The Kirks never kowtowed to the Church that way. When Alice was fourteen, she and some friends staged an epic snowball tight on the Training Field. Just then, Father John Fogarty of St. Mary’s walked past. Ordering the children to halt their battle, he took their names, then called their homes to report them. Alice never forgot that incident. Over the years, it came to stand for the Church’s determination to exercise authority outside its realm, and like her father, she bridled at such presumption. Some years later, when she married Danny McGoff, Father Fogarty presided at the ceremony, and remembering that snowy day on the Training Field, Alice took her vows through half-gritted teeth.
If Alice needed further evidence of the Church’s inclination to meddle in temporal matters, she found it in the decision of Charlestown’s priests to immerse themselves in the Town’s urban renewal battles. It was a strategy born a few years earlier on the South Side of Chicago. When Saul Alinsky, the radical community organizer, sought to revive the deteriorating Woodlawn neighborhood, he struck a marriage of convenience with the Archdiocese of Chicago. Albert Cardinal Meyer knew that the Church had a heavy stake in neighborhoods like Woodlawn, whose Irish Catholic residents were departing faster than blacks could replace them. Alinsky and Meyer collaborated to halt the exodus and redevelop Woodlawn as an integrated community. Not only did the Cardinal order the neighborhood’s nine pastors to provide $10,000 per parish toward Alinsky’s efforts, he demanded wholehearted support for the redevelopment program, including endorsements from the pulpit. One pastor heatedly objected, warning that his white parishioners would never stand for it. “There’ll be war, there’ll be blood in the streets,” he said. “Well, Father,” replied the Cardinal, “prepare for war.”
One of Alinsky’s organizers in Woodlawn had been a Lithuanian Catholic named Joe Vilimas. In 1961, Ed Logue hired him away to organize community support for urban renewal in Charlestown. Not surprisingly, Vilimas made Woodlawn his model; once again, his campaign would be founded on an alliance with the Church.
Even before Vilimas arrived, Cardinal Cushing had signaled his support of Boston’s renewal by delegating his most intimate associate, Monsignor Francis J. Lally, to serve as chairman of the new Boston Redevelopment Authority. Lally took up residence at St. Catherine’s in Charlestown, where his very presence was a visible symbol of the Cardinal’s commitment. Between them, Lally and Vilimas enlisted the three Charlestown pastors—Monsignors Flaherty, Shea, and Quirbach—in the renewal fight. The pastors didn’t need much persuasion. Like Meyer in Chicago, they saw the steady drain of young Catholics to the suburbs as a dire threat to their parishes. Renewal, they believed, would stem that tide.
The clergy became particularly emphatic after the first Charlestown plan was howled down at a hearing on January 7, 1963. Five days after the hearing, Lally—as editor of the archdiocesan weekly, the Pilot—wrote an editorial condemning the plan’s opponents. Three weeks later, the three Charlestown monsignori followed with a joint statement from their pulpits which went, in part: “Charlestown and its people are at a crossroad. The future of our district is mixed with uncertainty and fear. Amid the blight and decay and the ever-increasing commercial and industrial expansion, your home and your parish will vanish. Charlestown will be dead…. When another public hearing is called in Charlestown we hope that all the people of this district will attend and support the rebuilding of this town. Working together, in our own self-interest, we can achieve miracles.”
When Logue decided that he was ready for another hearing—in March 1965—Cardinal Cushing set the stage with a statement assuring Charlestown that renewal offered “the most hopeful promise of the permanent rehabilitation of that beloved part of our great city.” At the hearing itself, the Charlestown monsignori weighed in again with impassioned statements, concluding with Father Shea’s abrupt call for a show of hands. When the plan was approved, some commentators credited the Church with carrying the day. But for every vote won over by the clergy, another was probably lost by their intervention. For Bernie Kirk was hardly alone in his submerged anticlericalism; many Townies harbored a secret resentment of the Church, which at last it was permissible to voice. One opponent of renewal accused the priests of “selling the people of Charlestown for thirty pieces of silver.” Others called for a boycott of the churches, particularly their collection plates. “If they won’t support us,” asked Joseph Catanzaro, “why should we support them?” Others took more direct action. One outraged parishioner punched Monsignor Shea in the stomach. And a businessman paid $800 to rent a huge billboard on the expressway which proclaimed: “Father Flaherty is a Judas.”
The Charlestown churches never fully recovered. The extraordinary authority which priests had once enjoyed in the Town was irrevocably eroded. St. Mary’s Parish, where Monsignor Flaherty had spearheaded the renewal crusade, was decimated by the BRA’s bulldozers and years were to pass before new housing rose on the rubble-strewn lots. Opponents of renewal were convinced that the Church must have received some inducement, probably a secret share of the profits. Henceforth, many Townies—Alice McGoff among them—no longer regarded the Church as a spiritual body, but as a self-serving institution like any other, which wouldn’t hesitate to ally itself with Charlestown’s enemies if it envisioned some benefit for itself.
But Alice’s mounting skepticism toward the Church had another, more private source. In her first five years of marriage, she gave birth to five children. When the fifth—Tommy—was born in 1962, the delivery took thirty-six hours and nearly killed her. At one point, the prognosis for mother and child was so grim that a priest was summoned to her room, standing by to administer the last rites. Although Alice and her baby both survived, the doctor warned her that she must never have another child; her body simply wasn’t up to it.
The doctor’s pronouncement was a terrible blow to Alice and Danny, both still in their mid-twenties. They couldn’t imagine giving up sex with each other, but how could they continue, knowing it might cost Alice her life? Finally, Danny went to a priest at St. Catherine’s, explained the situation, and asked for a special dispensation to use contraceptives. “No, my son,” the priest replied. “Contraception is a mortal sin.” All he could offer was the “rhythm method” of periodic abstinence. When Danny said that would never work for them, the priest said, “Well then, you and your wife must live as sister and brother.” “Father,” said Danny McGoff, “I had three sisters when I was growing up. I didn’t marry Alice to have a fourth one.” The priest said he was sorry, but there was nothing he could do for them.
When Danny told her what had happened, Alice wasn’t very surprised. “What did you expect?” she asked him. “They have their rules.” But the more she thought about it, the angrier she got. The priest had given her a terrible choice: celibacy or death. Clearly, he didn’t much care whether she lived or died. But if her own life wasn’t important, what about the five young children she would leave behind? Didn’t the Church care about them?
Danny hadn’t given up. Several months later, walking through the Boston Common, he passed the Paulist Center, headquarters of a priestly order which took a more liberal position on matters like birth control. On impulse, Danny consulted a Paulist father, who told him, “I can’t give you any hard-and-fast rules on something like that. You have to follow your own conscience.” Interpreting this as a special dispensation, Danny rushed home to tell his wife. But, by then, it was academic. Alice was already pregnant with twins, born prematurely—but safely—the following spring.
Even after the twins’ birth, she never used contraceptives. The birth control prohibition had been hammered at her so long and hard she couldn’t bring herself to violate it. She was like her father, who, once the Pope announced that you could eat meat on Friday, still insisted on fish. “What about all those people who are burning in hell for eating meat?” he would ask, only half in jest. The old dicta died hard.
Many of them did die, though. For just as Alice was confronting the Church’s r
igidity on birth control, the world’s bishops were gathering in Rome for a conclave that was to change the face of modern Catholicism. The Second Vatican Council ushered in an aggiornamento—a spiritual renewal—which eradicated much that was negative and defensive in the Church’s relations with society. Under Pope John XXIII, the Council approved historic declarations on religious freedom and the Jews, modernized the traditional liturgy, allowing Mass to be celebrated in a country’s mother tongue rather than in Latin, and permitted more informal administration of the sacraments.
For Alice, Vatican II was a mixed blessing. She approved its attitude toward other religions, a far cry from the Church’s position when she was growing up. In those days, the priests at St. Mary’s flatly prohibited their parishioners from entering a Protestant church or a Jewish synagogue. After all, Protestants and Jews were destined to fry in hell. She never knew a Protestant until she was an adult and even then she felt uncomfortable in their presence. That struck her as ridiculous now: everyone ought to be free to believe what he chose to. But the liturgical reforms were another matter. They came so swiftly, so abruptly, that she had no time to prepare. All of a sudden, one Sunday morning in October 1963, the priests at St. Mary’s abandoned the Roman Mass as it had been celebrated for centuries. No longer did they turn their backs on the congregation as they mumbled the unintelligible mysteries of the Latin liturgy; now they faced their parishioners head on, speaking in the all too familiar accents of Irish America. The new style—democratic though it might be—blunted the aesthetics of Catholicism, long its principal attraction to Alice. The Church wasn’t teaching religion anymore, it was teaching humanism, but she didn’t need anyone to show her how to be human—she’d been granted that privilege when she was born; what she needed were priests to show her how to be truly Catholic. Instead, they were melting everyone together in one great religion.
Often it seemed as if Vatican II had opened the church door to all kinds of kookiness. Take the new breed of anti-war clergy—the Berrigan brothers plotting to kidnap Henry Kissinger, the priests offering sanctuary to war resisters, the Sisters in Maryland pouring sheep’s blood over draft records. Her own feelings on the war were deeply conflicted: she wasn’t sure what we were doing there in the first place, but once we were there, we ought to fight to win. Yet regardless of how you felt on the issue, what was the Church doing in the anti-war movement at all? Catholics had never been pacifists. Priests and Sisters should stop ridiculing the soldiers—Protestants, Jews, and Catholics—who were dying for their country. They should tend to the poor boys’ souls. That’s where the Church belonged—in your soul, not on a platform debating the issues.
Gradually, Alice noticed that the Church was beginning to take sides, too, in Boston’s school wars. It was nothing very dramatic at first—a few statements by Cardinal Cushing supporting the Racial Imbalance Act, later echoed by his successor, Humberto Cardinal Medeiros. Such declarations didn’t really bother Alice—they were the kind of pronouncements she’d come to expect from the Cardinal’s office, high-minded expressions of brotherhood and racial equality which nobody took very seriously. But when Medeiros endorsed Judge Garrity’s busing order in June 1974, Alice began to wonder just what this new Cardinal was up to. And when he ordered Catholic schools in the Archdiocese not to accept refugees from busing, she realized that Medeiros had thrown the full weight of her Church into the battle against her.
To Alice, the Cardinal’s proclamations grossly violated Church dogma which had consistently put the rights of the family above the rights of the state. The anti-busing movement produced a pamphlet documenting the Church’s statements on the question, most of them issued in the prolonged battle over the place of Catholic schools in a secular society. Alice found these statements clear and unequivocal. “Parents who have the primary and inalienable right and duty to educate their children must enjoy true liberty in their choice of schools,” the Second Vatican Council had declared. And Pope Pius XI had written in 1929: “The family holds directly from the Creator the mission and hence the right to educate the offspring, a right anterior to any right whatever of civil society and the state and therefore inviolable on the part of any power on earth. This mission cannot be wrested from parents without grave violation of their rights.” How could the Cardinal now defy these doctrines by ceding to a civil court the power to dictate where a Catholic family’s children should be educated?
From the day in 1970 when Cardinal Medeiros had succeeded Cushing, she’d felt uncomfortable with this pious little Portuguese. Whatever you might say about Cushing, he was one of them, a Boston Irishman through and through. His very faults—his incessant politicking, his cronyism, his alliance with the Kennedys—were typically Irish failings. As a Cardinal he sometimes overreached himself, but as a man you had to respect him—a big strapping guy who wouldn’t hesitate to toss a football around, or whack a kid when he got out of hand, or belly up to the bar with the rest of the fellas. Cushing was a regular guy. But Medeiros was something else—not only a foreigner, an outsider, but about as different from a Boston Irish priest as anything you could imagine. He was a holy little fellow, always bowing his head, wringing his hands, and praying in those whiny, singsong Mediterranean rhythms. Just like one of those Italian Popes. There was something about the new Cardinal, something soft, which made her profoundly uneasy.
Alice responded to the Cardinal’s stand on busing by refusing to contribute 40 his annual Stewardship Appeal, a special archdiocesan fund drive designed to reduce the huge deficit which Medeiros had inherited from Cushing. She still contributed to the parish, but when the Stewardship envelope arrived, she simply scrawled across it “No Forced Busing” and mailed it back. Even her aunt Mary—who had never refused a Church cause—boycotted the Stewardship Appeal. If enough people did that, Alice thought, the Cardinal might eventually get the message.
The real truth was that no Cardinal Archbishop could make that much difference in the daily lives of Boston’s Catholics. What mattered to them were their parish priests—the pastor and his two or three curates—who celebrated Mass on Sundays, heard their confessions, married them, visited them when they were sick, and gave them the last rites when they were dying.
Though crowded into one square mile, Charlestown’s three parishes each represented a distinct slice of the Town. St. Francis de Sales’ Church stood a bit haughtily at the crest of Bunker Hill, surrounded by the brown and gray three-deckers of its solid burghers; St. Mary’s, the oldest Catholic church in town and once the most prestigious, now catered to a strange amalgam of the new gentry around Monument Square and older working-class families in the Valley; and St. Catherine’s served primarily the social outcasts of the Bunker Hill housing project. Having grown up in St. Mary’s Parish, attended its parochial school, been confirmed and married there, Alice would always think of herself as a St. Mary’s girl, but now that she lived in the project, St. Catherine’s was just a few steps from her door and it was there that she generally went for Mass or confession.
St. Catherine’s pastor was William Anderson, an aging priest overwhelmed by project life and yearning for a quiet suburban parish. Many of his responsibilities fell on his pugnacious curate, Lawrence Buckley, a middle-aged Redemptorist priest who had served for twenty-two years in Puerto Rico and the Virgin Islands before returning to his native Roxbury in 1972. His long service in the Caribbean had left him with profound convictions about racial equality, and his two years in Roxbury only deepened that commitment. Arriving at St. Catherine’s in 1974, Buckley resolved to confront his new parishioners’ racial bias. In January 1975, he invited Pat Russell, the newly elected president of Powder Keg, to the rectory for a discussion of the gathering crisis. For nearly three hours they reviewed the history of Boston’s school case and when Pat left shortly before midnight, Buckley was convinced that he had persuaded her to take a more “Christian” approach to the busing issue. A week later, he was dismayed when he saw her on television wearing a “Stop Forced Bu
sing” T-shirt as she angrily confronted the Governor’s Commission on the Status of Women.
Undeterred, he took his case into the pulpit. One Sunday in May 1975—a few weeks after the judge released his Phase II plan—Buckley delivered a sermon at St. Catherine’s eleven o’clock Mass. Speaking of his experience on St. Thomas in the Virgin Islands, he called it “the happiest community I’ve ever lived in, a place where blacks and whites lived together, sharing what little they had with love and respect for each other’s rights.” Buckley urged his parishioners to abandon their racial preconceptions and work toward an integrated society in which all people were “free to come and go as they wish.” Such integration was not only a “Christian principle,” it was the law of the land. He warned them against politicians who tried to lead them down the “dead-end street” of resistance to the law, for such politicians wouldn’t be around when they were ambushed on that street.
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