Authors: J. Anthony Lukas
“Okay, all the Our Fathers over here!” one of the women shouted. “Line up facing this way!”
“No, no, you Our Fathers,” Alice yelled. “Stand fast until I tell you to move! Hail Marys over here!”
“What are you talking about?” the woman bellowed back. “I told the Glory Be’s to stand over there!”
Alice grew red in the face. Barbara was so angry she could hardly speak. “In one more second,” she said in a strangled voice, “I’m going to punch somebody in the nose.” They looked at each other for a moment, then collapsed in laughter. “Come on,” said Barbara, “let’s get out of here.” Turning their backs on the field of colored lights, they adjourned to the Cobblestone Bar and drank whiskey sours all through the Feast of Our Lady of the Rosary.
As Charlestown’s crisis intensified that fall, St. Mary’s rectory was frequently the tranquil eye in the hurricane. Located at the southeast corner of Monument Square diagonally across from the high school, it was an ideal retreat from the heat of battle. Bob Boyle and Bill Joy had resolved to make its somber, wood-paneled dining room a place where all parties, regardless of viewpoint, could find temporary sanctuary. A mug of steaming coffee, a sugar doughnut, and a sympathetic ear were available to anyone who rang the doorbell. It was where Frank Power went at dawn to share his private anguish; where Captain Bill MacDonald betrayed his doubts about police tactics; where Roberta Delaney,
manager of the Little City Hall, despaired about the evaporation of Charlestown’s “moderate middle”; where Moe Gillen wondered if he could any longer control the demons set loose in the Town. And on at least two occasions that fall, it was where Mayor Kevin White met with Charlestown’s leaders, seeking to restore some semblance of order.
From midsummer on, the rectory also harbored a major actor in the drama. Father Michael Groden, the Cardinal’s principal adviser on urban affairs, had lived at St. Mary’s for several years, but on July 1, 1975, he was named director of the Citywide Coordinating Council, the body Judge Garrity had created to supervise desegregation. The judge hoped a priest’s appointment to the post would help legitimize his order, much as Frank Lally had been used a decade earlier to sanctify urban renewal. But just as Lally’s presence at St. Catherine’s reminded Charlestown of the Church’s stance on renewal, so Mike Groden’s continuing residence at St. Mary’s constituted further evidence to the Townies of the Church’s support for desegregation. On occasion, demonstrators would shout epithets at the rectory. “Judas!” they chanted. “Traitor!” And when Father Groden failed to respond, they shouted, “We know you’re in there, Groden, come down and defend yourself.” More than once, when he emerged the next morning, he found the tires of his car slashed.
Sometimes invective was hurled at the other priests as well. Once, as Bob Boyle was crossing the Monument grounds, he passed a Powder Keg demonstration. “There’s a Boyle on your ass!” shouted one man. Wheeling, the priest stared at his tormentor. “I hear you, Tom Johnson,” he said.
Alice could never muster that kind of anger at the Church. As much as she might resent individual priests like Larry Buckley, she retained some degree of her reverence for the institution itself. And it was reinforced by her growing respect and affection for one priest in particular, the irrepressible Bill Joy.
Joy was Charlestown’s favorite priest. His natural ebullience, gaiety, and wit made his name seem especially appropriate. Barely twenty-six, with a boyish grin and thick brown hair curling down his neck, he didn’t look old enough to tend men’s souls. Free of the ecclesiastical cant and sanctimony that had marked certain of his predecessors, he felt utterly at home with the Townies and they with him. Joy was particularly effective with the young, who treated him as a wise, yet playful older brother—a rapport all the more remarkable since Charlestown’s youth had been rapidly drifting away from the Church. Once, the Town’s families had prided themselves on giving a son or daughter to the Church, but those days were gone; between 1965 and 1975, only two Charlestown youths had become priests. And the decline in vocations was only one symptom of an underlying reality: religion was no longer a relevant consideration for most of Charlestown’s young people.
Hoping to bring young Townies back to the Church, Bill Joy decided to begin with teenage girls. Male-oriented Charlestown bristled with clubs and sports programs for boys, but girls, more mature and self-reliant at that age, were generally left to their own devices. In late 1973, Joy set out to gain their confidence by forming a girls’ basketball team in the Catholic Youth Organization
league. Most of his players were tenth-graders at Charlestown High—among them, Lisa McGoff, Michele Barrett, and the others who later were to form the nucleus of Charlestown High’s girls’ team. They already had blue shorts, so Joy went looking for jerseys to match. Unsure what size to buy, he settled on small and medium boys’ shirts, but when the girls tried them on, they were much too small. There was an awkward moment as Michele explained that even a teenage girl had physical characteristics which made it difficult to squeeze into a boy’s T-shirt. The priest blushed a deep red, the girls giggled, and from then on they were the best of friends. A winning combination, they went all the way to the CYO finals, before losing to a team from the Cathedral. After the game, Joy took the girls back to his parents’ house for sandwiches and Cokes. Sensing an air of regret at the party—not so much at the loss of the championship as because it was their final game—Joy said that they didn’t have to break up just because the season was over; they could stick together because they liked each other.
So they did. On summer weekends, he would pile the girls into his car, spend a long day at the beach, then stop for pizza on the way home. That fall, they climbed Mount Monadnock, and that winter, Joy took them on their first skiing trip. They floundered and fell, but they loved it and loved him for bringing them. These trips with the young priest were the girls’ one escape from Charlestown, their only glimpses of a wider world. They called them “Joy Rides.”
Only after building this bridge of affection did Joy propose an overtly religious activity: a special Mass of their own. The girls readily agreed. Starting in October 1974, thirty girls assembled every Sunday evening at St. Mary’s rectory, sitting cross-legged on the floor before a table draped with an altar cloth. Dressed in a plain black shirt and white collar, Joy would read a piece of scripture, play some recorded music, then deliver a brief sermon on issues which concerned them most: relationships with boys, tensions with parents, doubts about their futures. Afterwards, they went downstairs for pizza, Cokes, and discussion. Sometimes, Joy celebrated the Mass in one of the girls’ own houses, lending the ritual an even more intimate air.
A dedicated member of Bill Joy’s circle, Lisa McGoff rarely missed a Joy Ride or a Sunday-night Mass. She’d never thought of herself as a particularly religious person—the priests at St. Catherine’s turned her off, and she rarely attended Mass there—but Joy was unlike any priest she’d ever known before. He was such a good guy, such a
sweet
guy. She found herself drawn more and more frequently over the hill to St. Mary’s.
Bob Boyle and Bill Joy tried other innovations in the Mass, including a “lay lector” program in which members of the congregation read short selections from the liturgy, and Joy was delighted when Lisa volunteered to take part in the Good Friday services. Assigned the New Testament reading from Hebrews, Chapters 4–5, she practiced the difficult passage before the bathroom mirror at home. When the day arrived, she stood proudly before a huge holiday crowd and read: “Let us confidently approach the throne of Grace to
receive mercy and favor and find help in time of need. In the days when he was in the flesh, Christ offered prayers and supplications with loud cries and tears to God …”
Bill Joy’s work with the girls paid dividends in the fall of 1975 when he found himself caught up in nightly skirmishes on Bunker Hill Street. More than once, as he and Jack Ward moved into the no-man’s-land between the Tactical Patrol Force and crowds of rock-throwing youngsters, the kids turned their wrath on the young priests, accusing them of meddling in matters which were none of their business. “Get outta here, you fuckin’ nigger lovers,” they would cry. “Go back to your stinkin’ church.” But when Lisa McGoff and her girlfriends heard that, they would rally to Joy’s defense. “You’re wrong,” Lisa would say indignantly. “He’s okay. He’s a Townie priest. Leave him alone.”
Somewhat to her surprise, Alice found herself defending Joy too. At first, when Lisa had told her about the Masses in the rectory, she was suspicious. What was this young priest up to with her daughter? Was he brainwashing her for busing the way earlier priests had done for urban renewal? But Lisa kept insisting that nothing like that was going on. “He never even mentions busing, Ma,” she’d say. “He’s different from the others.” Finally, Alice had to find out for herself, and she began crossing the hill to hear Mass in the grand old church of her youth, returning Sunday after Sunday. Soon she was nearly as pleased with Joy as her daughter was. Her friends in Powder Keg accused her of being naïve. “How can you like him, Alice?” they would ask. “He’s a pro-buser.” Maybe he was for busing—she didn’t know and, frankly, she didn’t want to find out; if he ever told her he was, if he made it explicit, she’d have to break with him as she had with the Cardinal. And she didn’t want to do that. He was her last connection to the Church and she treasured him for it.
But Bill Joy derived little satisfaction from knowing that many Townies held him in high esteem while distrusting—even disliking—Cardinal Medeiros. For in the long run, he knew, the Church would thrive or wither as a single organism. Ecclesiastical authority was still rigidly hierarchical, and despite his remoteness from their daily lives, the only figure who could make the Church a powerful force for the spiritual and temporal well-being of Boston’s Catholics was Medeiros himself. And as it happened, Joy knew the Cardinal better than most priests of his age and experience. As student council president at St. John’s Seminary in 1970–71, it was he who issued the first invitation to Medeiros to address the student body and he who welcomed the Cardinal on his arrival. Although they were scarcely friends—the difference in age and rank precluded that—Joy felt a sympathy for the older man. He had discovered human qualities in Medeiros that many others had failed to detect.
But the Cardinal seemed unable or unwilling to show himself to the people of Charlestown. On several occasions through the preceding year, the priests at St. Mary’s had urged him to make an appearance in the Town. When a sixteen-year-old girl was stabbed to death in May 1975 and two Chinese youths were arrested for the crime, Boyle suggested to the Cardinal’s staff that this would be an ideal opportunity for Medeiros to demonstrate his concern
for Charlestown; by simply showing up at the wake, he could earn himself—and the Church—great goodwill. But he didn’t appear. The priests had also hoped that he would attend the two hundredth anniversary of the Battle of Bunker Hill, in June 1975, but again the Cardinal held back. During the first week of school that fall, as the prayer marches wound past the rectory and the priests struggled to retain some vestige of their former authority in the Town, Medeiros telephoned St. Mary’s nearly every day to keep abreast of developments. But he declined to come himself.
So when the Cardinal invited him to lunch in mid-September, Bill Joy seized the opportunity. During the meal, conversation was light and inconsequential; but afterwards the Cardinal took the young priest into his study, where they talked for more than an hour. Clearly dismayed by what was going on in Charlestown—particularly the public attacks on the Church and on himself—he wanted a firsthand report from a priest at the scene.
Joy began by reassuring the Cardinal that things weren’t nearly so bad as they seemed from a distance. The people of Charlestown weren’t all violent racists. There were many open-minded moderates among them, but they needed support and reassurance. And they particularly needed to feel that the Church hadn’t abandoned them. As for the Cardinal himself, the Townies didn’t hate him, they simply didn’t know him. If only he would come to Charlestown and meet the people face to face, Joy argued, he could begin to break down the wall of mistrust erected against him. The meeting ended inconclusively, the Cardinal thanking Joy for his report but giving no assurance that he would visit the Town anytime soon.
All through the winter and early spring of 1976, the Cardinal kept his distance. Then, one Sunday morning in May, the Boston
Herald American
published a major interview with Medeiros. “Cardinal Rejects City Leadership” read the page one headline. Asked about suggestions that he should play a more prominent role in resolving the city’s racial crisis—especially in heavily Catholic communities like South Boston and Charlestown—the Cardinal had responded angrily.
“I am not colorful,” he said. “I am not flamboyant—waving my red flag before the bull. I am not going into South Boston to speak, to exhort, as so many think I should. Why should I go? To get stoned? Is that what they’d like to see? I am not afraid to get stones thrown at me. But I am afraid for Boston. It does not need the opprobrium of national headlines saying that their Archbishop was stoned.
“I’ve been turned off in South Boston, anyhow. No one there is listening to me. Eighty percent of the Catholics in South Boston do not attend Mass or go to church. They wanted me to go to Charlestown, too. To get stoned. They’re looking for blood and they’d love to see me dead in the streets so they can sell newspapers. Well, I don’t think I will do that willingly. If it is true that I am not accepted in Boston, then what could I do to stop it? They are not doing what I tell them to do. I have appealed a thousand times. My priests appeal. But there is no respect.”
The Cardinal’s interview reverberated through his Archdiocese. Many of the faithful reacted with disbelief. Could Medeiros really have said those things about his fellow Catholics? In South Boston and Charlestown, the reaction was even more intense. Catholics there stood accused of barbarism, of readiness to stone a prince of the Church much as twenty centuries before, ignorant heathens had abused and crucified the Lord. In Southie—which had borne the brunt of his scorn—the Cardinal was rebutted in the streets, in the taverns, and at public meetings. Louise Day Hicks said she had been “crushed” by the Cardinal’s remarks. “South Boston has always boasted with pride that it has sent more young men and women to the religious life than any other community its size in the country,” she said. “I respect Cardinal Medeiros the priest and invite him to walk in South Boston with me and preside at the holy sacrifice of the Mass in the community.” Many of South Boston’s priests felt personally impugned by the Cardinal’s remarks. By the Saturday following publication of the interview, the uproar was so great that Medeiros met with twenty priests from the district and tendered an apology, which was read from South Boston pulpits over the weekend: “Your Archbishop reacted, after a long and anguished time, out of fatigue and anger. These, as you know, cloud the mind … Our Lord has proved once again that I am human and that we are all sinners.”