WEBVTT - Chapter 6: The Sanctuary of Paul Couming 0:54:11.040 --> 0:54:11.560 You know that Paul Simon song Me and Julio Down by the Schoolyard? ARCHIVAL: When the radical priest comes to get me released we was all on the cover of Newsweek... The radical priest? That’s Dan Berrigan. Dan Berrigan never turned himself in after the Catonsville Nine were found guilty, and he’d been on the run for months. ARCHIVAL: Interviewer: Do you expect your life in the underground to be short lived? Documentaries were made. ARCHIVAL: Well, I’m proceeding now on the very open assumption that this thing can go on. Other priests were now regularly wearing handcuffs on the evening news after performing illegal acts to stop the war. Criminal clergy were all the rage. Bob Hope was guest hosting the Tonight Show one night and even delivered the punchline, “they suspected three priests because the ransom note was in Latin.” This was a time that was cuckoo for Coco-puffs. Berrigan would regularly make sudden appearances at churches, and universities And meeting halls. Some of this time was immortalized on film, in the Lee Lockwood film “The Holy Outlaw” ARCHIVAL: We have chosen to be powerless criminals in a time of criminal power. We have chosen to be branded as peace criminals by war criminals. HOWARD ZINN: They were looking for Dan Berrigan. Howard Zinn was helping to coordinate Berrigan’s underground. HOWARD ZINN: And then there's a huge anti-war rally at Cornell University gymnasium jammed with several thousand students. And there's a rumor, rumor that Dan Berrigan is gonna show up and the place is full of FBI agents. The Bread and Puppet Theatre were performing a Passover celebration, and at a certain moment, following Jewish tradition, they open the door for the prophet Elijah. HOWARD ZINN: So they open the door on stage and Dan Berrigan comes. And you see all over the gym, the FBI people scurrying towards the stage, you know, from all over. And then the lights go out. When the lights go up again, he's gone. Berrigan had jumped into one of the giant puppets. HOWARD ZINN: And they'd put him in one of these puppet things and spirited him away to a farm not far from Ithaca, New York. BOB CUNNANE The FBI was all there waiting for him and they're gone. Bob Cunnane. And he made 'em look like fools. It was a bit, uh, it was a bit much maybe, I dunno, but it got Hoover crazy. Dan Berrigan was taunting the Federal B.I. BOB CUNNANE It was a new territory for them. They didn't know what to do. Like Dan Berrigan was in hiding all around our area, you know, while he was wanted by the police. You know, they don't know where to look and the FBI couldn't catch him. And because the FBI said, we're not used to this. He's staying with all middle class people. But Berrigan and his accomplices not being a part of the criminal underworld was sort of a double edged sword... It would not be long before Dan Berrigan made a wrong move. HOWARD ZINN: He was apprehended by the FBI, uh, not due to any clever work on their part, but to, to an informer who had intercepted a letter and discovered that Dan Berrigan was going to Block Island to visit his friends. Howard Zinn. Something that we had warned him against. We said, “no, Dan, you shouldn't go there,” but Dan did not follow orders. The French discovered this on Île de Sein: when you’re part of an underground resistance... for the love of all that is holy, don’t go to an island. HOWARD ZINN The FBI went to Block Island. They surrounded the house, Dan Berrigan, uh, looked out. He saw people in the bushes. This was an extremely windy and rainy day on Block Island, Somebody went over to the people in the bush, said, "What are you doing here?” They said, “we're bird watchers.” And in the wind and rain, there were of course... no birds. No, they were FBI men. Berrigan went quietly, but he still had the last laugh. HOWARD ZINN There's, it was a great moment though. They, they took Dan Bergen into custody, and then they took him on this motor launch from Block Island to the mainland. The two FBI agents got sick. And so you, there's a picture when they get off the boat of Dan Berrigan, flanked by these two FBI guys, and you can see they look very sick. And Dan Berrigan is smiling. ARCHIVAL: Reporter: You have any comment, father? Daniel Berrigan: All good to be here. Reporter: What were you doing out on Block Island? Daniel Berrigan: Well, I was writing and reading and meditating. Exactly what I'll be doing in jail. Reporter: What are your future plans? Daniel Berrigan: Resistance. Dan Berrigan’s arrest had a big impact on just about everyone. KRISTEN: My biggest and boldest gesture was I gave up my pacifier for Daniel Berrigan. Marianne’s daughter Krissy. 'cause it was like my most beloved thing. Dan Berrigan, the one who had kicked things off by joining his brother Phil in the Catonsville Nine, was now in prison. And the movement would now enter a new post-Berrigan phase. But Dan Berrigan had embarrassed J. Edgar Hoover. He had essentially kicked a hornets nest of federales. Which meant, in short, now everyone was... kind of fucked. CHARLES MECONIS: The underground, of course, was a whole different factor. Catholic Left historian Charles Meconis, author of “With Clumsy Grace.” CHARLES MECONIS: This is, gets about the secrecy thing. It’s understandable that Dan and Phil and others would want to go underground. Too many people were, were ending up in prison. Too many leaders. But it also was a further step into secrecy. Once you go underground, now, you're, now you've gotta get serious. Berrigan’s arrest meant that the “first wave” of draft board raiders — the olds who believed in the power of symbolism and waiting to be arrested — were mostly now in prison. The youngs — the ones who wanted to directly sabotage the war — had taken over the asylum. And THEM youngs, never met an institution... they didn’t want to smash... I’m Brendan Patrick Hughes, and this is Divine Intervention. Chapter 6. The Sanctuary of Paul Couming KIP TIERNAN: From then on in, it was almost a steady parade of draft raids. PAUL COUMING: We were gonna knock off a major city every three months was our commitment. It was a period of escalation. In a movie version, this would be the gettin’-it-done montage. Cue montage music. In a new string of raids, the younger members of the movement became quite skilled at cat burglary, and at finding news ways to annoy Hoover. Paul Couming and his wrecking crew next hit New Haven, where authorities discovered not a trashed office but simply empty drawers. There, the raiders destroyed the 1-A files And sent letters back to the draftees, Telling them they were no longer obligated to serve. So each individual could decide for himself if he wanted to go to war. Refusing to accept punishment for illegal acts of protest violated an important tradition in non-violent resistance as practiced by Thoreau, Gandhi and King. Now, just like their government in the quagmire of Vietnam, the movement was well past the point of no return. Little cells of new would be raiders popped up along the eastern seaboard. Imagine you’re a kid, just out of college, you play bass, smoke kools, more than 50% of your pants have vertical stripes. You are infuriated about the war, and you say so at a party or a poetry open mic. A friend takes you to a “rap session” at a nearby apartment for people interested in doing something serious. You go, and you are taken aback by how dear and unassuming everyone is. Amidst the floppy felt hats, vinyl LPS and smoke, You hear some cockamamie brainstorms that lift your eyebrows. At one meeting, they talk about shutting down the government for a day, by blowing up the heating system that feeds all of the Federal Buildings in Washington D.C. At another, there’s talk of staging a citizen's arrest of Henry Kissinger, Nixon’s National Security Advisor. Despite these crazy ideas being quickly abandoned, it’s clear to you, these cats party pretty hard. The movement was looking for their next action to be an exclamation point. And then, a raid idea came up in Rochester, New York. Also known as “Flower City.” CHARLES MECONIS: Flower City happens in, uh, September of 70. The raiders identified the Rochester Federal Building in part because not only did it have a penetrable draft board, it also had an FBI field office. Among those helping to plan the raid was an incarcerated man named Boyd Douglass, who had befriended Phil Berrigan on the inside. He routinely left the prison to take classes at Bucknell, and got involved with planning the Flower City conspiracy. Also on the crew was Ted Glick, from the Philadelphia action where Anne Walsh got arrested. Ted was the one to volunteer to sneak into the building. TED GLICK: When we were, you know, checking out the building, trying to figure out how do we get in late at night, what we came up with was — we had seen up on the top floor a metal grate that was locked and behind the grate were stairs that were clearly leading up to the tower. TED GLICK: That was where we decided somebody could climb up to and hide. TED GLICK: I went in there by myself. Like, I was really scared. I can remember the fear that I felt walking into that building. I, I really did. Ted walked into the building alone. And he would be alone inside of it for a long time. TED GLICK: I went up, I climbed over the grate. It was maybe about 10 feet high. Nobody saw me. And what I found when I got up, there was kind of a platform of the tower, 10 feet by 10 feet, something like that, covered with dust. Ted then settled into that half inch layer of dust for not hours, but days. TED GLICK: So that's where I was for the next 32 hours until midnight on Saturday night when I went down and let people in. He had very little to do up there other than entertain himself with his own thoughts and maybe study the landscape. TED GLICK: When I was up in the tower that Friday, I remember at one point seeing a car. And it looked like somebody was in it. I didn't see at that point there was any reason not to do the action. After 32 hours, it was go time. TED GLICK: I had to go down to use the payphone on the first floor, to let them know everything was good, you should come. And we got in, uh, without anybody seeing us. The Flower City Conspiracy, as they called it, was going to up the ante for the whole movement. And that was the reason Ted had been so scared walking into the building... They planned to hit three offices that night. TED GLICK: The Selective Service Office. One. TED GLICK: The US Attorney's Office. Two TED GLICK: The FBI office. Three. These zany bastards were going after the FBI. TED GLICK: We were there for five hours. One of the raiders later told Charles Meconis that they found a note on a desk warning the offices about a raid that very weekend. TED GLICK: The government knew that we were doing this action there at that location on that night. A raider looked out the window and saw a squad car flash its lights. In a moment like that, “Scared,” a raider told Charles Meconis, becomes “the definition of your entire universe.” TED GLICK: We started hearing and noticing that police were coming up to the door that we had entered, checking the doors every half hour. So we called out to our outside people. Ted reached Paul Couming who was back at their headquarters, and they formulated an escape plan. TED GLICK: You should plan to be here at five 15, be alert and we'll call you right before. They timed their escape for 15 minutes after the last visit from the police. They gathered in the building’s lobby waiting for their getaway car. TED GLICK: We were all at the door, I was in the phone booth. TED GLICK: And all of a sudden a cop comes up to where we are, looks in and yells— COP: Come out with your hands up. The bottom fell out of Ted’s stomach. TED GLICK: And that was it. We ended up getting arrested. By this point, the raids were down to a science. They took every precaution. They should not have been caught. TED GLICK: There was an informer, not within the group of eight of us, but there was a, a government informer who had worked his way in. No one knew it yet But Boyd Douglass The incarcerated friend of an imprisoned Phil Berrigan Who had helped the flower city raiders Plan their action Was working with the FBI. It looked like the beginning of the end For the Catholic Left. Ted Glick, and his fellows in the Flower City Conspiracy were caught red-handed and carted off to jail. TED GLICK: We probably got some baloney sandwiches at some point. That's generally what they give you in these county jails. Flower City was a complete disaster, Ted went to prison for eleven months, and the FBI had officially infiltrated the movement. There was a joke back then that if all of the FBI informants left the Communist party, the entire party would collapse. Soon the same would be true of the Catholic Left. Their resistance activities had awoken the slumbering giant and Hoover had begun dedicating bureau resources to crushing the movement from the inside. Things began to change. Mistrust flourished among friends and co-conspirators. Anyone could be a Fed. Interested newbies standing at the doorway of a meeting were having doors closed in their faces. The movement found itself completely unequipped to deal with the sophistication of Federal scrutiny. It was a dark time, full of uncertainty. The future of the resistance rested in the hands of people like Paul Couming. PAUL COUMING: I, I was doing other actions, but y'all didn't know about 'em. This is where Paul earned the nickname “Little Big Man.” Paul was completely undeterred by news of FBI infiltration in the movement. He was not going to stop, no matter what peril he was in. And if it were up to him, He could have gone like this forever… PAUL COUMING: But I got interrupted because I got caught, called to court for not carrying my draft cards. Paul, you may remember, had been granted Conscientious Objector status by his draft board, but was told to be an orderly in Newton Wellesley Hospital. Feeling like his talents would be wasted cleaning up the bedpans of the wealthy, he quickly abandoned his post to devote himself full time to the anti-war movement. And just to put as fine a point on it as humanly possible, He mailed his draft papers back to the government. Now, two years later, the long arm of the law had caught up to him. PAUL COUMING: Anne Walsh grabbed me by the collar one day and said, “lookit, I want you to go down to the Paulist center. I want you to meet some people and talk to them about your situation.” MARIANNE: And the idea was that maybe they could take sanctuary at a Catholic church. PAUL COUMING: I met Marianne and I met, uh, Sarah Tosi, I met Anne Tobin. MARIANNE: I didn't meet him until we were planning the sanctuary. The Paulist Center community had abstained, until now, from directly entering the anti-war movement. But with Patrick in charge, it was finally possible for the movement to use the clout of the church itself against the war. The outside agitators, sabotaging the draft, and the inside incrementalists, changing the church, were voltroning into a super-organism. MARIANNE: So we were beside ourselves with excitement about the possibility of doing this 'cause it would be so powerful. The institution of the Catholic Church, under the thumb of Cardinal Spellman— had never wavered in its support for this war. PAUL COUMING: This was the first time a Catholic church, I think was being noted to offer sanctuary to a Vietnam draft board resistor. But the Paulist Center Community was in the business of reinvention. PAUL COUMING: And I said, wow, this potentially could be something powerful, you know, it could be an, an action in itself. But this was going to be one hell of a delicate operation. MARIANNE: So the groundwork that had happened prior to this was getting the church ready for sanctuary. All of us at the Paul Center, the whole Catholic left community, up and down the East Coast, there were hundreds of people involved. LIANNE MOCCIA: I didn't know what was gonna happen. You just went, I mean, we have to go, we have to support Paul Couming. We have to support, support Little Paul. This is Lianne Moccia. As an undergraduate, Lianne started a soup kitchen in the Bronx, and hung out with the Catholic Workers in New York. While Paul was leaving Dorchester with Marianne, Sarah and the kids, Lianne was taking in the scene unfolding at the courthouse. LIANNA MOCCIA: Paul didn't show up, but his father was there. He spoke for Paul. He's not gonna turn himself in. But, as you may remember, there was trouble when Paul and the gang got to Park Street. PAUL COUMING: So we were pretty sure that if the word got out that the FBI would hear about it. And the FBI would arrest me. MARIANNE: So we get out of the subway, we look up at the Paulist Center and we can see there's really activity outside. There's clearly parked cars, there's clearly FBI out there. So we go into Brigham's and we get ourselves a cup of coffee. And as we are plotting and trying to figure out what we're gonna do, we look down the street and there's a march coming from the courthouse. They were going up into the church to take sanctuary. Paul, Marianne, Sarah, Krissy and Jojo stood there, staring at the crowd coming towards them from the courthouse, on a collision course with the Feds on Park Street. So they hatched a plan... MARIANNE: So we decided we'll just get in the crowd. We'll just like get right in the group and we'll just march on up with everybody else. They scampered across the street as surreptitiously as possible, and blended Paul into the back of the line. MARIANNE: He's, you know, he’s got those eyes and he kind looks girly and he is short. KRISTEN: And I remember people like, I think it was my mom putting a little bit of makeup on him. MARIANNE: And he's adorable. So he looked like a girl with a hood up. And nobody knew it was him. KRISTEN: I remember being really, really worried about him and his safety. MARIANNE: It was an unbelievable disguise. It was an unbelievable disguise. And always, of course, having the kids made it so easy, you know, because we always look like just young people with our young kids. And they turned the corner onto Park Street, and walked slowly past the Federal agents. KRISTEN: Joe and I were part of the cover because we held his hands while he walked into the sanctuary. MARIANNE: We got right into the middle of the crowd, Paul's in his girl coat and up we walk, and we walk in the door and we were home free. BRENDAN: And you walked right past the FBI guess? MARIANNE: Yeah. BRENDAN: Did you make eye contact with them? MARIANNE: No. Nope. And so then we got into the church and then oh my God, we did it. And they were in.... And there was much rejoicing. ANNE WALSH: This is like the most incredible thing that’s happening. The first Catholic sanctuary. PAUL COUMING: I remember there being a liturgical service then. We passed around loaves of bread. MARIANNE: Yeah. We broke bread and wine. PAUL COUMING: And grapes. Yeah. Yeah. We passed around grapes rather than have wine. And Anne Tobin was on the altar. I don't know if Patrick was on the altar as well. MARIANNE: Yeah, yeah, yeah. I think so. With the feds watching outside, the sanctuary began with a liturgy. PAUL COUMING: So there was this beautiful liturgy that went on just like a mass, but much more powerful. It was a liturgy of resistance. And the church was packed. It was really literally packed to the brim. And, uh, people were standing in the aisles. PAUL COUMING: Yeah. And I can remember Howard Zinn making a comment about it. Yeah. Him saying he never saw any religious ceremony so powerful in his life. Nothing like this had happened in a Catholic Church for centuries. LIANNE MOCCIA: And it was in a Catholic Church. Lianne Moccia. So it, I mean, it wasn't totally strange to me, you know. There was the whole Catholic ideology to sort of stand with, or hope was holding us up or something like that. ‘Cause it was a new risk. Of course, no one had any idea, what the Feds had planned. PAUL COUMING We fully expected that I was gonna get arrested the first hour or so. But it quickly dawned on them, their plan might be working. It appeared that the FBI and its very catholic agents didn’t want to raid a Catholic Church. This planetary collision of powerful institutions suddenly felt like it could be the genesis of an entirely new era for a young and vital Catholic Church. So the team inside the Paulist Center went big. PAUL COUMING But we had three days at least of stuff organized. MARIANNE: Yeah. Three days and three nights. Hundreds of people, took up residence at the Paulist Center over the next few days. MARIANNE: mostly everybody slept on the, on the pews and slept on the floor. ANNE WALSH: We sort of lived in the building when we were there. We slept there in case the agents came at night. LIANNE MOCCIA: I didn't really know what was gonna happen and were we gonna get arrested and what was gonna happen to us. Because I think we didn't know when the FBI was gonna come or when the agents were gonna come, you know, to take Paul away. But when you stage an illegal sleepover with a bunch of wild young people, there’s no way it doesn’t become a giant party. LIANNE MOCCIA: But it was festive, you know, it was serious. But there was like a whole festival kind of feeling about it. MARIANNE: It was open to the public at night. So the public came at night and there would be, people would be singing, there'd be performances, there was, uh, an art, uh, display. It was this incredible happening. And much of young Boston started streaming through the door. MARIANNE: People brought food. It was front page of The Globe. I mean, it was on the television. And the doors were open all night. From day six to 11 at night. Yep. And people could just come and participate in the sanctuary. PAUL COUMING: And many people did. They just, many people did just off the street. Yeah. Just came in just even for an hour or two. Patrick’s weekly lollapaloozas, with their puppetry, slideshows, banners, music and dance, were kind of tailor-made for a happening like this. PAUL COUMING: We had planned on having different skits and, uh, different ways for people to show their resistance against war. MARIANNE: Yeah, workshops and art shows and sing-ins. And it was amazing. We'd childcare. Yeah. It was absolutely amazing. ANNE WALSH: Patrick and the community there had these, you know, overhead projectors with all the words to the songs, like, you know, of the time, like “If We Only Had Love” and, you know, “Suzanne” and all these different songs and people were singing and people were bringing food in. People were giving speeches and all kinds of people came to lend their support. So it was wonderful that somehow people found the spiritual nerve to embrace Paul. MARIANNE: But the amazing thing is the kind of ongoing celebration and like real consciousness raising. Paul gave interviews throughout the days, sang along to “If We Only Had Love,” welcomed newcomers to the cause, and was jokingly referred to, in a nod to the musical Jesus Christ Superstar, as “PC Superstar.” The funny thing to me about this generation is how young they all had children. So despite this being a big room full of twenty-somethings, it was also crawling with their feral offspring. PAUL COUMING: Lots of kids came. In fact, one mother, I remember, she came, she was pregnant and she had a child and it was a boy. And she named him Paul after me. KRISTEN: I hadn't received communion and I wanted to know what the host tasted like the round wafer. We all snuck in. Me, Sarah, and my mom snuck into the sanctuary, or the— BRENDAN: The sacristy? KRISTEN: The sacristy! And stole a bag of hosts so I could taste it. BRENDAN: Did you eat all of them? KRISTEN: No, they're terrible. I was so disappointed. I was like, well, is this really the body of Christ? You know? KRISTEN: There were a lot of kids there. It just was confusing to a kid to have like the grownups around you be so scared and taking huge risks. I knew that that was a huge deal that, um, he was gonna be arrested. Like, I wasn't confused about that either. Like, I knew the sanctuary could only last so long. Like, how long can you stay in a church? It was weird. I'm gonna get it together. But it was weird to that like that the government was bad. KRISTEN: You know what I mean? Like that, like that. 'Cause Paul was so sweet and he didn't wanna go to war, I remember being like really confused by how the government and the church or like the leaders or who was supposed to be in charge were so egregiously wrong and potentially evil. You know, like I, it was like, I didn't really know how to metabolize that like what he was saying like, “I do not want to go to war. I don't wanna kill.” And all this time, the FBI is sitting right outside the pair of red double doors on Park Street, trying to figure out what the hell to do. Realizing that In order to do their job They’re going to have to Defy their god. LIANNE MOCCIA: We didn't know when the FBI was gonna come or when the agents were gonna come, you know, to take Paul away. PAUL COUMING: I think they expected me to stay there until they made the decision on how to get me out, how to coax me out. MARIANNE: they weren't harassing anybody. They weren't, they were trying to plan how to do the arrest. PAUL COUMING. They didn’t expect me to run away. MARIANNE: So when Paul was in sanctuary for those days, the FBI is actually calling us and wanting to negotiate his arrest. What we didn't anticipate was how unbelievably difficult this would be for them, because they're all Irish Catholics. This is the beautiful thing about their gamble. It worked. MARIANNE: And we were forcing them to come inside. And that was the standoff. There were Catholics on either side of the doors. The ones on the inside had meticulously arranged a personal hell for the ones on the outside. MARIANNE: They didn't wanna come into a Catholic church and arrest anybody. So they were in negotiation. The FBI would make these offers and we'd make these counter offers and we'd be refusing their offers. I think most of the demands started with them wanting Paul to give himself up. That was like mostly what they demanded, but they wanted him to come out of the church outside. They really did not want to come into the church. And we really, really weren't gonna go outside the church. So that was the standoff. The longer the stalemate lasted the better for Paul Couming. MARIANNE: And at one point, one of them asked if the monstrous was, was on the altar. I mean, they literally wanted to know what they were walking into. Um, in terms of the sanctity of the church. I googled this so my fellow agnostics don’t have to, you’re welcome. The Monstrance is a big golden sculpture thing that they put out on the altar between masses, with a communion wafer inside, so people can come pray whenever they want. And it’s so sacred to devout Catholics, that these FBI guys might have thought they’d go straight to hell Or burst into flames if they just barged in and arrested Paul in front of it. So a joke they had inside was, “somebody find the monstrance!” MARIANNE: They were truly, truly, truly just completely stumbled about what to do. And on the one hand, feeling like real compassion and empathy for them, ‘cause they were authentically, totally distressed. The sheer magnitude of thrusting a Catholic Church into the middle of the antiwar resistance cannot be overstated. MARIANNE: The idea of taking sanctuary in a Catholic church, we didn't, we didn't even anticipate this. PAUL COUMING: We didn't know the power that we had. MARIANNE: Yeah. We didn't even realize this was gonna be such a, such a thing PAUL COUMING: No. Because we, we, we hadn’t felt that the sanctuary was gonna last more than an hour. We thought it was gonna end with them coming in and force pushing people aside and taking me and arresting me. You know? In fact, we had even talked about, uh, not interfering physically with them to make sure that there was nobody hurt and nobody got into a scuffle. MARIANNE: We had all prepared and done nonviolent training and all that sort of stuff. And on the third day... The reckoning began at dawn with a knock at the red double doors. MARIANNE: And then finally, I think it was about six or seven o'clock in the morning and there was this huge knock on the door of the church. And they were, it was just like in the movies, where they were saying, “FBI. We're here to arrest Paul Couming.” Bleary-eyed young radical heads began popping up among the pews. Sleeping bags shimmied out of. Hair: bandana’ed. PAUL COUMING: They arranged for me to sleep that night in the sacristy so I'd get extra sleep, which was good. I needed it. Someone came and fetched Paul in the sacristy and told him it was time. PAUL COUMING: So I walked out of this sacristy and, uh, stood at the, at the altar in the, like, where the railing used to be. As he emerged into the chapel, one of the priests was standing in the pulpit and giving it to the Federal agents. PAUL COUMING: Giving him a lecture about how he was violating the sanctity of the church. MARIANNE: “I hope you understand that you're crossing over the threshold of a Roman Catholic church.” I mean, he made some kind of unbelievable statement. The arresting agent was an officer named Tom Cody. He stood in the center aisle — hat doffed in reverence — feeling horrible about what he had to do. He was accompanied by two marshalls. All of them were Catholic. BOB CUNNANE: They came in and genuflected. PAUL COUMING: He was in the center at the front, and he was pleading with the priest to let me go and be arrested. His voice was shaking, trying to answer the priest at the altar. This was totally against his religion to do this. And yet he had, he had this other belief he had to arrest me. So he asked me to come forward. PAUL COUMING: People had been sleeping. And, uh, they arose and people started automatically seeing “Amazing Grace” as I started to walk towards Tom Cody, and then Tom Cody says to me, “I'm not gonna handcuff you if you promise not to run.” And I said, “it's okay. I'm not gonna run.” MARIANNE: And then he made another statement about the war. And then they came in and they arrested him. PAUL COUMING: And we walked out and they sang “Amazing Grace” as I, as the five marshals escorted me out the door. And then it was over. This three day, spontaneous arts festival that was a celebration of the patriotic act of resistance. This incredibly daring bid to throw the church into the fray of the antiwar movement. The standoff had been national news. The shockwaves it sent were strong. Paul was now under arrest, like he always would have been, but something had shifted in the hearts and minds of those who paid attention. After the sanctuary was over, Tobin went up to the roof deck on top of the Paulist Center to watch Paul be placed in the back of the squad car. Dignified. Without handcuffs. An old, retired priest approached her, and she collapsed into his arms, sobbing. After the sanctuary, many of the activists walked up the hill behind the State House and filled the booths of a restaurant called The Fillabuster. KRISTEN: I remember everybody crying. They reached around the booth to hug each other 'cause I think it's just, oh yeah, it was heavy. Um, and these are like the grownups, even though they were kids. As his friends wept into their eggs benedict, Paul was driven to jail. PAUL COUMING: Cody was the, uh, marshal that had driven me over. And he and I had struck up a pretty good conversation. He was telling me that, uh, he was thankful that I didn't try to run away, and that he totally accepted what I was doing as the right thing to do against this activity in the war. This is the federal marshal that's arresting me. Paul was facing fifteen years. He was the first person in US History To be tried solely for not carrying his Draft cards on his person. And as far as we know, he was also the last. PAUL COUMING: I spent a week in jail. I was actually in the old cell blocks, which I'm not sure if they're still using, but they were the original cell blocks they had when Sacco and Vinzetti were tried and held there. Sacco and Vanzetti were two Italian immigrants who were executed for being anarchists during the Red Scare of the 1920’s, which was engineered by an early career J. Edgar Hoover. PAUL COUMING: One slot in the bar had an opening about this big for a shoe box to come through. And that's how your meal was delivered. I stayed there a week and I fasted during that week. The only thing I could get was coffee or milk to drink. And I chose coffee, which led to great severe headache by the time I went to, uh, court the week after. In the People of the United States versus Paul Couming, Paul Couming decided to represent himself. PAUL COUMING: The prosecution was very quick asking how it came about, that I didn't carry my draft cards. And the woman, uh, who was, uh, the secretary for the draft board reiterated while I had mailed them back to her and stuff like that. I then, um, questioned her and I kept asking her questions. Did she know how many people from that draft boat had been killed in Vietnam, or how many had served in Vietnam? And questions like that. She had no idea. And, uh, I had no idea. And I was asking the question honestly. This is how dear Paul Couming is. While cross examining the star witness in a trial that would put him behind bars for over a decade, he didn’t ask rhetorical, gotcha questions. He asked her things he was genuinely curious about in the hopes she might have answer. PAUL COUMING: And then the, uh, judge, uh, sentenced me, I believe on the same day and sentenced me to one year suspended sentence and three years of probation. The judge clearly felt As the arresting officer did, That this was a patriot, heartsick for his country. Paul’s release made it clear, the sanctuary had been a massive success. KRISTEN: I felt like the incredible power of organizing and that the protests really were working. Like, these great acts of courage, like Sarah and Paul and my mom and you know, Ann Walsh and Bob Cunnane and all of these people, were taking huge risks and putting themselves on the line for their values. MARIANNE: That was an, just an unbelievable experience. Again, I was this incredible community coming together around this action against what they knew was wrong. They knew the state in this instance was wrong, and that you had to take public civil, disobedient action to make the point. We used to say, you have to put your body where your mouth is. And that was our mantra. And the sanctuary was a perfect example of putting your body where your mouth is. The Paulist Center had come a long way from the musty echo chamber Patrick and Floyd had walked into only two years earlier. MARIANNE: I think the sanctuary became part of the really important narrative of the Catholic left. I don't know if the Paulist Fathers of the Paulist Center see that as one of their proudest moments Looking back now, I’m sure the Paulist Center sees the Paul Couming sanctuary as an important milestone in its history. But in its immediate aftermath, it became clear that Patrick and Floyd had broken something that could never be fixed. Sure, through a lot of internal struggle, Patrick and Floyd had wrangled control of the Paulist Center away from the old guard, and smashed the place into an entirely new institution. But they still shared a roof with about 60 retired priests who were absolutely scandalized and personally wounded by what they had done. SARAH TOSI: How's it going with the three of you and the rest of the Paulist fathers? Was anything decided? A letter from Sarah Tosi to Patrick. SARAH TOSI: How do you feel about it? I only know what you said about it the other night. I arrived at Park Street, sort of near the end of the trouble, I guess over upstairs and downstairs and everything. I hope it is okay. To the old priests upstairs Patrick and Floyd had become the personification of change, and that made their every waking moment in that house... very tense. FLOYD: We epitomized it. Floyd. Here's a way of life. They've gone all this time, so I could have been annoyed. What the heck going on here? I learned all this Latin. Now all of a sudden you're told now we can do better than this. You know? So, I mean, the whole thing was hard for them. Very hard. JIM CARROLL: Those kinds of small things had tremendous meaning. Jim. And traditionally minded Catholics found it very hard to make those adjustments. And that was painful. The sanctuary had changed things. Patrick and Floyd tried to maintain a stiff upper lip among the cold shoulders and icy stares, but it started to take its toll. JOANN HUGHES: He used to come to the house down to the cape a lot during that period. Patrick’s sister, JoAnn. He'd be just exhausted from the struggles. So it became very petty I think in many ways. It's not where he wanted to struggle. JIM CARROLL: The basic gift that Pat and Floyd had was that they were so overwhelmingly decent and humane and in generous as people that, that dominated the difficulties, the unsettling changes they were advocating, except for some people who just could not accept those changes, no matter how kind the priest was, who was advocating them. With 50 years of hindsight, and maybe more in common now with those old fellas, Both Jim and Floyd felt some compunction about the collateral damage their cause had left behind in the upstairs common room. JIM CARROLL: And we, young Turks were, uh, all too insensitive to the human difficulty of making such adjustments. And looking back on it, I'm sure if Pat were here, and I'm not sure how Floyd would say it, but looking back on it, I think we would've all done better if we'd been more sensitive. FLOYD: And as I got away from it, ah, ah, I don't know. You wonder, was it worth it? You know? Yeah. The battle. The battle. You know? Um, you think it, you think it is at the time. But in retrospect, JIM CARROLL: The old guard was the old guard. And it was, it was a kind of revolutionary moment. But if you side with the past, a revolution will never be pleasant for you. MARIANNE: I think Patrick, I'm trying to remember if Patrick would've thought of himself as, I don't know that he would have thought of himself as a radical or revolutionary. Agitating can be painful for inside incrementalists. JIM CARROLL: So that's always the, uh, revolutionaries problem, isn't it? To make sure that the corruptions of what we've inherited can be left behind without the precious values that we've inherited being abandoned... Not easy, not easy for anybody. FATHER X: Tensions arise within the residence. Father X - our mystery chronicler of the Paulist Center FATHER X: Pat and Floyd decide that a community, as they envision it, cannot function within the structure of the center. Finally Patrick and Floyd had had enough, and made yet another shocking announcement. FATHER X: Four male team members decide to get an apartment outside the center. Patrick says, this is unusual, but not unprecedented. Patrick and Floyd had been living in dorm rooms in the floors above the chapel for over two years. They had dutifully lived out the monastic life of men of the cloth as long as they possibly could. But the Paulist Center 0 had simply become a pressure cooker. The boys needed a place to escape at night, and perhaps have a little more privacy. But the apartment idea — Had everyone wondering if this was the beginning of the end of the Paulist Center community they had built. SARAH TOSI: We all kinda knew what we were saying, but what were we saying? Sarah Tosi — living with Marianne and the kids in Dorchester — wrote furiously in her journal. SARAH TOSI: What are we saying goodbye to? To a phase? To Patrick? To our mission at the center? To What? The boys found an apartment on Beacon Street only a few blocks away. MARIANNE: All hell had already broken loose at the Paulist Center. Patrick and Floyd they had all moved out of the Paulist Center and they had moved into this like fifth floor apartment on Beacon Street. But inside Floyd, something else had already shifted. FLOYD: Fighting or that bitterness, the animosity and so forth was wearing on me. And so I just sort of came to the realization that I'm going to, I, I'm, I'm gonna have to, uh, get outta here. But the problem was getting, getting out in that I was so immersed in, in the community and what was going on. And I, I valued what was going on, but I must say, I sort of didn't see a future to it. And, um, I decided in my own head, I'm gonna be leaving. Sarah Tosi journaled vividly about Floyd, often calling him “Flouride”. SARAH TOSI: Fluoride, You ding-a-ling According to her journal Sarah and Floyd locked antlers on the regular. One night, he asked her why she was hanging around the center, after years of doing so. SARAH TOSI: Floyd, what are you doing here? Huh? In the center, you mean? Sometimes I wonder myself. Evening falls so hard. Floyd, what are you doing here? Everything suddenly felt like it was all falling apart. Their vision for a new Catholic church for the turn of the millennium, one they felt could possibly change the world, was barely hanging on. And then, the first nail in the coffin... FATHER X: Father Floyd McManus announces his decision to marry a girl he met and fell in love with while working at the tutoring program in the center. MARIANNE: They had just moved into this apartment when Floyd announces he's getting married. And this really threw things really in turmoil. Floyd had met a young woman in their basement tutoring program. FLOYD: I said to her, you know, if I were to leave, you know, I’d be interested… you know, would you be interested in, in marrying me? And, uh, she indicated she would. So, uh, I was then done. I never said mass again. Floyd made preparations to leave the Paulist Center. Patrick suddenly felt like he’d spent so much time with his friends, Marianne and Sarah, that he’d let go of the core of their mission, and was about to lose Floyd in the process. SARAH TOSI: Patrick, are you coming? It's Patrick in the middle. Floyd in his elevator. Us by the door. Patrick in the middle. I don't wanna think of it. I can't stand it. Has it come to this? Torn. There's no need for this. Patrick was ready to go to war with the archdiocese, and the whole Catholic Church, to keep Floyd at the Paulist Center. FATHER X: Reaction to Floyd's announcement: Pat feels a real community allows its members total freedom. Floyd's marriage should not interfere with his role as a team member. Pat feels the community, now about 1000 laypeople and team, is strong enough to go to the Wire with Medeiros, the Archbishop of Boston, regarding the place of married priests within the church. Without Floyd, Patrick had no idea how he could keep The Paulist Center experiment alive. Sarah journaled about the toll his was obviously taking on him. SARAH TOSI: We are all so many different things to so many different people. We understand that. But you don't have to defend yourself by being a bastard to us because we understand that you are different things to different people. You wear a lot of suits. Some of them are so bewildering we just can't trust them. Example BC bastard, gut reaction, arrogant son of a bitch. It's only us, but we do trust and love the real Patrick. When the Team announced they could not come to a consensus about how to handle Floyd’s departure, Sarah knew it meant that the church, tradition, the archdiocese, and everyone who resented Vatican II were going to win. Their beautiful, beloved community, that stood up to tradition, to hunger, to the Paulist Fathers, to the DOJ, could not hold the center any longer. Turns out, institutions only become institutions because they know how to smash back. MARIANNE: But the whole time I knew Sarah, she was going back and forth from Boston to Ho-Ho-Kus to help her mother take care of her father. Her father was dying of cancer for a very, very long time. Here's what happened. She went home. Sarah had been playing an even more important role in holding the place together than she or anyone had realized... Patrick and Marianne Had started feeling electrocuted whenever they were with each other, which was manageable as long as Sarah was with them. They had been the three musketeers, carousing around Boston and CHANGING the world together for over a year. MARIANNE: She went home to take care of her father. That's where the chemistry would take over, kind of. SARAH TOSI: Patrick, did I tell you that I talked to my mother yesterday? She's sick. My father's in the hospital and I have to go home. Monday. I'm thinking about seagulls and leaving softly Sarah wrote to Patrick while she was home. SARAH TOSI: Please tell everyone. Hi. And peace for me. I smile a lot for you. And because of you. Peace, my friend, and much love, Sarah. Marianne and Patrick, trapped in Boston together without Sarah as a buffer were headed for a reckoning. SARAH TOSI: But it wasn't like we were wanting it to. Do you know what I mean? It wasn't like I was pursuing this relationship or he was pursuing this relationship. We were not like consciously pursuing this relationship because it was off limits. It was no, but it was going, it had its own life. It was going of its own accord, you know? Um, and we were kind of fighting it. When Sarah went home to take care of her father that time, that's when I think both Patrick and I were left there looking at each other, like, oh boy… MARIANNE: There was a first drive home without Sarah. Oh, I remember this now. Oh, Patrick drove me home and came in to why? That's the question. Did he often come in? I think he may have often came in and had a beer or something. So he came in probably to have a beer. And there was obviously this, something was really gonna happen. It became clear, sort of, I mean, there was so much tension in the air, like sexual tension in the air that you could have cut it with a knife. This was bad. This was really, really bad. MARIANNE: And the phone rang. It was my friend Sheila, and it's like 11 o'clock at night calling 'cause she wanted to talk. And I answered the phone because why did, I don't know why I answered. Well, because it rang and it would've been weird not to answer the phone… The spell was broken. Patrick chugged the rest of his beer, waved goodbye, and then showed himself to the door. And thank god... MARIANNE: For him in his priesthood. And I probably would've like lost the whole community. I mean, it probably would've been like that. It would've been a disaster. I just know that in my bones. After Floyd left, Patrick had to give up the Beacon Street apartment. And one night, after another emotional meeting at the Paulist Center about its fate, Patrick, Tobin and Marianne went up to the apartment to help him clear it out. MARIANNE: So we come up to Patrick's apartment and, um, he was starting to repack his, you know, repack boxes and all of that stuff. They ordered a pizza, built a fire, split a six pack and some Marlboro red apples, and talked into the night. MARIANNE: We were all just sitting around. I laid down on the couch and actually fell asleep on this couch. Patrick was over there? No, I laid down on the floor. I was in front of the fire, and I laid down on the floor and actually dozed off. Patrick apparently fell asleep in a chair over there. And Anne Tobin, who lived in Newton with her mother, got up and left and went home. BRENDAN: Did she see the writing on the wall? MARIANNE: I think she saw the writing on the wall. Uh, oh. He woke up, we both woke up at the exact same time, and he was laying on the couch and I was laying on the floor, and we just looked at each other. And then he came over. That was that. MARIANNE: You know, we just start to make out like crazy when I think about that. Like actually there was, being in love that whole year and falling in love that whole year and becoming really knowing each other and, and learning about each other and being absolute best friends in the world. You would just die for the other person. But then really declaring that kind of love for each other. It was, I honestly felt like I'd fallen through like Alice's hole or something. Everything felt sort of golden or like a lot, like, it felt like inanimate objects were alive. And hell was breaking loose all around us. In the next chapter of Divine Intervention... J. Edgar Hoover brings down the hammer. ANNE WALSH: The FBI was getting really madder and madder. COOKIE RIDOLFI: FBI agents were coming to my mother's house week after week after week. MARIANNE: I started to be followed very heavily by the FBI. PAUL COUMING: It’d be unlikely that he would know who I was unless he happened to be in the Philadelphia office at the time. ANNE WALSH: J. Edgar Hoover. He was furious. He was out of his mind. Somebody violated the FBI and he wanted to bring the Catholic left to its knees. Divine Intervention is a production of iHeartPodcasts, it’s produced by Wonder Media Network. It was created and written by me, your host, Brendan Patrick Hughes. Our astonishing adroit producers are Carmen Borca-Carrillo, Abbey Delk, Paloma Moreno Jimenez, Grace Lynch and myself. Our Editor is the gravity defying Grace Lynch. Additional production support from Alyia Yates Grau. For Wonder Media Network, our executive producers are Emily Rudder and Jenny Kaplan. For iHeartPodcasts, our executive producer is Cristina Everett. The late Sarah Tosi was voiced by Carly Pope. Father X was voiced by Adam O’Byrne. “Amazing Grace” was arranged and performed by the outrageously brilliant Moira Smiley, Kai Fukuda, and friends. Our theme and end credit music, and the Patrick and Marianne makeout theme, were all composed and performed by the deeply incredible, in real life and in music, Tanya Donnelly and mastered by Ben Arons, known swashbuckler. This is Brendan Patrick Hughes, thank you for listening to Divine Intervention.