Prince of Peace (70 page)

Another time Michael appeared at a so-called Celebration of Resistance at the University of Connecticut at Storrs, a typical college town in the farming area north of Hartford. The weekend festival, with music, speeches, "political theater," slide-shows and movies, was held in the huge university fieldhouse. The place was packed for the Saturday night rally because Jane Fonda was appearing. That Father Michael Maguire unexpectedly joined her was like Mick Jagger showing up at a Janis Joplin concert. Fonda embraced the renegade priest chastely when he walked onto the stage. When she turned then and introduced him to the crowd, most of whom had recognized him and were already cheering, the seven widely scattered, overweight and nervous campus policemen got orders from their chief through their walkie-talkies to converge on the platform and arrest him. Students saw the cops moving and spontaneously, good-naturedly, spilled into the aisles, slowing them. Michael spoke only for a moment—"Resistance, yes! Violence, no!"—and then disappeared backstage. Fie made good his escape inside one of the giant puppet heads of the mime troupe that had preceded Jane Fonda on the evening's program. The papier-mâché head that enabled him to slip by the police was, in fact, a dreary, gray monster, the writhing face of death.

Between these dramatic, much-discussed appearances, Michael shuttled from place to place driven by strangers, people whose names he made a point not to know. In the cities, his movements and contacts were orchestrated by a handful of organizers, four or five at the most, whose identities I never knew. Obviously, given his success, they were people Michael had reason to trust. The longer he was at large—and it had never occurred to them in the beginning that he would elude capture for so many months—the more smoothly the network functioned. He hid out in little attic rooms or apartments over garages. His attitude toward the strangers who harbored him was one of utter trust, a kind of abandon, although he refused to stay with families with young children, who would not understand why their parents and a priest would break the law. He did not go out in daylight even when he was in small towns that seemed far removed from the controversies of the day. Mostly he was sheltered in the nicer suburbs where lived the professors, ministers, rabbis, psychiatrists and social workers his hosts tended to be: Newton outside Boston, Columbia near Baltimore, Summit, New Jersey, Media outside Philadelphia. He avoided New York, where he was so well known, and places like New Haven, Cambridge and Princeton, which the FBI were sure to stake out. Though he was on the platform often with antiwar celebrities, he never hid out with them. And he had nothing whatever to do with the anarchistic underground of the SDS and its spin-off groups of crazies. Instead he lost himself among an anonymous mass of average, essentially moderate people. They were no "underground" at all, but had simply come to hate the war passionately and now welcomed Michael, despite the risks, as a way of turning up the volume on their "no" to it. In the evenings, Michael habitually encouraged his hosts to have friends over so they could talk. Just being exposed to him in such informal settings, knowing that that huge posse of Hoover's agents was outside looking for him, realizing what risks he was taking and most of all experiencing up close his compelling, single-minded but strangely relaxed and self-accepting dedication was enough to change people in fundamental ways. It was commonly said by men and women who met him in such circumstances—I heard this second and third hand often—that for the first time since they'd turned against the war they believed they could make a difference to it, they could help stop it. Michael Maguire, by example, by manner, by what he said and especially by how he lived, was shattering the paralysis of doubt, futility and frustration people felt. When they asked him, as they always did, "But what can
we
do?" he would smile, raise his shoulders and say, "You've already broken the law by being here with me. You are in resistance now. So keep resisting." An act of disobedience had freed him once so that when the opportunity came to strike a real blow against the war he could take it. Now he had become himself the occasion of disobedience for others, and many of those, in fact, found it to be as freeing for action as he had. He left a trail of recruits to the antiwar movement behind him, men and women who would give it their best energy for years.

Ironically, because of him, some of those liberals found themselves reconsidering their attitudes toward that most reactionary of impulses, belief, and that most conservative of institutions, the Church. For whatever else Michael was during that time, he was never more a priest. Perhaps only the unchurched who did not take such things for granted could fully appreciate that the driving force of his resistance was his spirituality. Those who were sensitive to it were moved, and those who weren't still knew that this man had depths they couldn't touch. He was rarely with religious people, and so mostly he prayed by himself. Prayer, the hagiographers would say, became his one steadfast companion.

In the interviews he gave and in his short talks in that variety of settings he hammered away at what My Lai revealed. The story of that massacre and the subsequent army cover-up that was exposed that winter gave him his theme and made his message accessible to a broad public. Not even staunch supporters of the war were unaffected by the news of My Lai. Even military men professed repugnance. Sennett himself was eventually censured, reduced in rank and stripped of his DSM. Horror at the war spread to average people, and Father Michael Maguire gave voice to it. His hit-and-run appearances were widely covered in the media, though not with universal approbation. Editorials blasted him regularly, but the average journalists who wrote the news stories about him hardly disguised how enthralled they were. A surprisingly large segment of viewers and readers followed the dramatic unfolding of his defiance with sympathy. Groups, including apolitical and patriotic ones, began passing resolutions of support for the fugitive priest. Vestries and parish councils began inviting him to their churches to preach. At times organizers of antiwar rallies deliberately began rumors that Michael was coming as a way of drawing television coverage for their demonstrations, and that made it seem as if he was capable of a kind of omnipresence; Father Maguire, more than once, was reported to have been in Washington and Boston on the same night. Hadn't he become like Superman?

Cardinal Cooke steadfastly refused all comment about the notorious priest, although a Vatican spokesman in Rome said the pope was praying for him. Reports from Stockholm had it that he was a candidate for the Nobel Peace Prize (which had yet to be given to Henry Kissinger). It was a period when the sixties ended and the seventies began, and though Michael Maguire's defiance seemed to embody a massive national repudiation of the war, the brutal bombing of the North was resumed in those months and plans were laid for the invasion of Cambodia. We had no idea how utterly immune from influence, moral or political, the warmakers always were.

In January, despite its own condescension toward him, the
New York Times Sunday Magazine
ran a long, dramatic interview with Michael. The reporter described having been searched, blindfolded, and driven in successive cars to a farmhouse well outside of New York City. It was like
Breathless, Bonnie and Clyde
or
Easy Rider,
only this criminal was no psychopath, no weirdo, no loser, but, in the reporter's estimate, an accomplished, intelligent, admirable man. In February his picture appeared on the cover of
Time
and the accompanying article was entitled "Wanted and Needed." If his appeal among Catholics grew out of the myth of the fugitive priest, his appeal to the people as a whole—it seemed eventually that the entire country was rooting for him—grew out of the classic American romance with the decent outlaw—Who was that masked man?—who challenges the crooked sheriff not for his own ends but for the town's.

 

The door bell rang. Carolyn looked up sharply from her book.

I looked at the clock. It was nearly midnight, a Saturday in February. The house was utterly still. Molly was asleep in her room at last. A school friend was sleeping over and they had drawn out the goodnights endlessly. Carolyn and I had each made trips to silence giggles.

I waited for the bell to ring again. It didn't. Finally I put my own book aside, took my glasses off, and stood. Carolyn stayed where she was.

I opened the door. No one was there. When I stepped out onto the stoop to look down the street I think I half-expected someone to jump on me. No one did. I went back into the house and shut the door. On the floor below the mail slot was a piece of paper the size of a business card. I might have missed seeing it. I picked it up, but was afraid to read it, as if the FBI could see through wood. I went into the living room. The curtains were drawn, as they always were that winter. By Carolyn's lamp I squinted at the piece of paper. "Come to the eleven o'clock at Saint John the Divine," it said, and nothing more. No signature, no peace sign, no Chi-Rho. But the handwriting was as familiar to me as my own. I let Carolyn read it. We did not exchange a word. Then I dropped the note onto the embers in the fireplace and watched it flame.

We left the house the next morning at eight-thirty and spent an hour and a half riding various subway trains, hopping on and off at the last minute the way Cary Grant and Audrey Hepburn would have. We came up at Times Square, caught a taxi to Columbus Circle, walked to the Paulist church, went in one door and out another, and caught another taxi to Saint John's. We arrived feeling exhausted and nervous at ten minutes before eleven.

The organ was playing softly, far from full out, but the tones filled the vast church. On the wooden chairs and needlepointed cushions—not pews with kneelers, the Catholic notes—several dozen people sat and knelt. But in that space dozens counted for nothing. Others arrived as we did, shaking their heavy coats open and walking with a certain timidity into the overwhelming Gothic nave. The mammoth piers, curving stone pillars rising one hundred feet in a single, stark leap, dwarfed everything human. It took an act of intellect to recall that those columns themselves were made by men too; the sacred space itself was human. I watched the other arriving worshippers, hoping they would make the cathedral seem less empty. They were older and well, but not flashily, dressed. The men wore their hair slick and the women wore hats. Except for an occasional young person wearing blue jeans and an angelic expression, the gathering congregation seemed like establishment Episcopalians, as one might have expected. Of course, establishment Episcopalians by then, led by their outspoken Bishop Paul Moore and theologians like Pike and Stringfellow, were resolutely against the war. Still, that the pulpit of this cathedral might be offered to Michael Maguire, the fugitive priest, amazed me. As I walked well to the front of the center aisle, clutching Carolyn's arm, my anxiety, like the architecture, soared. We took our places. I knelt at once and tried to pray. My mind was whirling along, and in the end, like a schoolboy, I mumbled my Hail Mary and sat.

At the appointed time a blast from the trumpets behind us reverberated the full length of the cathedral. As we rose, I held a hymnal for Carolyn, but neither of us sang. We turned to watch the ranks of choir, clergy and attendants enter. How sparse the congregation seemed! There may have been several hundred, but they seemed a paltry number and the strains of their singing were lost in the vaulted shadows. Still the procession was impressive, with boys carrying medieval banners ahead of the choir. The paired singers passed pompously, and then came the candle-bearers, the crucifer and thurifer whose incense pot spewed forth a pungent, billowing cloud through which strode the subdeacon, deacon and presiding priest. The smoke stung my eyes. There was no sign of Michael.

The last time Carolyn had attended a Solemn High Mass had been at Michael's ordination in Saint Patrick's a decade before. Such liturgy, with chanted prayers, the Gregorian music, the incense, the hierarchy of officiants—as opposed to concelebrants—in old-fashioned fiddleback vestments, was rarely seen in post-Council Catholicism. It seemed strange to think of it as a Protestant service, since it was more familiar to me, and more beautiful, than anything I'd seen in a Catholic church in years.

It was the first Sunday of Lent and there was no
Gloria.
After singing the
Kyrie,
the choir sat and the Scriptures were read by lectors. And then the celebrant, identified by the program as the dean of the cathedral, the Reverend Thomas Reid Evans, mounted the elaborately carved white marble pulpit. Father Evans was a huge man—he had to be in that space—and his head was crowned dramatically with white hair, though he did not impress as old. He wore spectacles, but took them off with a flourish as he began to speak.

"For reasons that will be obvious to you in a moment, it was not possible for me to consult in advance with either the liturgical committee or the standing committee of the board of trustees, and for the sake of limiting possible legal jeopardy, I decided not to consult with the bishop but used my own discretion—my
sole
discretion—as the pastor of this community to invite into our pulpit this morning, on this first Sunday of the Penitential Season, a priest of the Church who has restored to us in all its power the commission priests receive from the Lord Himself to go forth into the world preaching the Gospel of Peace."

Abruptly, with no further comment, he turned and descended the pulpit and resumed his chair in the sanctuary. After a moment a bearded man robed in white and wearing a purple stole walked from behind the carved choir stalls up the length of the Choir. He bowed at the altar as he crossed in front of it, then walked to the pulpit and mounted it.

The beard threw me. He looked like an English actor. But when I heard his voice as he blessed himself and pronounced the sign of the cross, I wanted to cry out with joy for the sight of him. The old son of a bitch! My dearest friend!