1 00:53:22,000 --> 00:53:22,560 Speaker 1: You know, it was just as likely that Jesus would have been stoned, as crucified, when he was put to death. But if he had, instead of Catholics crossing ourselves,we’d be punching ourselves in the head. In the 60s, the great Lenny Bruce had a joke about this where he said that if Jesus had been put to death twenty years ago all the parochial school children would be wearing little electric chairs around their necks. See, that’s the thing about being Catholic: everything feels so personal. They have to make jewelry and gestures out of the way jesus was excruciatingly put to death, so that they’re never far from a feeling of, well, “jesus christ.” And it’s been a while since I was Catholic. But it makes you feel all alone against the world. Which makes it feel like every moral and ethical dragon must be slain by every individual on their own. Irish Catholics especially, are a fiercely moral bunch. But everyone is so idiosyncratic about it. I mean, beyond the ten commandments, everyone just decides right and wrong for themselves. Which means you sometimes end up confusing the sacred for the profane and vice versa. The people in this story were trying to be Catholics at a time when the church itself was at its most uncertain. And so they all needed to find their own true north in deeply chaotic times. Anne Walsh was the combat-booted nun that mastermind the Paul Couming Sanctuary idea. But, like Patrick, she didn’t start out a flaming radical hellbent on justice, improvising dangerously with her life and those of the people she loved. . She started out a good little Catholic conformist, having absolutely no confusion about what was sacred and what was profane. Anne Walsh My back porch looked right over into the church. It just seemed like a beautiful place, like a, a sweet place and a true place. I used to spend a lot of my time with the nuns in the sacristy, you know, arranging flowers and putting candles and candle sticks and polishing brass. Before she was marching and shouting, before she was routinely breaking the law, Anne Walsh was contemplating a life with the Sisters of Saint Joseph in Boston. Anne Walsh It's something I can remember always wanting to do from the time I was in elementary school. It seemed like such a fabulously powerful thing for me to do. Just like Patrick, Floyd, and Jim discovered at the seminary, that they could either be in this world to participate in their vocation, or vice versa, Anne came in knowing she was here to participate in the world. Anne Walsh I graduated from high school in 61, and that was the year that JFK gave his inaugural speech. It was definitely our time. I felt it was mine and ours, people of my generation. And so Vatican two went right along with that. I fell completely into that. You know, I wanted to be admired by my family, by my community, and I wanted to do good. Like I'm a, I was born to do gooder. But this born do-gooder was striving to be better than merely good. Anne Walsh Good enough is to get married or not get married, but the best is to be a contemplative of nun. And to, to never talk again, to to live on rutabagas and stuff like that. That's like the best. So it wasn't like wealth or money or career or anything like that, that was interesting to me. It was really to serve God. In the seminary, the boys were trained in church leadership, since statistically, one of them, might end up the pope. In the convent, on the other hand, ancient church doctrine demanded that women be trained… somewhat differently. Anne Walsh You dressed up like a bride, day one. To become a canonical novice. You get married to Jesus in a wedding ceremony. Wearing a wedding dress. Anne Walsh You just promised vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience for the first time. You've just declared yourself after nine months there, you've just declared, this is really what I want. You are 19 years old. You don't even fucking know what you want. The next ritual she underwent was one Anne could describe in vivid detail over fifty years later. Anne Walsh Day two, they came with electric razors...to shave our heads. It's traumatic. It was just trauma. When it happened to me, it was such an assault. It was, the only thing I can say is akin to rape. Somebody started screaming, the least likely person started screaming and beat the novice away from her, and left then and there with her long hair. She would have none of it. And she was like such a pious, she was like a role model. And she was the one that said, this is sick….They send the novices to shave your head and then you're stuck. You couldn't go anywhere. 'cause where would you go bald? At this point it dawned on Anne and her sisters, that their lives as postulants, and as canonical novices would be very... tightly... controlled. Anne Walsh Like as a... power and control thing. How something that doesn't involve like a gun or somebody stalking you, but just somebody with ideology is trying to capture you. You've promised, and you can go back on your word…if you wanna be a schmuck. With a bunch of electric razors. The church had lit a fuse inside of Anne... Anne Walsh We were the beginning of the end, that revolt. ...and her sisters. Anne Walsh That was the radicalizing moment. I think if they didn't do that, we wouldn't have been radicals. They were supposed to keep their hair shaved. Anne Walsh And my friends and I wouldn't. They even established a code phrase for people growing their hair back. Anne Walsh The joke was, do you play the violin? Which was, do you have long hair? That was my like code with people. Anne and her sisters knew that for them, change wasn't going to come from the inside. They were going to have to go outside the church to be heard. I’m Brendan Patrick Hughes and this is Divine Intervention. Chapter 3. The Nun in Combat Boots. It's not that Anne didn't want to make change from the inside. She was trying to become a nun for christ's sake. But she ran up against a little sticky wicket called....clericalism. ANNE WALSH ...clericalism. Clericalism is that special feeling you get when the parish priest is eating corn on the cob at your dining room table. So you of course make sure he gets the biggest ear of corn. And after a priest spends long enough in this privileged position,he naturally begins to feel like he deserves the biggest ear of corn. Clericalism is that inflated prestige of priestly power that can corrupt everyone around it. Not just the priest. It’s the blur you see when you flip the two-sided coin of “I’m certain because I’m right,” and “I’m right because I’m certain.” And growing up, Anne came up against this notion of clericalism most often in the weekly ritual of penance that Catholics call “confession.” Okay, confession. We have to stop for a second. Let me speak directly to my agnostic listeners. I don’t know about you, but I am pretty hard on myself about all of my awkward and embarrassing moments. I still feel embarrassed about things that happened 10 years ago. I feel embarrassed about things that happened with people who are dead now, The only other eye witness has been eliminated…but I’m still embarrassed about them. I could really use some sort of mechanism to burn off all this white heat. Now imagine if there were some sort of external moral/ethical authority that you could appeal to every week and get forgiven for things. Every Saturday afternoon, you go sit in a box and tell some guy “I made it weird at a party.” Then it’s out of your system. You go get forgiven for this week’s faux pas the way you go get a gallon of milk. You don’t just keep accumulating more and more of these moments until you literally can’t be left alone with yourself. How sick would that be? But... it bears mentioning... due to the whole clericalism issue I was just talking about, there are also some strong caveats. For instance, when the organization offering this service is inherently patriarchal, and you — like Anne —are biologically disqualified from said patriarchal power structure, and let’s say you happen to be in a time of budding sexual confusion, you are expected to address these concerns to a member of the opposite sex who not only is celibate, and middle aged, but is also fucking positive he’s right about everything... Confession might not then be as cathartic as it was intended. Anne grew up as confused as anyone about various thoughts and impulses she was having, and struggled mightily with the pressure to tell some old guy about it. ANNE WALSH You are being told in school that it's a mortal sin. And if you don't confess it, it's like a, a stream of logs and they get clogged up. And then you're fucked for eternity. Say, unfortunately, you die. You get hit by a car. Too bad. Hell for you girl. You know what I mean. I understand it now. Like that's why, like I am critical about clericalism. It's so fucked up. Like I wanted to go to everybody saying, do you know how fucked up this is . Do you have any idea? So through confession, clericalism might have a way of installing shame like malware. And for Anne, it was another reason to start looking at the patriarchy through squinted eyes. The Church counted on the power of tradition, but it hadn’t counted on a class of sisters that would demand to be in their vocations to participate in the world. Nor did it realize there were already a few free thinkers on the faculty. ANNE WALSH Because Vatican two was being broadcast from Harvard Divinity School. And we got to listen to it on the radio on Sunday nights. I thought it was a drag to have to do that. You know, I was 18 years old and I'm listening to stuff from the Vatican, which was not something I related to. Didn't like thrill me like new shoes would, you know? No, um, but my teachers who were relatively young and they were very progressive, they were the ones that decoded what Vatican II meant to me. Just as the boys had learned that Vatican II meant they were called upon to lead the church into a new era, Anne felt destined to be a new kind of nun. ANNE WALSH So we were raised as progressive nuns who were gonna change the priorities of the order. Like to think about the second World War and the silence of the Catholic church during the slaughter of the Jews. So I said, oh, wow. It's now not the slaughter of the Jews so much as its Black people in America. There was so much she wanted to do. ANNE WALSH Nuns and priests in that same little arc of time were marching and doing voter registration in Selma and Montgomery and desegregating beaches, lunch counters. That's where I wanted to be. And there was one progressive teacher at the convent who to Anne was the shiniest penny: Bob Cunnane, who you may remember from the last episode was the priest who was at John XXIII’s coronation ANNE WALSH Bob had been the confessor at our convent when we were training. And we all loved him 'cause he was so fun, you know, and easygoing. She might have even had a little bit of a crush. ANNE WALSH He was someone that I felt was completely out of my league. You know, he was that kind of a hero among my friends… All my friends knew that Bob was, you know, Bob the brave. Bob was deeply political,and very active in just the way that Anne so desperately wanted to be. Vietnam — and the nightmare of facing another war — was just beginning to enter the consciousness of young radicals like Bob and Anne’s other teachers at the convent. By January of 1965 216 young American men had already been killed in the war.. But the American Bishops, led by Cardinal Spellman of the New York Archdiocese, were massive supporters of the nascent war effort, and were communicating to people like Anne, if you are Catholic, you support what America is doing in Indochina. So Given how personally Catholics tend to take everything, it was inevitable that concerned clergy-people would begin to gather and whisper in groups against the directives of the establishment.. After the church’s silence in the face of the holocaust, this generation of young Catholics would be damned if they were going to let another atrocity roll by on their watch. And soon enough, genuine rumblings of a bonafide Catholic Peace movement began to be heard... In early sixty-five, as Johnson launched Rolling Thunder and authorized napalm, he also dramatically increased the Vietnam draft to start shipping off 35,000 young boys every month. That August, young men began torching their draft cards. By Christmas of 65, more than 6,000 young American men had now been killed in Vietnam. Then for Christmas, Cardinal Spellman, in his role as US Military vicar for the Roman Catholic Church, visited the troops in Vietnam on a highly publicized junket. According to Jim Carroll’s books, he handed out packs of cigarettes with his own face on them, which became known as Holy Smokes. He said that the war in Vietnam was a war for civilization. He called the communists, “godless goons,” and had the unmitigated gall to utter the famous phrase, “my country, right or wrong.” And here’s the psychotic thing, unbeknownst to Bob and Anne and other young Catholic radicals at the time, Cardinal Spellman was instrumental in starting the war in Vietnam. Back in the 50s, the CIA had installed Spellman’s close personal friend to be an American puppet dictator in South Vietnam. And that guy, who himself was a bizarre Catholic mystic, had gone squirrely, and began believing he ruled by divine right. Remember the monk that set himself on fire? That was to protest Cardinal Spellman’s friend who was cracking down on Buddhists, because “God told him to.” Spellman’s friend, Ngo Dinh Diem, made such a mess of things that an American war with the Communist forces in the north became inevitable. JIM CARROLL And that's the beginning mistake in Vietnam. Jim Carroll JIM CARROLL In the fever of American anti-communism in the 1950s, that grotesque mistake was made. Instead of celebrating the end of colonialism in Vietnam, we continued it. We became the new colonial power. In DC power circles, because Spellman had brought his friend around when US intelligence was looking for a puppet dictator, the Vietnam war was often called “Spelly’s War.” So when Cardinal Spellman said “my country right or wrong,” he was the wrong he was talking about! But Bob and Anne didn't know this. Yet. What young radical Catholics could see in 1965 was that the warmongers were winning. And If they didn’t do anything about it, this war would destroy their entire generation. But most initial protest wasn’t working, so they were banging their heads against the wall, becoming increasingly convinced that the traditionally non-violent route was fruitless against this increasingly terrifying juggernaut of a war. They needed some sort of non-traditional, in your face, loud statement against the war, something the grinders of the war machine could actually fucking hear. Could SMELL. And then... this zany thing happened in Minnesota. One day, a young man named Barry Bondhus received a telltale envelope in the mail that he knew was his draft notice. Barry’s father headed immediately to the local draft board during the next public hearing… and pleaded to the local Selective Service board members that he was worried about the draft because he had 12 sons. One board member was a World War Two veteran who’d been injured in battle and didn’t understand why everyone else shouldn’t serve as well. “You got 12 sons,” the veteran shot back, “Well, where are the rest of them?” This made Barry's father so angry, he stormed out of the hearing and formed a plan with his sons. All twelve Bondis boys then spent the next few days defecating in a bucket in their bathroom. Then Barry — the one who had received the draft notice — brought the bucket into the draft board office and plopped it onto the counter saying, “here are the rest of my brothers. What do you want me to do with them?” To which the secretary on duty said, “I have no idea what you're talking about.” And Barry said, “Oh! you have no idea what I'm talking about, then I'll just put 'em over here!” And he marched past her and threw open some drawers and started dumping the feces all over the draft files. He eventually served eighteen months for destruction of government property, but had no regrets. Barry Bondis’ action made headlines across the country and caught the attention of activists as the first attack on a draft board. And this incident became known as the “movement that started the movement.” But By October of 1967, over 16,000 American kids had been killed in Vietnam. For the resistance, if there were to be a successful one, it was go time. PHIL BERRIGAN we had tried a variety of things, and they were all fruitless. One of those young Catholic activists that was banging his head against the wall was Phil Berrigan. Phil Berrigan was a seminary brother of Bob Cunnane and the younger brother of Dan Berrigan. During World War II, Phil was drafted into combat duty and served in artillery during the Battle of the Bulge. By October of 67,Phil Berrigan had long since radicalized. Barry Bondhus’ movement that started the movement was one of the events that inspired Phil Berrigan to change tactics. PHIL BERRIGAN So we thought that we ought to move from dissent to resistance, and we ought to, uh, focus on, uh, selective service. In order to have the biggest impact on the escalating war, Phil and his compatriots made the fateful decision to attack the draft boards themselves. To build a dam at the mouth of the river that was sweeping away so many poor young men into the nightmare of war. It was clear to them, the only way to make any difference, was to start breaking the law. They decided that four men would enter the Draft Board office in Baltimore's Customs House, pour their blood on the draft files and then wait to be arrested. CHARLES MECONIS So the notion of doing something ritualistic and symbolic, what's it gonna do to the war? You go pour blood on a, one office worth of files, you know, not much. But you make that statement. This is Charles Meconis. Charles is a historian who was also a member of the movement. Meconis wrote his dissertation on the Catholic left, an invaluable document in my research. So at first, Phil Berrigan and his co-conspirators tried to draw their own blood. CHARLES MECONIS They ran into a problem trying to draw blood. You know, I mean, if you screw it up and you inject an air bubble into a vein, that could be all she wrote So after a couple of clumsy attempts, they went to a Polish market. They bought ducks blood, and funneled it into four Mr. Clean bottles. And then they were ready… October 27th, 1967, Baltimore, Maryland, Charm City. These four men arrived at the Customs House doors just as an armed guard had wandered away. They walked in to the draft board office and asked if they could see their personal files. As soon as the secretary went to the filing cabinets they knew where the draft files were.They marched around the counter, seized the drawers, and dumped the contents of their Mr. Clean bottles, on every file they could, shocking the clerks. Then, one of the raiders handed out copies of the bible, to make a point about the war and what this office was doing, and he was immediately bonked on the head with it. After that, their action was complete. And there was an awkward pause ... ...as they just stood there, not making a break for it. The clerks staring at them, the raiders staring back. The four men then waited for over an hour—with hands and scattered files covered In blood—for the cops to come and take them into custody. CHARLES MECONIS They notified the media. So this wasn't just a pure act of personal co commitment. They wanted it to have a, a broader, uh, impetus. Suddenly, this flourishing Catholic Peace movement was upshifting from dissent to resistance. During the trial of the Baltimore Four, the judge barred testimony and witnesses not directly related to the incident itself, and prevented the defendants from using the context of the warin their defense. But nonetheless, during the trial,there was a crucial revelation. During a cross examination, after the colonel in charge of the Baltimore draft board had complained about the files being destroyed a defense attorney asked him why he couldn’t just use duplicate copies. To which the Colonel replied, “There are no duplicates.” ANNE WALSH & BOB CUNNANE Should probably explain to young people that once the draft file was destroyed, it was gone. It was gone pre before computers was computer days, right? BOB CUNNANE The draft boards ran on a shoestring. Bob Cunnane and Anne Walsh. ANNE WALSH It was before technology. It was before computers. So that was it. These guys couldn't be sent to Vietnam to fight this war. You disabled the machine. So this seemed like, oh wow, you can really disrupt this. This revelation would change everything. The Baltimore Four were convicted on April 16th, 1968, and a sentencing date was set for five weeks later. Martin Luther King had been assassinated during the last weeks of the trial. And after MLK’s death protests erupted in Black neighborhoods across the country. For Anne and her sisters at Saint Joseph Convent, who were now teaching in parochial schools, this was a time of great anguish. ANNE WALSH We were all forbidden to leave the convent. There was a march on Boston Common in honor of MLK. ANNE WALSH Nuns who were teaching African American kids were censured for going with their schoolchildren. Being a part of this struggle was what Anne had gone there to do. She was inspired by Bob Cunnane, she was inspired by the Baltimore Four, this was all very personal to her, and she was being made to watch from the safety of her classroom. Then, when one of Anne’s sisters got expelled from the order by the Mother Superior —for walking one of her students home when the child’s neighborhood was in open rebellion — this was the last straw. ANNE WALSH It was, it was wrong. It was shortsighted. But they would say, holy obedience. And that certainly pushed me closer to leaving Anne and her sisters several years into their vows began to grapple with leaving the order behind. A small group of them began meeting at a Catholic lecture series led by a Paulist Center priest and secretly plotting their escape. ANNE WALSH Well, I don't wanna defy, I don't wanna disrespect anybody. 'cause I really loved the people in the community. I felt like they had done wonderful things for me, but I also didn't want to give up my time in life. You know, you've got to be at the lunch counters. You've got to be in the protest on behalf of the Vietnamese people, and you gotta keep on going. It's a way of life. It's not okay. You'll fix the Vietnam War and then you go back to life as it is. Yeah, yeah. You know, it's movement as a way of life. She was starting to get a sense that this war, which had now claimed over 27,000 young American lives,was getting hungrier, and it was time to act. ANNE WALSH Well, I left the order in mid-June of 68. She was just shy of her final vows. ANNE WALSH I stayed seven years. So, on the eighth year I would've made final vows. Her class of sisters, so traumatized by the head shaving, so radicalized by their progressive teachers and Vatican Two, so galvanized into action by the death of MLK, walked out of their order en masse. ANNE WALSH We decided to leave as a group. So by the end of it, seven of us left. And then three joined us almost immediately to form a radical group. They were going to create their own quasi-order of renegade nuns. ANNE WALSH We ended up in St. Leo's in Dorchester. And they found a radical priest to take them in. ANNE WALSH he had led the St. Patrick's Day parade with the sign in Celtic that said, we shall overcome. And with a Black minister beside him. Anne and her renegade sisters told their new radical priest landlord that they needed a headquarters so they could begin to organize for peace. ANNE WALSH We went to mass there every morning and then had breakfast with the priest there. And anything that we wanted to do, he was like all for it. PAUL COUMING Three of them ended up living in the two family home that I lived in. They call themselves the Bread Community. That’s Paul Couming, the one who would eventually need Sanctuary at the Paulist Center. When Anne and her renegade sisters moved into the rectory at St. Leo’s, Paul was nineteen, and living with his parents nearby. He took a shine to these curious former nuns, and began to hang around. As for Anne— By day she worked for a publishing company, but any other time, she was — ANNE WALSH Demonstrating against the war and against racism…It all came like a big wave. Meanwhile, Phil Berrigan, of the Baltimore Four, was, at this same time, determined to pull off another draft board raid before his sentencing date. Now that they knew the draft files had no duplicates they realized that every draft file they stole was another life saved. And this movement would need some momentum once he was in prison. So First, he recruited his reluctant brother Dan, the famous poet. Dan had initially been circumspect about his brother’s bold action in Baltimore, as it pushed the boundaries of non-violence DAN BERRIGAN And then there was horror upon horror, Martin Luther King's murder and so on. But MLK’s assassination had changed his mind. DAN BERRIGAN Suddenly I saw that my sweet skin was hiding out behind others. And for that matter, the war was heating up. That month, April of nineteen sixty-eight, the US government drafted 48,000 young men. One in three would be killed. The Berrigan brothers felt the gravity of this situation, and knew they needed some fireworks. So for their next action, instead of blood, they would use napalm. CHARLES MECONIS ... this time, instead of blood. They do, they do fire. Same, same thing. Historian Charles Meconis. CHARLES MECONIS You know, the fire is an ancient symbol in religious rituals. You know, that's how you do sacrifices. The Berrigan brothers gathered nine volunteers and chose the wealthy suburb of Catonsville, Marylan for their next action. At 12:30 PM on May 17, 1968, these nine Catholics entered the draft board in the Knights of Columbus building carrying wire baskets. ARCHIVAL Mrs. Murphy, will you tell us about the day when the Catonsville nine came? ARCHIVAL Well, it was a gorgeous day, beautiful day. Mrs. Murphy was finishing her lunch with two other coworkers, when she heard footsteps coming up the stairs, and a few young men stood in the doorway. ARCHIVAL And I said to him, may I help you, sir? Then she recognizedPhil Berrigan from the newspapers. ARCHIVAL As soon as I looked in his face, I thought, “Oh, my, the Lord, something's gonna happen.” The nine catholics, who would become infamously known as the Catonsville nine, started scooping up draft files into their baskets. ARCHIVAL and I think they were just as terrified as we were in a way They started down the steps but Mrs. Murphy intervened. ARCHIVAL Well, I took a hold of the wire basket and I pulled and tugged and tried to get away from 'em while they were two very large men. They continued outside. ARCHIVAL And they had manufactured some of this napalm that they had made themselves. And of course, they set these, uh, records on fire. In the parking lot, at the scene of the burning files, Dan then made a statement to the gathered reporters. HOLY OUTLAW We regret very much, uh, I think all of us, the inconvenience and even the suffering that we brought to these clerks here, it was done so quickly, and we had hoped that they wouldn't be so excitable over a few files. It's very hard to bring home to people exactly what they're doing by being custodians of such files. The nine Catholics then joined hands, said the Our Father, and waited for the police. HOLY OUTLAW We make our prayer in the name of that God whose name is peace and decency, and unity and love. Amen. Then they were all carted off to jail. There were huge demonstrations in Baltimore during the trial of the Catonsville Nine. And they were convicted, of course, because that was the whole idea. HOLY OUTLAW So with eight other felons…I went into a draft board in Catonsville in May of that year, removed about 300 draft files and burned them with homemade napalm under the utterly absurd and totally un-American assumption that it is better to burn papers than children. When the jury read the verdict, a man in the gallery stood up and shouted, “Members of the jury, you've just found Jesus Christ guilty!” The Catonsville 9 quickly had the desired effect. CHARLES MECONIS And, and of course, Catonsville became a, an incredible cause celebre. Charles Meconis. CHARLES MECONIS And I think if there was one thing Daniel Berrigan lent to the movement in particular, it was in modern terms, this is gonna sound bad, but he was a superb propagandist for the movement. They got more mileage outta that one action than, you know, you could imagine. But as Dan and Phil Berrigan became more and more famous, they risked tying the movement to themselves, and not allowing it to take on a life of its own. CHARLES MECONIS Dan and Phil believed that the most important action was the next one. Because they weren't involved. They were tied up in the legal system. By 1968 he rate of young American men dying was escalating. Fast. And over 350,000 Vietnamese people had been killed. At this point, Bob Cunnane knew, on a personal level, that after Catonsville, it was time for him to enter the resistance. BOB CUNNANE You know, I was always scared to death of it all. 'cause I knew it was changing me drastically, and I didn't know if I wanted to go that far, you know? Mm-Hmm. as I said, you know, when you went in become a priest, you almost thought, this is my life. That's it. 95 I'll die. And everybody would be around praying, and that would be it. And then all of a sudden things were changing fast. And the whole idea that I had above my life, security of it was by the by. He attended a retreat in New Jersey for people interested, as his seminary brother Phil Berrigan would often say, in “doing something serious.” Sixty people were there and of those, fourteen people, including Bob, came forward for the next raid. The group of fourteen identified the Brumder building in Milwaukee, where all of the city’s draft records were housed. In one fell swoop, they could end the draft in an entire American city. As they cased the Brumder building over the next few weeks, they decided to go in after hours when only the maintenance staff would be there, cleaning offices. BOB CUNNANE In Milwaukee alls we had to do was take the key from the cleaning lady, They role played getting the keys off of the cleaning lady, and decided this would best be left the two most mild mannered members of the group. And then... on September 24th, 1968, they gathered in an apartment on the south side of Milwaukee and held an impromptu liturgy before the action. Bringing a sense of the sacred to the profane thing they were about to do brought some measure of comfort to them in their fear, and perhaps made it clear, that the line between sacred and profane, can become very blurry when you’re changing the world for the better. The fourteen set out on foot for the Brumder building. They successfully talked the keys off the cleaning woman they found inside. Bob Cunnane: She kind of protested, but she gave it to us. And one of the men stayed with her the rest of the time they were there just trying to comfort her. They had choreographed and rehearsed their moves down to the second. They went to work, stuffing over ten thousand draft files of would-be inductees into burlap sacks. But then suddenly, another cleaning woman was standing in the doorway and shouting at them. They had to physically restrain her, which they all spoke later of with regret. That altercation abruptly cut short the action. So they carried the bags they had outside, leaping and shouting and singing. They brought the files across the street to a little triangular pocket park, dumped them on the ground, threw napalm on them, and dropped a match. BOB CUNNANE Oh, scared the hell outta me. I'll tell you. Woo. The kid got it from the military manual…How to Make Napalm The Milwaukee action happening without the Berrigan brothers meant that suddenly this kind of drastic action could happen anywhere and be pulled off by anyone. CHARLES MECONIS So the Milwaukee 14 action, in some ways is really where it became a movement, not just the organizing skills of a couple of radical priests. Now, with the Milwaukee 14 waiting to be arrested, young Catholic radicals had a bonafide movement on their hands. Back in Dorchester, Anne could not believe what she was seeing in the papers. Her father confessor — and longtime crush — Bob Cunanne in national headlines. ANNE WALSH You know, this is how local a girl I am, that, y’know, his name would be on petitions in the, you know, big American liberal magazines. It’d be Daniel Berrigan, Philip Berrigan, and Bob Cunnane. So Anne, and her renegade sisters, jumped in head first. ANNE WALSH So we got involved in the Milwaukee 14 Defense Committee. PAUL COUMING I've heard of the Milwaukee 14 being, the three of the priests were from Boston, As Paul Couming got to know the women in the Bread Community, he started becoming intrigued by the burgeoning Catholic resistance. And Paul and Anne made their way out to Wisconsin for the big trial of The Milwaukee 14. Paul Couming: I paid for my own airfare and flew out there and flew back just to be there for a couple of days to see what it was like. Since the Milwaukee 14 defendants fully intended on going to prison, just like the Baltimore Four and Catonsville Nine before them, they thought that, this time, if they dismissed their lawyers...they would be much more free to discuss their motivations. But the judge was a particularly ruthless goalie, preventing as much Vietnam context as he could, from entering the record. During the trial, one of the defendants tried to introduce the New Testament as evidence and was overruled. At every turn, these young Catholic radicals were denied the opportunity to properly defend themselves. And if they couldn’t represent themselves as concerned citizens, the law would treat them as criminal vandals. So they brought in the big guns. HOWARD ZINN I testified as a so-called expert witness. Howard mother fucking Zinn. As in, A People’s History of the United States. Howard was friends with Daniel Berrigan and would go on to work with Jim Carrol and Anne Walsh at BU. And when he got to Milwaukee, he planned to bring the entire glorious history of American civil disobedience down on the courtroom. HOWARD ZINN And I was supposed to bring to the jury information about civil disobedience. That civil disobedience is something that these people had committed. They had not committed an just a crime. Civil disobedience was an honorable tradition in American history. And in the case of Milwaukee 14, as when I got up on the witness stand and I began to testify, I started with the Declaration of Independence, which after all, as you might say, a manifesto for civil disobedience. Then I got to the anti-slavery movement, and I started talking about Thoreau and Thoreau's belief in civil disobedience. And as I got to Thoreau, the judge said, hold it. Said, you can't testify anymore. He said, that's getting to the heart of the matter. It was an amazing moment. That's getting to the heart of the matter. I, so I couldn't testify. Paul Couming, watching from the gallery, was furious. PAUL COUMING I spoke out from the audience saying. ANNE WALSH Thank you. You've just crucified Jesus Christ, that would be like, so Paul, kind of corny, but still in all. PAUL COUMING Then the ushers removed me from the courtroom. ANNE WALSH And chaos. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Order in the court. [THEREFORE] THE VERDICT SCENE WAS CRAZY It took the jury an hour and 10 minutes to find the Milwaukee 14 guilty on all counts. CHARLES MECONIS So the Milwaukee 14 and the trial wasn't, was incredible. The judge tried and mostly succeeded in eliminating any real testimony about the war, so that at the very end when they're convicted, that the, the courtroom just exploded. One man in the gallery stood up and said, “If they're guilty, I am too. From this day forward, I'm a draft resister.” The power of seeing priests and ordinary citizens being sent off to jail for committing victimless crimes in the name of justice, was just more than these Milwaukeeans could take. The judge banged his gavel, demanded order, and hollered for more bailiffs, but the crowd broke into “We Shall Overcome” and went limp in the aisles. CHARLES MECONIS This had not happened to this extent where the whole courtroom just kind of blows up at, at a, at a guilty verdict, and the judge is panicked and calls for more cops and, and all that kind of stuff. When he ordered the defendants to stand, one of the fourteen yelled, “judge, you lost your authority, whether you know it or not!” The police finally arrived and dragged limp bodies from the courtroom. And the Milwaukee 14 went off to prison in OshKosh, Wisconsin. BOB CUNNANE We were the first ones to go to jail. . Mm-Hmm. , rah, rah. I always say to people, jail is a nice place to have been from, you know? Mm-Hmm. , I don't particularly would enjoy going back. But it was an education, and I would say a bigger education than most of my schooling. But now... the movement...had entered the octagon. CHARLES MECONIS The fact that that happened in one sense laid the seed for the counteraction. I think Milwaukee is the raid where the powers that be now really started paying attention to the Catholic Left. The war effort only grew. Young men were being chewed up by the thousands. But now, young radicals had something they could do about it. Summer of 69. 42,000 young American men dead or missing in Vietnam. More actions were planned. But now that the movement was becoming thoroughly Catholic, a problem lurked within it. The problem that now came to haunt the movement, the one that would finally drag Anne Walsh to the center of it, was, of all things, clericalism. ANNE WALSH Men really dominated and men used women. And we were terrified to speak about it. And we went along with it 'cause of our own needs to find importance. Priests were at the center of these actions, And women in the movement were finding themselves doing the typing and cooking and airport runs, and were being iced out of planning sessions. But women hold up half the sky... God damn it... Op-eds began appearing in Catholic magazines, saying: It is time for the men to relinquish more of their freedoms and help with the dirty work while we, the women, take on a greater role in changing the society.” Raiding draft boards became the official way for young Catholic Radicals to stand up against the war, and more actions started happening through the United States. But, tensions began to mount among the sexes. Until finally, during the planning of a New York action, infighting began as the women grew impatient with all the jibber-jabber. CHARLES MECONIS But yeah, that it was a schism. There was a larger group that was planning something. Charles Meconis. CHARLES MECONIS And a group of women from that group got frustrated and finally said, that's it. We're doing something. And no men allowed. Five women decided to go splinter off from that New York group and pull off an action in Manhattan, calling themselves Women Against Daddy Warbucks. CHARLES MECONIS Women against Daddy Warbucks went in at night into the draft board in New York, and then surfaced the next day. They would be the ones to change the entire direction of the movement. MAGGIE GEDDES What we attempted to do, um, with the rest of our action was make a connection between the military power that those draft files represent and the corporate expansion overseas in which America is involved and, and which military forces have to protect. This is Maggie Geddes, one of the Women Against Daddy Warbucks speaking only a few days after the action to Radio Free People. MAGGIE GEDDES What we did was destroy most of the 1-A files in most of Manhattan, and seriously obstructed the draft system in Manhattan as a result. Back then, young men of draftable age had different classifications. 4-F was for men who either failed their physical. Or were wealthy enough to get a doctor’s diagnosis for things like bone spurs. 2-C was an agricultural deferment for the sons of farmers. 2-S was a student deferment for rich college kids. And the dreaded one was 1-A. “Available for Military Service.” If you were classified 1-A, you were on borrowed time. So in all these draft board raids, the files they really wanted were the 1-A files, because those were the kids that were about to be dragged into war. The badasses of the Women Against Daddy Warbucks had studied this system closely, and knew exactly where to strike. MAGGIE GEDDES For the, the guys whose files we destroyed. The guys who were 1-A eligible for induction, that means that their inductions legally had to be postponed. They didn't have a complete file. We also destroyed the 102 books, which are large classification books, which have the record of call, and it's illegal to draft someone out of order. They effectively sabotaged these offices so completely, it would take years of legal hassles to sort out the issues and get drafting again. And to make their point crystal clear they brought pliers and yanked out the 1s and As from every typewriter in the office. MAGGIE GEDDES It's really an, an amazing feeling, or it was an amazing feeling that night, rather to be, you know, tearing up people's files and thinking that, that perhaps in some way you were helping to keep a few people from being killed. And then they took it one step further. Women Against Daddy Warbucks were the first to decide they would not stand by and wait to be arrested. Instead, they snuck out and left this note behind saying they would surface the next day, during lunchtime at Rockefeller Plaza. The note read: WOMEN AGAINST DADDY WARBUCKS We interfered with the ability of the 13 uptown Manhattan draft boards to initiate the processing of men into numbers, into killing machines, into corpses. The next day, the Rockefeller Plaza surfacing event quickly turned into a fiasco. MAGGIE GEDDES And we brought the files to the, to the rally in the form of confetti, which we then threw around and scattered all around to our friends and everything. Three hundred people were there during that lunchtime hour, and so was the FBI. They tried to get at the women, who then were protected by their friends and supporters. A melee broke out and four of the women were arrested. Maggie Geddes escaped, and was never found. This decision — to actually avoid arrest — was a turning point for the movement. CHARLES MECONIS That became more and more the standard technique because more and more of our people were going off to jail. You know, you start losing leadership cadre and so then you start thinking, well, we just, we can't, we just can't stand there and wait to get arrested because pretty soon there's gonna be nobody left. This is gonna be the Catholic Nobody Left. When the action was over, the questions Maggie Geddes and her counterparts received were deeply ridiculous. MAGGIE GEDDES Did you really do this? You know, implying women can't do something like this in our society, right. And yeah. Who, who were the men by yourself? You know, who were the men behind you? Yes, we did it. Yes, we're women. Yes, we did it without a guy. You know, all that. For Anne Walsh, who was paying very close attention, the message Women Against Daddy Warbucks was sending felt very personal. ANNE WALSH They were onto Clericalism as a form of male dominance. And, we as women, we're all so eager for approval from men. It was still that paradigm. That's why the Women Against Daddy Warbucks is so important. Anne felt herself at the precipice. Her own father confessor Bob Cunane was serving jail time for the cause. Women like her were taking bold, feminist stances and carving out their own place in the movement. Everyone seemed to be putting themselves on the line. She knew in her heart what she must do next. She had to switch from dissent to resistance. But she struggled. ANNE WALSH Or I felt that it was right and therefore I ought to do it. But I didn't want to do it. I knew it was like a right of passage I had to go through, 'cause I was scared and I was like worried about my family, but I knew I had to do it. In her mind, the biggest obstacle was her own family. ANNE WALSH Somehow I wanted to be simultaneously renowned as like an activist quickly and then completely anonymous because I didn't wanna have to grapple with my family. My father had been a World War I hero at the age of 17, second highest military honor in the country. So that was not to be trifled with. And here I was kind of was like, like dragging the flag in the mud or something. That's how polarized it was then. But then she realized she had already done most of the heavy lifting to become a rebel in a much tougher environment. ANNE WALSH I could let go of old beliefs very easily because I was in the convent. And, I began to see what had gone wrong in the church, how it had calcified. And so it didn't seem like I was ever rebelling. It was that I was, uh, shedding calcification in order to be true to the spirit. And once you did that in the holiest of domains in the church, then you could do it in your own family It was decided. Anne Walsh was going to raid a draft board. Because already 140,000 young men had been drafted that year. Because it appeared the government’s thirst for death was unquenchable. Because this was her time. And she knew she needed to make change from the outside. But, you couldn't just waltz into an action. ANNE WALSH It was like almost histrionic secrecy. And so we had to have people's like imprimatur on it, you know, like we had to have Bob Cunnane vouch that we were fine. Once vetted, she screwed up her courage and headed to the Greyhound Station. ANNE WALSH I went to New York on the bus and then took the subway to the Bronx to a meeting that was talking about doing an action. She took the IRT to the Boogie Down Bronx where the de facto headquarters of the movement was a Resistance Book Distributor facetiously nicknamed Iron Mountain. There she met the people with whom she'd be spending the next few years of her life. ANNE WALSH I felt like that for the most part, people were very smart in this movement. They were very analytical and committed. And brave. Yeah. And funny, I mean, I wouldn't have stayed if it weren't funny. She walked into a room where she found Phil Berrigan and several other people, planning a raid in the boroughs of New York City, and she declared she was ready to do something serious. ANNE WALSH And so we became part of that action. Hundreds of thousands of people were now dead, and, for Catholics like Anne – this war was personal. CREDITS Divine Intervention is a production of iHeartPodcasts, it’s produced by Wonder Media Network and written by me, your host, Brendan Patrick Hughes. Our stalwart producers are Carmen Borca-Carrillo, Abbey Delk, Paloma Moreno Jimenez, Grace Lynch and myself. Our Editor is freight-train of competence, Grace Lynch. For Wonder Media Network, our executive producers are Emily Rudder and Jenny Kaplan. For iHeartPodcasts, our executive producer is Cristina Everett. Our theme and end credit music is composed and performed by the ridiculously brilliant Tanya Donnelly. It was mastered by sonic ninja Ben Arons. This is Brendan Patrick Hughes. Thank you for listening to Divine Intervention.