An American Requiem

by James Carroll

  William Sloane Coffin, the Yale chaplain, himself a former CIA man and a former defendant in a famous draft resistance case, stood in our midst. In a fit of anger, he denounced the politicians. Business as usual was killing people! On the swell of his own passion, Coffin declared that we were not going to leave the Capitol until funds for the war were cut off. We all spontaneously assented. "If J. Edgar Hoover can spend the night in the U.S. Capitol," Coffin said, "why can't we?" And that is how it happened that I was sitting on the floor of the rotunda when, after closing hours, the police came for us. It consoled me to find myself in the same paddy wagon with Killian and Kessler. But when a fourth turned out to be Dr. Benjamin Spock, I began to think I was dreaming. Hoover dead? Dr. Spock arrested? Soon enough, it seemed a nightmare.

  The D.C. cops were vicious. Those demonstrators who remained limp were carried up and down stairs at a backwards slanting angle so that their heads banged against the steps. Our fingers were bent out of joint by fingerprint technicians. We were roughly pushed into the D.C. lockup, a hellhole in the bowels of the courthouse on Pennsylvania Avenue. Other prisoners hooted and cursed as we were brought in.

  The stench of disinfectant combined with sewage choked me. There was no air. It seemed like an oven. I was locked in a stinking two-man cell with another demonstrator. In the center of the cramped space was an unflushable metal toilet brimming with urine and feces, which had spilled onto the floor. Bolted to the wall were two narrow steel shelves, mattressless bunks. There was nothing to do but lie there and read the graffiti that covered every surface, trying to block out the fearful noises. I prayed to go to sleep, but never did.

  By the middle of the night, my spirits had begun a free fall. Whatever sense of liberation I had felt on first joining the peace movement had long since evaporated. All the organizing and marching had come to seem futile as the war dragged on and on. Anarchy and nihilism seemed to mark not only the government but the movement too. And the Catholic wing of it was proving to be no more trustworthy than the SDS. The Berrigans, for example, had been staunch defenders of the way of life to which I'd given myself, making a special point of the new relevance of our vows, especially celibacy, which in an age of sexual exploitation marked us as the true radicals. So imagine the betrayal I'd felt at the recent news that Philip Berrigan and Elizabeth McAlister had secretly "married each other" at some point in the past. My heroes had been getting it on all this time, and what a fool that made me! It is impossible to describe fully the preciousness of the fragile bond we vowed celibates had shared, or the devastation we felt as, one by one, we saw it break. More and more of the priests I admired, and whose steadfast commitment was crucial if our vision of the new Church was to be realized, were leaving the priesthood. Literally thousands had resigned since I had become a priest, including some of the brightest lights of the Paulist Fathers. A joke of the time told of the note pinned to the rectory bulletin board: "Will the last one out please extinguish the sanctuary lamp."

  It was far from a joke to me when Patrick Hughes took me to dinner one night at Jacob Wirth in Boston to tell me he was going to marry Marianne Murray. I knew her mainly as one of the Camden 28 supporters. She would become one of my dearest friends, the godmother of my first child, but at the time the news of Patrick's decision fell on me like a wall. No way was I saying "Go Patrick!" now. I had followed him out onto the thin ice of this crazy life, and he was leaving me here, like an old Eskimo. I was pissed off and hurt. Hadn't we made a deal with each other to stick it out? Weren't our challenges to the old ways promises to bring the new ones to completion? Hadn't we told each other that if we quit, the reforms of the Church, for one thing, would never take effect? And haven't events shown that intuition to have been the truth?

  It was as if, that night in jail, I saw into the future, saw the coming collapse of the liberal Catholic impulse, the very thing I was trying to build a life around. But all around me, men were saying it wasn't worth it. Men I needed. And men I loved. It was as if I saw how Vietnam too would scar us all forever, how the dream of a new just, "great" society was falling in slow motion on a sword. In the D.C. lockup, the unclothed despair that I'd been fending off assaulted me like one of the sadistic guards. This was merely a single miserable night in the hoosegow, not the years' worth of prison that Dan and Phil and dozens of others were having to survive. Yet I fell into a pit of angst and fear that was also the old pit of my self-loathing.

  Then, from the next cell, in the absolute middle of the night, in response perhaps to the sounds of a demonstrator's weeping, William Sloane Coffin began to sing. He had a rich baritone voice and a Protestant's command of music—although his father-in-law was the Jewish maestro Arthur Rubinstein. Gradually I began to listen to what he was singing. "Comfort ye, comfort ye, my people." It was a plaintive prayer set to the most familiar music ever to come from Dublin. "I know that my redeemer liveth...," Coffin sang. And finally, bringing us all to our feet in our minds, "Hallelujah! For the Lord God omnipotent ... shall reign for ever and ever. King of Kings, and Lord of Lords, Hallelujah."

  Coffin was an epiphany of manliness, courage, and faith to me. I will never forget what his singing of passages from Handel's Messiah in that cellblock meant and did for me. He seemed to sing for hours. Some of the other inmates up and down the corridor joined in. Soon I was singing too. As those old words of the faith rolled over and out of me, I knew that I believed them to be true. My redeemer liveth, which meant I was where I was supposed to be. I was doing what I was supposed to be doing. Here I am, Lord. Send me.

  When I got out of jail the next day, I was about to head back to Boston, but then I thought of Hoover, how his death would have saddened my parents. I called home. My mother answered. There was no question of lying to her, but neither had I any need to tell her what had brought me to town. I wanted only to connect. I said I was passing through.

  She answered coldly, "We know what you're doing here."

  "You do?"

  "Your father is hurt this time. This time you've hurt him."

  "Let me talk to him."

  My mother went away from the phone, then came back. "He doesn't want to talk to you."

  "I'll call from Boston."

  "He doesn't want to talk to you again!" The pitch of her voice shot up. "I won't let you do this to him. Do you hear me? I won't permit it. Not you too."

  In her tone I heard the fury of a warrior woman. Not my man, you don't! You don't do this to him! Those others might, but not you! Not you! Not to mine!

  "Do you hear me?" she asked.

  "Yes, ma'am."

  "You've disgraced your father. He says he doesn't want to talk to you again, and I don't blame him."

  "Can't he tell me himself, Mom?"

  "No," she answered sharply. "He can't."

  And that was that. I wrote a poem at the time that ends with these lines:

  I said to the general's son, "Get the hell

  out of my chair!" And he said to me,

  "You're lucky, war being what it is,

  all you lost is your Dad."

  But by some miracle—no, that's wrong. By her doing, the war didn't cost me my mother. There were six men in her life. She loved us all. Her omnidirectional anger was proof of it. She loved her draft-dodger son and her FBI-agent son. She loved Kevin and Joe. She loved her husband. And she loved her son who'd become a thin-soup radical priest.

  My father had built a life out of his response to her steadfast will. I found a way to salvage my life because, for all the ways I disappointed her, she continued, when she wasn't furious at me and perhaps because she could be, to convey her belief in me. I think now that I kept believing in myself because she did. Once when I was visiting home, while Daniel Berrigan was still underground, a fugitive, he was referred to on the evening news. Yet another Scarlet Pimpernel appearance, tweaking her beloved FBI. She turned to me and said, "I wish he'd come here."

  Thinking of her old fondness for Hoover, her loyalty to Brian, I blurted b
itterly, "So you could turn him in?"

  An amused expression came into her face, and she said softly, "No, to hide him. They'd never look for him here. He'd be safe with me."

  I was too surprised to speak. She explained herself by saying simply, "He's a priest, Jimmy. Isn't he a priest?"

  And there it was. The primordial value. The family touchstone. The soul of who we were to each other. My mother had spent the best energy of her life embracing a particular American ideal. Daniel Berrigan held it in contempt. But isn't he a priest? And aren't I?

  I loved being a priest. The experience I'd had with a grief-struck Allen Tate foreshadowed the form my ministry would take—an effort to redeem the cruel myopia of the Counter-Reformation Church. My job was to accompany people on their versions of the journey I was taking. At Boston University, my main function as a priest was to discover and offer new images of what belief in Jesus Christ entailed. What happened to the little chapel I inherited there was the perfect symbol of my progression.

  St. Jerome's Chapel occupied the first floor of a large old Back Bay mansion next door to Newman House. The building had been the residence of Cardinal O'Connell, Cardinal Cushing's predecessor. And the chapel, when I became its priest in 1969, reflected a rigid old view of the Church worthy of such a provenance. A rank of wooden pews offered seating for perhaps a hundred and fifty, a meager capacity considering that a third of BU's twenty thousand students were Catholics. But size didn't matter. The chapel looked more fit for an order of cloistered nuns than sixties college students. There were grim Stations of the Cross, dull smoked-glass windows at one end, and at the other a formal altar raised on a small pyramid of stairs. The pyramid was one sticking point, and the altar was another—symbols of the two main notes that the theology of the Vatican Council had rejected. The Church was not to be thought of as a mass of people at the bottom, a few cardinals near the top, capped by His Holiness the Pope. The Church was not a pyramid but a people, the people of God. And its main activity was not a sacrifice on an altar but a meal at a table. A table symbolizes fellowship, hospitality, and equality, which is why Jesus put tables at the center of his ministry and why, in its liturgical reforms, the Church had embraced it.

  I took one look around St. Jerome's and thought, Here is where we start. In that first year, the pews went, and so did the altar, and so did the smoky glass. Students did the heavy work with me. Artists among them created new symbols for us: a beautiful mural instead of Stations, a modern set of stained-glass windows that reflected views of the street outside, hand-thrown pottery for the Eucharist. We put down a bright red carpet on which we could sit in a big circle until it was time to stand around the simple oak table a student had built. There was a rotation of banners, a riot of bright cushions, all made by the kids. By the time we celebrated the new St. Jerome's, we'd become a new people. After that, I could not go into the little place, whether for our Saturday midnight Masses or for my stolen hours of solitary prayer, without feeling the lift of my heart.

  Students entrusted themselves to me there. In one corner was a confessional, twin booths for penitent and priest. The new theology encouraged a move away from the impersonal encounter in such dark corners and toward, for example, face-to-face meetings in an office. I made myself available in both ways, but some of the most moving moments of my priesthood occurred when people talked to me anonymously. Despite seven years of seminary, I was in no way prepared for the shock of having strangers place their complete trust in me, not because I was James Carroll, would-be poet, would-be prophet, general's son, hip young campus minister, but only because I was a priest. In the confessional, hearing stories of struggle, suffering, self-doubt, and despair; sensing that the very act of my listening was a consolation and that the sacred Word I spoke was healing—I remembered the words of Lacordaire that had once defined my dearest hope: "What a life! And it is yours, O priest of Jesus Christ!"

  What I did best, and loved doing most, was relate the simple Gospel stories that repeated over and over again the one thing I'd been ordained to preach and the one thing my students needed to hear—that no matter who we are or what we do, God loves us. The more I said it to them, the closer I came to believing it myself. But in truth that faith continually eluded me.

  My room at the Paulist Center on Beacon Hill looked out over Boston Common. Late one night I was awakened by sirens and the monster engines of fire trucks gunning up the hill. Then the noise passed, and I rolled over and went back to sleep. Almost immediately my phone rang. It was someone from BU, calling to tell me that St. Jerome's was on fire, along with the rest of the building, which housed archdiocesan offices. My caller told me that the huge building was engulfed in flames, which were visible all over the city. I went to the window, and sure enough the sky was glowing.

  Minutes later I was there, standing across the street, numb. I saw the figures of two firefighters silhouetted against the sky, the men balanced on a blazing ledge high above, the building collapsing around them. First one, then the other plunged willingly into the fire—to die, I was certain, although they did not. I remember an overwhelming sense of awe and gratitude that strangers would do such a thing for me.

  Their efforts kept the fire contained, but our building burned to the ground. Evidence of gasoline and rags was later found in the ruins, a case of arson, never solved. The same night, someone took a crowbar to the door of my office in the adjacent building, but was unable to get in. I asked the arson investigator if it could have been firefighters, but they'd never entered that building. Colleagues of mine later attributed the intrusion, and the arson, to Nixon's "plumbers," which, if I could have believed it, might have given that profoundly absurd experience some meaning. As I stood there that night, I did not explicitly see a metaphor for what was happening everywhere around me, but unconsciously, the burning of that chapel—symbol of all I'd brought to the priesthood and all I wanted from it—was surely decisive in my facing up to the truth of my situation. The vision of the new Church that I had first glimpsed in Pope John XXIII and in the writings of Hans Küng was already being repudiated right and left. Pope John was long dead, and Pope Paul VI was in the grip of a savage Catholic neurosis about sex. Küng, soon enough, would himself be officially repudiated, like everyone who agreed with him. To be a priest in the post-Humanae Vitae Catholic Church was to have such contradictions at the center of one's life. And notwithstanding the buckets of rhetoric about our priestly fraternity, none of which remotely addressed the hidden pain of ordinary men, to be a priest was also—here was what I could deny less and less—to live that contradicted life alone.

  My brother Dennis decided to come in from the cold of his own contradicted life. He returned to the United States, and came at once to see me in Boston. He had learned that, after his refusal to report for induction, his draft board had referred his case to the U.S. attorney. But because of the backlog of such cases, he had yet to be formally indicted. He had returned to America prepared to go to jail, but I encouraged the impulse he also had to apply for conscientious-objector status. He had refused to do that in the first place because, at the time, one could do so only by appealing to religious convictions, narrowly defined. Dennis would not pretend to be religious. To him, the war was wrong whether God existed or not.

  Such restricted notions of "religious" had now loosened somewhat. I knew there were precedents for an appeal to "mere" ethical conviction as a basis for conscientious objection. If his application was rejected, he intended again to refuse to serve. This time he would go to jail. Without revealing his whereabouts, he contacted the Selective Service. He was told to report for a hearing in Washington, and advised to come accompanied by an attorney. An appeals board would decide whether to seek an indictment; if no indictment was called for, the board would reorder his induction or recommend him for CO status.

  Meanwhile, I used my contacts to find a lawyer. That was when Dennis stunned me. He had not been in direct communication with our parents in nearly two years, yet
he said that he intended to ask Dad to be his lawyer.

  "You can't do that," I said. "Dad would never help you, and it would only be cruel to ask him." As it was cruel, I might have added, of Dad to ask me to offer a blessing at Hoover's dinner.

  "He went to law school," Dennis said. "He was admitted to the bar. He's a lawyer."

  "He's also ashamed of you. Believe me, I know. He hates what you've done."

  Dennis shrugged, not answering with the question that hung above us both: But does he hate me?

  I remember how angry I became at Dennis. His plan struck me as passive-aggressive, almost sadistic, guaranteed to escalate the insult and bad feelings between him and Dad. I knew so little. I have referred to my father in the period after his retirement as an almost entirely broken man. I used the word "almost" because something vital and courageous and large-hearted had remained intact in him. He drew on it in response to Dennis, agreeing to represent him before the appeals board.

  He took the project very seriously. He studied the law and then met with Dennis, to advise him as he prepared his own statement. When the day of the Selective Service hearing arrived, Dad appeared wearing his uniform, one of the few times he did so in retirement. His three stars matched those of General Lewis Hershey, the infamous long-time Selective Service director. When Dad and Dennis entered the hearing room, the board members were seated on the far side of a long table. Our father introduced Dennis, but the chairman, struck by the uniform, wanted only to hear from the general. He asked Dennis to step outside. Dad looked at Dennis, then said, "My son has a statement to make."