosts tended to be: Newton outside Boston, Columbia near Baltimore, Summit, New Jersey, Media outside Philadelphia. He avoided New York, where he was so well known, and places like New Haven, Cambridge and Princeton, which the FBI were sure to stake out. Though he was on the platform often with antiwar celebrities, he never hid out with them. And he had nothing whatever to do with the anarchistic underground of the SDS and its spin-off groups of crazies. Instead he lost hims
elf among an anonymous mass of average, essentially moderate people. They were no "underground" at all, but had simply come to hate the war passionately and now welcomed Michael, despite the risks, as a way of turning up the volume on their "no" to it. In the evenings, Michael habitually encouraged his hosts to have friends over so they could talk. Just being exposed to him in such informal settings, knowing that that huge posse of Hoover's agents was outside looking for him, realizing what risks he was taking and most of all experiencing up close his compelling, single-minded but strangely relaxed and self-accepting dedication was enough to change people in fundamental ways. It was commonly said by men and women who met him in such circumstances—I heard this second and third hand often—that for the first time since they'd turned against the war they believed they could make a difference to it, they could help stop it. Michael Maguire, by example, by manner, by what he said and especially by how he lived, was shattering the paralysis of doubt, futility and frustration people felt. When they asked him, as they always did, "But what can we do?" he would smile, raise his shoulders and say, "You've already broken the law by being here with me. You are in resistance now. So keep resisting." An act of disobedience had freed him once so that when the opportunity came to strike a real blow against the war he could take it. Now he had become himself the occasion of disobedience for others, and many of those, in fact, found it to be as freeing for action as he had. He left a trail of recruits to the antiwar movement behind him, men and women who would give it their best energy for years.
Ironically, because of him, some of those liberals found themselves reconsidering their attitudes toward that most reactionary of impulses, belief, and that most conservative of institutions, the Church. For whatever else Michael was during that time, he was never more a priest. Perhaps only the unchurched who did not take such things for granted could fully appreciate that the driving force of his resistance was his spirituality. Those who were sensitive to it were moved, and those who weren't still knew that this man had depths they couldn't touch. He was rarely with religious people, and so mostly he prayed by himself. Prayer, the hagiographers would say, became his one steadfast companion.
In the interviews he gave and in his short talks in that variety of settings he hammered away at what My Lai revealed. The story of that massacre and the subsequent army cover-up that was exposed that winter gave him his theme and made his message accessible to a broad public. Not even staunch supporters of the war were unaffected by the news of My Lai. Even military men professed repugnance. Sennett himself was eventually censured, reduced in rank and stripped of his DSM. Horror at the war spread to average people, and Father Michael Maguire gave voice to it. His hit-and-run appearances were widely covered in the media, though not with universal approbation. Editorials blasted him regularly, but the average journalists who wrote the news stories about him hardly disguised how enthralled they were. A surprisingly large segment of viewers and readers followed the dramatic unfolding of his defiance with sympathy. Groups, including apolitical and patriotic ones, began passing resolutions of support for the fugitive priest. Vestries and parish councils began inviting him to their churches to preach. At times organizers of antiwar rallies deliberately began rumors that Michael was coming as a way of drawing television coverage for their demonstrations, and that made it seem as if he was capable of a kind of omnipresence; Father Maguire, more than once, was reported to have been in Washington and Boston on the same night. Hadn't he become like Superman?
Cardinal Cooke steadfastly refused all comment about the notorious priest, although a Vatican spokesman in Rome said the pope was praying for him. Reports from Stockholm had it that he was a candidate for the Nobel Peace Prize (which had yet to be given to Henry Kissinger). It was a period when the sixties ended and the seventies began, and though Michael Maguire's defiance seemed to embody a massive national repudiation of the war, the brutal bombing of the North was resumed in those months and plans were laid for the invasion of Cambodia. We had no idea how utterly immune from influence, moral or political, the warmakers always were.
In January, despite its own condescension toward him, the New York Times Sunday Magazine ran a long, dramatic interview with Michael. The reporter described having been searched, blindfolded, and driven in successive cars to a farmhouse well outside of New York City. It was like Breathless, Bonnie and Clyde or Easy Rider, only this criminal was no psychopath, no weirdo, no loser, but, in the reporter's estimate, an accomplished, intelligent, admirable man. In February his picture appeared on the cover of Time and the accompanying article was entitled "Wanted and Needed." If his appeal among Catholics grew out of the myth of the fugitive priest, his appeal to the people as a whole—it seemed eventually that the entire country was rooting for him—grew out of the classic American romance with the decent outlaw—Who was that masked man?—who challenges the crooked sheriff not for his own ends but for the town's.
The door bell rang. Carolyn looked up sharply from her book.
I looked at the clock. It was nearly midnight, a Saturday in February. The house was utterly still. Molly was asleep in her room at last. A school friend was sleeping over and they had drawn out the goodnights endlessly. Carolyn and I had each made trips to silence giggles.
I waited for the bell to ring again. It didn't. Finally I put my own book aside, took my glasses off, and stood. Carolyn stayed where she was.
I opened the door. No one was there. When I stepped out onto the stoop to look down the street I think I half-expected someone to jump on me. No one did. I went back into the house and shut the door. On the floor below the mail slot was a piece of paper the size of a business card. I might have missed seeing it. I picked it up, but was afraid to read it, as if the FBI could see through wood. I went into the living room. The curtains were drawn, as they always were that winter. By Carolyn's lamp I squinted at the piece of paper. "Come to the eleven o'clock at Saint John the Divine," it said, and nothing more. No signature, no peace sign, no Chi-Rho. But the handwriting was as familiar to me as my own. I let Carolyn read it. We did not exchange a word. Then I dropped the note onto the embers in the fireplace and watched it flame.
We left the house the next morning at eight-thirty and spent an hour and a half riding various subway trains, hopping on and off at the last minute the way Cary Grant and Audrey Hepburn would have. We came up at Times Square, caught a taxi to Columbus Circle, walked to the Paulist church, went in one door and out another, and caught another taxi to Saint John's. We arrived feeling exhausted and nervous at ten minutes before eleven.
The organ was playing softly, far from full out, but the tones filled the vast church. On the wooden chairs and needlepointed cushions—not pews with kneelers, the Catholic notes—several dozen people sat and knelt. But in that space dozens counted for nothing. Others arrived as we did, shaking their heavy coats open and walking with a certain timidity into the overwhelming Gothic nave. The mammoth piers, curving stone pillars rising one hundred feet in a single, stark leap, dwarfed everything human. It took an act of intellect to recall that those columns themselves were made by men too; the sacred space itself was human. I watched the other arriving worshippers, hoping they would make the cathedral seem less empty. They were older and well, but not flashily, dressed. The men wore their hair slick and the women wore hats. Except for an occasional young person wearing blue jeans and an angelic expression, the gathering congregation seemed like establishment Episcopalians, as one might have expected. Of course, establishment Episcopalians by then, led by their outspoken Bishop Paul Moore and theologians like Pike and Stringfellow, were resolutely against the war. Still, that the pulpit of this cathedral might be offered to Michael Maguire, the fugitive priest, amazed me. As I walked well to the front of the center aisle, clutching Carolyn's arm, my anxiety, like the architecture, soared. We took our places. I knelt at once and tried to pray. My mind was whirling along, and in the end, like a schoolboy, I mumbled my Hail Mary and sat.
At the appointed t
ime a blast from the trumpets behind us reverberated the full length of the cathedral. As we rose, I held a hymnal for Carolyn, but neither of us sang. We turned to watch the ranks of choir, clergy and attendants enter. How sparse the congregation seemed! There may have been several hundred, but they seemed a paltry number and the strains of their singing were lost in the vaulted shadows. Still the procession was impressive, with boys carrying medieval banners ahead of the choir. The paired singers passed pompously, and then came the candle-bearers, the crucifer and thurifer whose incense pot spewed forth a pungent, billowing cloud through which strode the subdeacon, deacon and presiding priest. The smoke stung my eyes. There was no sign of Michael.
The last time Carolyn had attended a Solemn High Mass had been at Michael's ordination in Saint Patrick's a decade before. Such liturgy, with chanted prayers, the Gregorian music, the incense, the hierarchy of officiants—as opposed to concelebrants—in old-fashioned fiddleback vestments, was rarely seen in post-Council Catholicism. It seemed strange to think of it as a Protestant service, since it was more familiar to me, and more beautiful, than anything I'd seen in a Catholic church in years.
It was the first Sunday of Lent and there was no Gloria. After singing the Kyrie, the choir sat and the Scriptures were read by lectors. And then the celebrant, identified by the program as the dean of the cathedral, the Reverend Thomas Reid Evans, mounted the elaborately carved white marble pulpit. Father Evans was a huge man—he had to be in that space—and his head was crowned dramatically with white hair, though he did not impress as old. He wore spectacles, but took them off with a flourish as he began to speak.
"For reasons that will be obvious to you in a moment, it was not possible for me to consult in advance with either the liturgical committee or the standing committee of the board of trustees, and for the sake of limiting possible legal jeopardy, I decided not to consult with the bishop but used my own discretion—my sole discretion—as the pastor of this community to invite into our pulpit this morning, on this first Sunday of the Penitential Season, a priest of the Church who has restored to us in all its power the commission priests receive from the Lord Himself to go forth into the world preaching the Gospel of Peace."
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