Chapter 1: An Explosive Cauldron

So wanted me to start very simple in to sort because you say your name and where you're from.

Oh, okay, my name's Paul Koming. I'm from Rochester, mass originally great okay, so I made some of those nuts.

So little.

What did you want to talk about to start off the end?

Oh?

Kind of my how it was. I came to be the kind of person I was outspoken from a rather quiet person because I never usually spoke out about much of anything when I.

Was a kid.

Two miles before you get to downtown Boston on the Southeast Expressway, you pass a giant gas tank right at the edge of Boston Harbor, covered in a rainbow of colorful stripes. Seeing this gas tank means you're passing the neighborhood of Dorchester, where much of our story takes place, or at least where most of the characters seem to have apartments. It's the largest neighborhood in Boston, making up

I was born in forty eight. So the war ended, and there's a lot more opportunities there, and there's a lot more hope in the nation as a whole. Dad went a lot to what kind of person I became you know, and I was quiet, but I was very open to the things being hopeful.

Okay, before I unleash all these accents on you. Something that's always driven me crazy. When you see a movie about Boston, there's always some character walking around being like kid. If you see Tommy Sullivan at Doyle's, tell that chuckle, fuck, I need a ride back to Revere. These ridiculous accents. We're not all hit in the package store for fat mouth makys and scratch tickets. It's not really like that. I mean, I guess it is kind of sometimes a

She went overboard. No matter who came to the back door, people would come, She'd always have it open and serve them sup.

Their strongest beliefe.

Were to help other people. My father worked as a janitor in a housing project at Columbia Point. He's saw it as a pleasure to serve the poor. He's sorry as a Christian honor to be able to do that.

Like many Catholics of the fifties and sixties, the church was the centripetal force in their lives.

One of the things about living right next to the church that we open up our kitchen to anybody from the church who want to come over, and we had this big urn of coffee, and we'd have coffee and donuts for anybody that wanted to command. And they used to be a crowd of twenty twenty five people who would come over every Sunday after the church, and that would be the more progressive wing of the parishioners.

Paul grew up in the Franklin Hill housing projects near Bluehill Avenue.

I was very much going to join the Marines and fight for freedom.

I was religiously.

I would always put the American flag out.

By the time he was in his early twenties, the Vietnam War had hit Dorchester hard. A mile north of the gas tank on Morrisey Boulevard, a memorial stands for the eighty Dorchester servicemen that were killed in Vietnam in

Casualty figures to a new high.

Every night Americans received horrifying images of the government's vain attempt to pound a tiny agrarian nation into submission. And as these nights drew on into weeks and months and years, and as veterans came home and broken states of sorrow, Americans like Paul began to wonder why the hell are

Paul comes to Florida Street with me and Sarah and the kids.

If it's five am in Dorchester, where she still lives with Prince by sister Careita hanging in her pantry. Mary Anne is sitting in her living room reading books about spirituality and leadership. In January of nineteen seventy one, however, she had just left her first husband and was living on welfare with her best friend Sarah and her two children, Chrissy and Jojo. Chrissy was four.

Paul, I remember, like I thought Paul was mine, Like I thought he was like my friend, so funny, so fun the most outrageous laugh. I can't even describe to you how bizarre his laugh was.

Paul's laughs. Okay, that brings up an important point and we have to stop ever everything right here and get something out of the way. I listen to serious podcasts all the time. I listened to NPR. I know how this is supposed to go. I put my mouth really close to an expensive microphone and speak softly, with hushed patrician enthusiasm about lofty things. But it's really hard to do that if you're talking about Irish Catholics, especially if

You have no idea how I wish, Oh my god, because we were both really funny. I mean we would scream laughing, scream laughing. I remember one time we're walking down to the Newman Center and we're laughing so damn hard. We're like like literally bending over, and Mike Hunt yelled.

On the street.

Do you two know wars going on?

Legend has it? Sigmund Freud once said of the Irish that they are the the only people in the world completely impenetrable to psychoanalysis. So with that caveat out of the way, that this is going to be a fucking mess because Catholics are involved, let's continue with Chrissy describing Paul.

And I remember like everybody whenever he would let would stop whatever they were doing, like in a restaurant or at the Paula Center, or just like walking down the street. He just was special. He was really special and small and elfin and always had rosy cheeks.

So why did sweet little Paul, he of the world's most wholesome upbringing, have to go under ground in the first place? And by that I mean hide from the FBI by moving into a one bedroom apartment that already had four people in it.

Paul Koombing had signed up as a conscientious objector.

This is Anne Walsh, who at the time was a nun living on Claiborne Street in Dorchester. In those days, she was known as pretty h core and was often seen wearing combat boots and rocking up Pat bennetts ar haircut. She had just rebelled against her mother's superior and was in the midst of starting a renegade order of nuns in Dorchester. When Anne met Paul, he'd already gone before the Selective Service Board and been given conscientious objector status.

They grilled me on whether I would defend my mother she was being attacked on the street. I said, I would do everything in my power to stop that from happening, but I would not kill the person trying to do it.

If you're granted conscientious objector status, you still have to perform some sort of alternative service during the time you would have been in the army.

And he was assigned for alternative service to be an orderly at the Newton Wellesley Hospital.

But Newton and Wellesley are fancy suburbs full of rich people, and it's hard to get to on the tee.

And this is Paul Combing grew up in Dorchester between the Franklin Hill Project and Saint Leo's Parish, and so he said, you know, I'll go to City Hospital if you want, where poor people would be served. But I'm sure I'm not going to go to Wellesley. So they said, no, you're going to go to Wellesley. You don't get any choice.

So Paul never showed up in Newton, which people in Dorchester call Snewton, and in doing so forfeited his sought after CEO status. And then he took it one step further.

Filar at the time said that you had to carry your classification card and your registration card on your person at all times if you were over the age of eighteen.

Not satisfied with merely flouting his orderly assignment, Paul wanted to make sure he was in direct violation of federal law.

I took my cards and put him in an envelope and mailed them back to the Draft for telling them to do was against my religion to continue to hold these cards to participate in the draft. So I sent them back with the statements similar to that, and they kept them.

He was basically jumping up and down and waving his arms, yelling at the government to come get him, and sure enough, the long arm of the law eventually did.

A few years later, they charged me with not having them on person. Yeah, I got a summons from the court that I was being charged with three counts of violation of Select Service Act.

Paul was facing fifteen years for not carrying his draft papers on his person.

They knew I didn't have mommy, because they had them in their hands.

As you can imagine, he found this pretty depressing.

I was just going to end up going to jail for a while, and I was really just bummed out about the whole process.

He started looking at every option.

My brothers all three years I mentioned were in the service. We're all trying to convince me to go to Canada.

But Paul knew he only had one choice to stand up to the government when he knew it was wrong, because sometimes the only way to be a good citizen is to do something illegal. Then a Kakamami idea developed among the Catholic activists in the Dorchester Resistance.

There was some tauk Mary Anne amongst the community Claiborne Street.

Kind of action around on my refusing to carry my draft cards in my trial.

That Paul wanted to take this action that he wasn't going.

To show up for Corey Ann Walsh grabbed me by the call of one day and said, look, I want you to go down to the Poula Center. I want you to meet some people.

The Paulist Center was a church in downtown Boston that was beginning to make a name for itself as a hotbed for a very new kind of youthful Catholic unrest.

And talk to them about your situation.

I don't know who came up.

With the idea.

Anne Walsh.

What we came up with this idea.

We were hoping that the Paulist Center community would put Paul in sanctuary.

Sanctuary meaning Paul would turn himself over to the authority of the religious leaders inside a church instead of federal law enforcement. The Catholic Church had adopted this practice at the First Council of Orleans in five eleven AD for thieves, adulterers, and fugitive slaves to seek refuge in churches from capital punishment until an oath was sworn to do them no harm. But it had long since been abandoned.

So the question was could they find a Catholic church in which to take sanctuary. So Anne Walsh approached an Tobin at the Paula Center.

So now we have an Ann, an Ann, and a Marianne. This is, as I warned you, a story about Catholics. Here's an Tobin who everyone called Tobin.

I would meet people and they would say, oh, what are you studying. I'd say, oh, theology, and they oh, geology or isn't that interesting?

I say no not. Rocks Tobin was diminutive like Paul. She had a master's degree in theology and its great at keeping housecats. Alive well into their twenties. Tobin had recently and controversially been named female lay minister at the Poula Center. Once she got a call from Anne Walsh.

And she called me one day and said, could you come and meet me. I have somebody I want to introduce you to and we want to discuss something with you.

That night, Anne Walsh, Paul Cooming and a Tobin met at a Peter Pan restaurant near Boston University.

She had this young man with her. She introduced me to him and she said, this is Paul Cooming. He's been drafted and he's not going to go. He's going to resist. And she said, we want to know if we could have a sanctuary at the Paula Center. And I said, well, yeah, sure, why not? And she said, well clearly, she said, you don't know much about sanctuaries.

Anne Walsh then explained to Tobin that there had recently been a sanctuary at a Protestant church across Boston Common from the Paulist Center. Here's how Tobin and Paul remembered it.

Federal marshalls broke into the chapel and beat people up, and people were hurt, and there was a lot of damage done to the Arching Street. Church.

Police had gone in a riker and smashed heads with billy clubs and drag the soldiers that were a wall basically out into the street and the rest. And there's a lot of injuries.

Is it all? I see? Well, that's okay.

We'll do it anyway, you know, we'll do it.

We'll figure it out.

The thinking was that maybe in a Catholic town like Boston, where the police force was filled with Irish Catholics just like them, they could avoid a visit from the goon squad.

The sanctity of the Catholic church was just a much more really you know, chose of prejudice against other religions, I guess, but it was much more secure than any other church that would offered.

Or at least the action would create a pr nightmare for the authorities.

We felt that for sure the FBI would want to try to stop me from going into the church, rather than having to dragged me out of the church.

But their other problem was that this would put the Police Center at odds with the Catholic Church at large, and.

A Catholic Church had not done that during the Vietnam Antaiwan movement as far as I know at that time, because.

It really a Catholic Church had never had a sanctuary for a conscientious subjector ever in the history of the Catholic Church ever anywhere in the world before. It was a first, like all through World War Two, no nothing, zero, zippo.

It won't generally sound like it because a lot of what I'm going to tell you is hard to believe. But this show is in fact fact checked and we found nothing to disprove this claim. In fact, there hadn't been any instance of political sanctuary in a Catholic Church since the sixteenth century, and for that matter, the American Catholic bishops, led by Cardinal Spelman of New York, were

I remember being overjoyed that I was assigned to Boston.

That's Jim Carroll, who at the time was a Polis priest working at BA You with Anne Walsh. He's also the author of several books, including Practicing Catholic Prince of Peace and an American Requiem God, My Father and the War that Came Between Us, which won the National Book Award.

And I was assigned to Boston University, which also pleased me. I didn't want to go to the Paula Center. Why not, Well, it was a church, and it was also a famously establishment, and it was full of old guys, and it was going to be hearing confessions and saying masks. But it was a church.

Two of jim seminary brothers, Patrick and Floyd, had been assigned to the Paula Center when they were all ordained. Patrick was a wild man. Electric shocks of curly hair flew from his head as he merrily kreemed down the halls of the place from one urgent meeting to the next.

And he never wore his caller.

This was a Roman Catholic priest, the ones that wear the all black habit with a cardboard collar, putting a telltale white square at their Adams apple to signal to the world. I am a man of the cloth. But Patrick just wasn't into it because it.

Was the new church. And they never did I think, he said. He wore it three times in his whole time he was a priest.

Patrick was a kook and a revolutionary. He was on a mission to reinvent what it meant to be a priest in the world, starting with not taking himself so goddamn seriously all the time.

He would come really through a doorway and he would take one foot and put it in front of the other and cause himself to trip, like just to make people laugh, like he was a natural clown or something like that, and he had the ability to do that, and everybody.

Would laugh, and he would laugh too. He just thought it was hysterical. Every time.

He thought it was as funny as the time before, and it really was.

Patrick had only been ordained two years prior, and he and Floyd had spent those two years trying to drag the Poulas Center kicking and screaming into the twentieth century, and through a bizarre series of events which we'll soon learn about, Patrick had been placed in charge of this entire place at only thirty years old. He was the one that appointed Ann Tobin to be female lay minister, something in the Catholic Church at large found absolutely scandalous.

They were going to do it by renewing the church from head to foot, including Floyd getting a screwdriver and going into the chapel and literally starting to unscrew all the mealers because that was ridiculous.

That was part of the old church.

And now Patrick, Floyd and Tobin were running the place in an avant garde, non hierarchical Berkeley food co op structure. So of all the Catholic churches in all of Boston, this was the one that could wedge itself between the anti war movement and the Department of Justice. And so Tobin started putting the wheels in motion.

And Tobin calls me and Sarah and says, you're not going to believe.

This is Mari Anne, what just happened.

So we were beside ourselves with excitement about the possibility of doing this because it would be so powerful, and Tobin had to bring it to the team.

The only problem was when I went back to the Paula Center.

That night Tobin after her meeting with Anne Walsh and Paul Cooming, I.

Ran into Patrick and I got off the elevator upstairs and I said Oh, Patrick, this is the most exciting thing. I said, We're going to have a sanctuary that. Don't say anything else about it. I don't want to know. He said, don't tell me anything else about it. I said, oh, okay.

When this conversation happened, Patrick was going through some serious shit with the Paula's Brass, so basically the last thing he could think about was unilaterally pitting the might of the church against the might of the federal government. So Patrick wanted to help paul at the Paula Center on Park Street at the behest of Anne Anne and Mary Anne. But he was frankly pretty slammed.

That was really kind of shocking to me. So I called Anne and I said, well, there's a little bit of a problem. I said, Patrick is probably the most liberal person on the team, and so I'm not sure about the reaction of the others.

What were the stakes, though, would it be could they.

Have been maybe they shut down that, Yeah, Mary Anne, they could have maybe shut down the follow Center or whatever.

Did Rome have that authority to do that?

Well, Boston archdioceis could have Yeah, they could have said you're no longer welcome in the Boston Archdioces.

Patrick had only taken over the Paula Center about eight months prior and was in the middle of trying to rescue the church at large from itself. He was an innovator, holding crazy multimedia liturgies that bore no resemblance to the Catholic Mass one thinks of today. But he had thus far avoided too much direct anti war activity, focusing instead

The group came around to it. I think it probably took quite a few conversations.

Somehow they managed to convince Patrick and Floyd that it was better to beg forgiveness than ask permission, that if you play two behemoth institutions like these against one another, it can create enough confusion to get away with anything.

And they said yes, so, oh God, that was bad.

Although I loved him to death, I feared the ramifications of it, like the federal agents, you know, bashing people.

So the decision was made amongst all of us that we were going to do it.

And so they began making preparations.

And there were hundreds of people involved in this, from the whole community. The Newman House would be you all of us at the Paula Center, the whole Catholic left community up and down the East coast.

There were hundreds of people involved.

We were planning us for about a month. I believe the peace community within the Poula Senate was so advanced.

The groundwork that had happened prior to this was getting the church ready for sanctuary because we knew, you know, there would be many people who would stay inside the church with Paul, including me, the two kids, Sarah, and one hundred other people.

We were sure that the word had gotten out that this sanctuary was going to happen.

By this point, j Edgar Hoover's FBI was being incredibly aggressive with the anti war movement following Paul and his friends, harassing everyone's parents and even conspicuously searching through their parents' neighbors trash pins.

Because the FBI was so vigilant. There was concern that Paul would be arrested.

Because we knew that were parishionists who had brothers or relatives in the FBI.

And that they would find out about this ahead of time.

We fell for sure that they knew.

So the question was where could Paul go quote unquote underground?

I and mary Anne and Sarah and others Anthobin and Patrick decided the idea.

Was could he come and stay at Florida Street with.

Us, pretty low income building that was not well kept up.

Why we were thought to be underground? I have no idea, because maybe because of the kids.

Okay, I had a crush on Sarah Toci, So I think I was the one that brought up the idea that a good place for me to hide out was their apartment. So Paul moves in with us, and the fact that there was no place other than a floor space for me to be didn't make any difference.

You know, three rooms.

Christy and Jojo.

Had one bedroom, kids had the bedroom.

There was a kitchen, and there was a living room and that's all there was to this apartment.

Paul's got a bid roll. Sarah and I are on the day bed pullout.

Coach on the flos and did that for two weeks.

One thing I remember about Paul was sitting.

On him Chrissy again, Mary Anne's daughter, who was four.

He just loved him, sitting on his lap, holding his hand while he was doing his crazy laugh, feeling his body's shape.

This was a group of people who knew first and foremost how to have a good time, a distant second how to be criminals. Mary Anne would come to refer to them all as the ganger couldn't shoot straight after a screwball Jerry Orbach gangster comedy running in cinemas at

Now we're all living together at Florida Street, and we're all involved in getting the sanctuary organized and then getting him in town without being seen. And I will never ever ever forget the morning we're going to go to take sanctuary. He's supposed to show up at court at nine o'clock.

I had a quick date. I was supposed to show up for a trial to answer questions and ask questions because I was defending myself.

But instead the plan was Mary Anne, Sarah and the kids would spirit Paul into the Paula Center while the trial was underway.

There was a lot of pressure from my family not to do it this.

Way, but despite their preference for Paul to escape to Canada, Paul's parents agreed to appear in his stead at the trial. Marianne and Sarah knew meanwhile that the FBI was on the lookout for Paul, and so they had to somehow go incognito.

So the morning of the sanctuary we all get up at the crack of dawn.

We had a long brown coat with a hood.

I remember the cape. They had to dress him up in a costume, and I think it was like a cape with a hood. Again seventies.

The styles of the winter coats at that time, they almost looked like monk's habits.

I either looked like a woman or I look.

Like a monk.

I remember. I think it was my mom putting a little bit of makeup on him.

I think I even put on a little bit of makeup, lipstick or something to emphasize the fact that I.

Was a woman.

Joe and I were part of the cover because we held his hands.

And we have the kids. We've got Jojo in the carriage. We're carrying backpacks.

Because we know we're going to stay.

And Kristen and Sarah, Paul and I and Jojo all go to Ashmont station.

It's snowing.

I mostly remember the subway ride being anxious.

When we get off at Park Street, we look up Park Street and we see that there's activity outside Park Street and it looks like the FBI.

It looks like Park Street is being covered.

When the sanctuary started, Paul was not in the Paula Center. The FBI got there before he did.

And so we get ourselves into Brighams.

Brighams, if you're not from Boston, was a ubiquitous chain of diners in the sixties and seventies, and their coffee tasted like payment.

And we get ourselves a cup of coffee and we're stunned. I mean, we're flummoxed.

What are we going to do?

Were we going to make a break for it and just saunter up there Paul in his girl coat and get him in the door.

Meanwhile, Paul's father was in the courthouse facing the judge in his son's place.

There was probably one hundred people in the courtroom expecting me to be on trial then there to support me. But I wasn't there. But my father and mother were there. The judge, Charles e.

Isisansky Jr.

I remember his nigh very well. He was the chief goudge of the Federal District. He asked if there was anybody there that knew where Paul was.

His father was going to be at the courtroom and read the statement to the judge.

My fatherly gets up and says, your honor, Paul is not coming to trial today. Paul is being offered sanctuary in the church nearby and will stay there and is refusing to come to trial to participate in this process. I think he was shaking in his boots all the time he was talking. And the judge of journal meeting and he ordered the federal marshals to take every precaution not to disrupt the church. He ordered that from the bench.

At that moment, the assembled supporters stood in Unison, began singing and marched towards the Paula Center.

They walked from the courthouse, which was probably a good seven er or ten blocks away, somewhere in that vicinity, marching and singing all the way with my father and mother the parade, singing on anti wa songs. They did that for the several blocks, right through the streets of Austin.

From where they stood at the window of Brigham's, Mary Anne, Paul, Sarah and the kids could see down Tremont Street that the singing marchers were headed straight for the Paula Center and they were going to go inside and start the sanctuary without Paul in the building.

Now, our job had been to get Paul there before anybody else got there, but what with the FBI up and down the road, that wasn't working out.

The marchers were about to round the corner onto Park Street and head straight for the FBI, with Paul trapped in Brighams watching on this season of Divine Intervention, a generation of young Catholic radicals enters the resistance.

They just cried, these incredible doors open, and a whole generation just poured through.

It was definitely our time.

This kind of time that you think, well, things are never going to be quite the same anymore, and they weren't.

Many of the things that we were about to do we're not considered legal or patriotic.

And attempts to sabotage a war by any means necessary.

It was a real comedy of eras that we pulled off.

They've not committed just a crime that wasn't simply breaking an entry.

They were committing acts of civil dish obedience. It took a lot of God.

We had a very modest name. We called ourself the East Coast Conspiracy to.

Save lives as they faced down j Edgar Hoover's FBI. Hoover was crazy about us.

He wanted to have kind of dyed everybody.

It was an agent behind them.

Burn nailbox and when the verdict of the jury was announced, people stood up in the courtbrook and sang amazing grace, and the jury stood up.

With and attempted to smash one institution after another.

The Catholic Church was going through a revolution and the Paul Center was a main place of revolutionary firment.

That's what makes liberation theologies so threatening, I think, is the people get to call on the leaders.

It was more equal, and it was a new concept.

While navigating the unbridled chaos of being young and in love. Those movements come out of love.

They come out of people's love for their fellow men and women.

Just throwing yourself on the mercy of the universe and just hope to Christ you're going to land on your feet.

He wanted so much in his life that somehow the priesthood refused to alloe.

I picked up the phone.

And my thought was, this is the most important phone call I'll ever make in my life.

I couldn't believe it. I mean, it was Divine Intervention.

Divine Intervention is a production of iHeart Podcasts. It's produced by Wonder Media Network. It was created and written by me, your host, Brendan Patrick Hughes. Our indefatigable producers Our Carmen Borca Correo, Abby Delk Palomo, Moreno, Jimenez, Grace Lynch, and myself. Our editor is Towering Figure of Strength Grace Lynch for Wonder Media Network. Our executive producers are Emily Rudder and Jenny Kaplan for iHeart Podcasts. Our executive producer is Christina