Chapter 5: The Red Double Doors on Park Street

Sometimes in life you make an impulsive decision for all the right reasons justice, dignity, reckless, abandon etc. That immediately plunges you into the deep end in way over your head. And when that happens, you tend to examine your life choices.

There I was inside the closet.

We last left Anne Walsh, trapped to two in the morning in a roasting utility closet after the raid on a Philadelphia draft board had gone horrendously wrong.

Before I knew it, I heard those barking dogs with a canine squad.

Anne wasn't even supposed to be part of this raid, but she had filled in at the last minute.

Policeman came was with a drawing gun.

Everyone else had known the escape plan. If they got caught, they scurried down a certain staircase into the Philadelphia night. Now she was all alone in the dark in a city she didn't know. It must have felt like the ass not Michael Collins floating around the dark side of the moon, no contact with humanity, while Neil Armstrong traps across the lunar surface. Anne Walsh was a woman desperately in need of a lifeline.

I was taken down to the ground floor, my hands behind my back, handcuffed to a chair.

But it was these dogs, like you know, circling me. So I'm praying, like to Saint Francis of a sissy, Oh please love you don't do that.

Now Anne would be arrested, her one fear of disgracing her war hero father realized.

And one policeman said, frankly, I'd like to piss all over you.

Police forces are kind of like hockey teams. You got your finesse players, and you got your goons tonight and got all the goons.

And that was like so horrified to me that someone would speak to me in that way.

She's been just over a year away from the convent, and now she'd likely face years in prison.

And I thought I was done for. I thought I was done for.

Remember four draft boards now had been discovered ravaged, and I was the only suspect.

She was about to have the legal weight of this entire action and the broader actions of the whole movement rained down on her.

I thought I would never see the light of day because of all these crimes that had been committed and me caught red handed.

Ann was in way over her head, but then Paul Cooming rushed onto the scene.

I was the only carle that went.

Actually, this is like a snowy winter night and this is the heart of the man of Paul coombing from Dorchester from Saint Leo's. He was maybe nineteen or twenty at the time, but he looked twelve. He planted himself outside to be found.

I just sat there by the exit door so I would not be alone.

In her darkest hour. Paul staged himself to be arrested along with Anne Walsh.

They police came up and asked me what I was doing there, and I said I was waiting for somebody to come out of the train terminal. Then they took me out of the car and put me in handcuffs and put me in a Patti wagon.

They stuck Paul in the back of a police fan and then one of the Feds climbed in with him.

He came in and started asking me questions and started slapping me around on the face and telling me to answer his questions and tell me who else was involved and all this, and I just kept saying, please don't hit me, Please don't hit me. That's all I had ever answered, but I had my head been down like this to try to protect myself a little bit, and.

Slapping like an Paul was an idealist, and like many idealists, he was finding out, to the tune of the Little Chin music, what happens when he took a stand for justice in an unjust world.

I've memorized the whole patent on his shoes. He had wingtips shoes.

On wingtips, you'll remember where the trademark dress code of FBI agents, as insisted upon by Jay Edgar Hoover.

So I ended up in the cell and I see Anne Walls being brought in right next to her the cell I was going to be put in. He was just so thrilled to see that I was there, that somebody else was with her, and he was totally absolutely aloft.

Paul was taking a massive risk. He had already by this point, as you may remember from episode one, mailed his draft card back to the government, and now he had just put his head in the lion's mouth. I'm Brendan Patrick Hughes, and this is Divine Intervention, Chapter five. The red double doors on Park Street. While outside agitators Anne and Paul were awaiting arraignment in the Philadelphia Slammer. Inside, incrementalists, Patrick and Floyd were starting to build a bona fide movement.

Everything was an argument. This is Floyd, it becomes wearing, it wears on you, let war on me. Over time, he.

And Patrick quickly discovered how uncomfortable change truly is.

You know, when you go into the common room where people would go perhaps just shortly before supper, maybe you have a cocktail, and maybe stop afterwards to watch the news or something like that, or chat a little bit. Yeah, I would say that if one or both of us came in there, it sort of emptied out.

But here's the thing. They were incredibly popular. Hundreds of young people were stuffing themselves into their basement on Sundays, and it was becoming increasingly clear that things were headed for a showdown. The boys had clearly outgrown their basement, but with the Cardigan Brigade upstairs blocking their every move, they had absolutely no idea what to do. But then crazy thing, one of those old fellas started wandering downstairs to hang out with them. He saw what those crazy

And that was the foothold Jim Carroll that Floyd.

And Patrick were able to stand on as they quickly began to change the way things were done into Paula Center.

Patrick and Floyd had made their first alliance, their first bona fide work friend, a single casino chip on which to build an empire. As noted in Father X's Mysterious.

Notebook, concept of the teen Ministry emerges out of the needs of the community.

So they named themselves the Team, and together the three of them came up with a plan to take over the chapel upstairs. They started off, according to Father X, by attempting to go through the proper.

Channels a petition with seven hundred signatures from barishioners to be allowed to use the chapel.

As ignored, we tried to appeal within the house first and couldn't get it.

Pre steupstairs were not about to let these young turks have the keys to the company Cadillac, so their only recourse was to start punching below the belt.

Patrick and Floyd refused to take collections at the four pm and six pm liturgies, the loss of four hundred and fifty dollars a week for the center.

The Paula Center was in serious debt and Patrick and Floyd knew it. When they stopped taking collections at their controversial basement liturgies, the place started losing in today money thousands of dollars a week. But despite Patrick and Floyd turning off this money faucet, the brass still wouldn't budge.

The crisis point. March eighth, nineteen seventy, the team decided that on the following Sunday they will take over chapel by imminent domain.

So the boys prepared the community to march up stairs and occupy the chapel.

We're told that if we did, they were going to call it the lade The resident priests.

Why are the New York hierarchy saying that if the team is allowed upstairs? They were refused to say any further mess.

Now the whole place is in an uproar.

So then we had to appeal to Scarsdale.

Scarsdale is where the Policies have their national headquarters, where the Superior General has his office.

Paulists throughout the country are in a state of turmoils in regards to the goings on at Park Street.

Now, polists all over the country were gnashing their teeth. So the heads of the National Order came to Boston to sort things out.

The council meets with the whole Policy Center.

I can still kind of picture him in that room.

That's Christine Truffant. She was there. She was a local college kid who had discovered Patrick and Floyd's basement liturgies and volunteered in many of their programs.

He talked to us in the basement of the church, and it was a very crowded meeting.

As I remember, I.

Was horrified and so surprised to realize he was really wet his finger and telling us we better get in line.

I just think it was a matter of control.

Never before had the policed hierarchy had to reprimand its parishioners for their enthusiasm.

The hierarchy was so scared.

What were they afraid of?

After a presidential tongue lashing for the youngs downstairs, it was time for a showdown with the Cardigan brigade upstairs. That meeting was intense.

All anger and hostility is out in the open for the first time. The regulars want the team kicked out. The house is now in two armed.

Camps, sitting in this deeply uncomfortable face to face confrontation with the men upstairs. Patrick and Floyd said fuck it and gave the Order president the hard sell.

They wanted. First control of the whole apostolic operation, second financial autonomy, third, two more members for the team, and fourth reassignment of residence priests to other centers.

A stunned silence at their unmitigated gall filled the room. But here's the thing the President of the Order could not deny. Patrick and Floyd were the ones that had the box office to make the center financially solvent. He had no choice but to grant the chapel to the team. Their gamble worked. Patrick and Floyd, the young turks, the fucking new guys who had only arrived the year prior, suddenly found themselves in charge of the entire goddamn Paulas Center.

May of nineteen seventy and Tobin joined the team. That is a revolutionary act.

Tobin was appointed to be a female lay minister, which sent shockwaves.

This is really advanced stuff for the time, and I know now it probably doesn't seem like a big deal, but to introduce a woman into the mex It's great.

Patrick and Floyd had huge plans. Patrick and Floyd were coming down the mountain. Patrick and Floyd were going to drag this dusty institution into the twentieth century, whether it liked it or not. But that, you guys, that is the exact moment Marianne walked through the front doors and into our story.

He had on a blue button down shirt and a pair of jeans and loafers and his incredible, fantastic smile, and he walked in and gave me the hugest grin, a huge Patrick grin, and.

It was this incredible moment of absolutely love at first sight, just was boom and then gone, you know, and then of.

Course, I mean, my god, he's a priest.

You've heard from Marianne a lot already, but this is where she first enters our story, walking through the Paula Center's iconic pair of red double doors, meeting Patrick and falling in love on the spot with a Roman Catholic priest. But if you knew anything about Marianne's life up until this point, you would know this was basically the exact opposite of what was likely to happen in this scenario.

My father comes in one morning, it was about five o'clock or something, and wakes me up to say, mummy's very sick, but did you have to get up? And I'm sitting there, and father Carlin opens the front door, like.

With this huge swish.

The door just slams open, and he takes.

The stairs two at a time or three at a time, and races upstairs.

A Catholic priest was the harbinger of her mother's death.

Like I was in absolute denial about what was going on until I saw him do that.

After that, Marianne entered a period of deep loneliness. Her father, a traveling salesman, then hastily married his manicurist, who was vindictive and strange and permanently inebriated. This made Marianne a bit of a Cinderella, and when she graduated high school, she was determined to escape the cruelty of her neglectful father and wicked stepmother and get the living hell out

JFK founded the Peace Corps and Vista. He created these vehicles, and then he called this whole generation forward to serve that how you could be fully human and fully alive is by serving.

Vista was to the domestic United States what the Peace Corps was to struggling nations around the world. So Vista volunteers were deployed to help alleviate poverty and small struggling communities throughout the US.

I'd gone into Vista mainly because I had to get out of town. I was like a goody two shoes. I mean, I could have gone in the convent or joined Vista, but I liked to party too much for the convent, so better to go to Vista.

Marianne was stationed just about as far from Milton as she could be in Laredo, Texas.

Oh my god, I learned so much being with other young people, and we were all being educated about the world and how it worked and our role in it, our potential around impacting it and really making a difference. And we believed that we could and we saw that we did. I met Caesar Chavez. I stood on a bridge.

With him, and she experienced a fairly massive political awakening.

I was just so influenced by those times, and it grounded me. It sort of took me. That experience took me and just planted my feet firmly in a foundation that I've never veered from in terms of my work, the work I want to do in the world.

Marianne stayed in Laredo for two years, organizing, fighting for justice and learning what kind of difference you could make in the world. But when her tour was over, she faced the terrifying specter of returning to Boston, the loneliness of her life there, and the cruelty of her stepmother. So she looked around and hooked up with the only other twenty something in Laredo, Texas, a local kid named Mike Woodward.

Mike I think had enormous potential, handsome. He lived on the border, which is a culture that makes your head spin.

And quite confoundingly, like so many people of Marianne's generation, despite being twenty zero, they immediately planned to get married.

Why in the name of God we thought we should get married. We didn't know each other. The chemistry was so overwhelming that we thought let's just do it. It wasn't like I knew him. Well, we couldn't have sex. Otherwise you married the first person you had sex with. It's so prehistoric. Yeah, And the first person I had sex with was Mike Woodward. Therefore I married him.

It all makes sense now.

He knew just the place for a shotgun wedding. So Mary Ann, Mike and their Vista pals caravans deep into Mexico.

How we get to this place in Mexico is by following the electric wires. Are no roads. It took us till midnight to get to the place. We knock on the Justice of the Piece's door and she comes down in her nightgown. We're in a garage and she marries us in Spanish, which of course I didn't understand, but I did say see.

Marianne and Mike then tried to settle down. They got a little place, and Mike got a job.

Mike had been raised in a really macho culture, and I have a vivid memory we had been demonstrating for higher wages for restaurant workers, and we'd been demonstrating in front of this restaurant and hadn't told him I was going, so I was on TV footage that night. Mike came home like enraged and actually pushed me that night, and I was pregnant with Chrissy.

The mic she had dated was not showing up in her marriage. Mary Anne started to get a sinking feeling that perhaps she was in way over her head. The loneliness that had chased her since her mother's death caught back up to her.

That was the patriarchal culture. You know that you had a right to tell your quote unquote wife what she could do.

I asked my mom, like, why didn't you guys decide to have kids so young?

Crazy Marianne's daughter Chrissy, and she said.

I think because I was so lonely. Chrissy was born in August, and then Jojo was born a year and a half later.

Mike Woodward was one part dreamer and two parts banned it with a twist of instability. He moved them around every few months in search of a purpose.

He was just a.

Lost soul and was desperately trying to find himself or his place in the world or anything, any kind of meaning or purpose or whatever. And it wasn't being a young husband with a wife and children building a little life together.

By the time Joe Joe was born, Mike was spending weeks at a time away from the family.

I don't even know if maybe he'd been maybe doing some drugs at that point, but when he came back, he was just convinced that we all needed to go like a bunch of homesteaders to Taos, New Mexico.

The last place we lived with him was in a thing called that Kiva and Taos.

Akiva is an ancient Pueblo meeting space dug into the ground with earthen walls and floors. Mike had found an abandoned one, and, being a committed hippie, decided to start over with Marianne and the kids as homesteaders.

It's not really a place that you could have two infants because it was so traumatic and shocking to be living in a mud hut.

Like.

She couldn't put us down having two babies. She could put Joe down on the ground. You had to get wood to boil water that kind of stove. Awful, awful, awful. The next crisis is Jojo got sick.

Jojo suffered from horrible asthma and had quickly developed pneumonia.

I'm walking down the highway with these two kids from the hospital, carrying Joe on my backpack and Chrissy in the carriage. I was so clear I'm done.

Then two nights before Christmas.

So Christmas came. You can imagine how pleasant that was.

Mike showed up all hepped up on goofballs.

Christy was in a crib and Jojo was in another crib. I was asleep. He came in in the middle of the night and I think was on drugs. Joe woke up and was crying. I went to pick up Jokes. I know, I had Joe in my arms. Then Chrisy woke up and just screamed at the top of her lungs. He goes over to Chrissy's crib, and I felt like Mike was going almost like after her, and I grabbed his arm to not allow that, and I had Joe in my arms, and he started to hit me.

I remember being under them or between them, and Mike like hitting my mom.

So I'm sort of holding Jojo. I'm bent over to protect him, and he's hitting me from the back, and.

She was crouching over Joe. I had Joe in her arms and I was beneath them somehow, and he took off.

After Mike left, Marianne was alone with two children who needed something better than this. The next day, there was a knock at the door.

And it's four of Mike's friends from Austin. I was like, what are you doing here? They found us because they had some sort of intuition something was wrong.

What gave them the intuition, I don't know.

They didn't know. They were just really worried and thought something might be really wrong.

Austin to Taos is a twelve hour drive. These old friends had all felt their Spidey sense tingling, and driven all night on Christmas Eve, I.

Looked at those guys and, honest to God, it was like it was like the Three Kings arrived with their incense and Mrror and you know whatever. Really it was Christmas. Honestly, it was a Christmas miracle. I couldn't believe it. They said, we were just really worried about you, and I said, the minute they said I have to get out of here, that was it, Brendan, it was divine intervention.

Marianne grabbed a bag of diapers and threw a few shirts in a backpack. She loaded the kids into the car and left her husband.

We fled in the middle of the night. It took everything for me to get to where it was I needed to be to be able to leave, but I didn't have anywhere to go.

Her friends brought her back to Austin, where she and the kids crashed on their couch for a few weeks, listening to Buffalo Springfield's Yellow album and wondering what the hell she was going to do. Mike found out, of course, and followed her to Austin, where she told him their marriage was over.

First he's pleading with me to come back together again. Then he's threatening me. He's going to take the kids. He's taking out all the stops. He was basically saying, I was really wrong and I really want a do over, and I couldn't do I just couldn't do it. Couldn't do it. No, the answer is no.

He came back to the apartment repeatedly, and eventually she wouldn't even open the screen door for him.

There was a night he came to the apartment again, pleading again, and I was again saying I can't do it and he ran out of the apartment. Just desperate.

Mike was running down Guadalupe Street along the UT Austin campus, known to locals as the Drag. He felt his life falling apart, and he ran up to the first person he saw.

He literally ran up to a man in a trench coat, saying, I need help. He had no idea who the guy was, he just looked official.

Mike had randomly run up to a Paulish priest named Jack Campbell who worked at UT Austin.

So Jack brought him in to the rectory and learned about the whole story, and he could see the trouble Mike was in mentally.

So Jack agreed to go talk to Mary.

And there's Jack Campbell again in a trench coat. He looks completely official, and he said, are you Marianne Woodward? And I said yes, And he said, my name's Jack Campbell. I'm a priest and I have Mike down at the rectory. Can I come in? And I said sure.

Turns out father Jack was from Boston, just like Marianne. It only took one conversation for him to see that Marianne did not belong in a marriage with Mike. And she needed to leave Texas. So over the next few weeks, Jack worked with Mike and mary Anne. They reached an agreement that Mike would seek medical treatment and mari Anne

He had written on his ordination card, which was I remember, I say, I might must still have the Ordination card. I'm sure I do. I'm sure I do. In a box. The ordination card was a quote from Tayar de Chardanne on the front.

Tahar de Chardin was a Catholic mystic and let me tell you, and I say, this is basically an atheist. His writing is the shit.

He handed me the card and he said, as he's handing me the card, I want you to look up this guy. He's my best friend in the world. You're really gonna love him. He's terrific. His name's on the back of the card.

Father Jack had given mary Anne Patrick's number at the Paula Center.

And then he said, and don't ever be afraid to fall in love again, And that was the last thing he said to me before I got on the plane.

Mary Anne, at twenty three, flew home to Boston with her two tiny children. Jojo was nine months Chrissy was two, and she moved into an apartment on flo Florida Street in Dorchester.

I was convinced that there was quicksand on Florida Street because Florida.

I had two kids and not a nickel, nothing, and it was obvious I would have to go on welfare. I had no other option at that point.

She met a caseworker, barely got her expenses covered, and settled into her new life in Dorchester. While she was unpacking, she came across the card father Jack had given her in Texas.

I decided I would call Jack's friend Patrick. I don't know why exactly, but I decided I would call.

But when she reached for the phone, something strange happened.

When I sat down, I will never forget it. I put my hand on the receiver and I thought, this is one of the most important phone calls I'll ever make in my life. And then I proceeded to dial the.

Number, brushing off that strange premonition. She diediled seven digits, and she and Patrick had a brief chat where he invited her to come down to the Paula Center sometime, and.

I hung up. And I also then remember thinking I'm not going to go to the Pall Center. I mean, you know, I made the call because in some ways I felt almost obligated to Jack to make the call, and because I just made the call. But it wasn't as if I wanted to talk to a priest for sure about I don't know what God has put together, Let no man put us under.

Say that box checked. With a new chapter of life to begin, she forgot all about the Paula Center and began to meet other tenants in the building.

We all had kids about the same age, and everybody used to babysit for everybody else.

She was determined to continue the political work she started in Vista.

So I started doing welfare rights and we did some prison stuff.

But then something horrifying happened on a campus in Ohio that would indirectly change the entire course of her life.

The first week of May of nineteen seventy was the invasion of Cambodia, and it was the murders at Kent State.

You earlier asked what was the pivotal moment, Jim Carroll, when young people began to understand that they were standing against something broad in the culture. And I've always thought that the pivotal moment was Kent State.

Mixon, violating the promise he had made not to extend the Vietnam War, extended it by bombing Cambodia.

Howard Zinn At Kent.

State University, huge number of students got it on the campus lawn. The governor called out the National Guard.

And the National Guard shot and killed four students.

By then, it was well known that the government was capable of waging any immoral war ten thousand miles away. But at Kent stated began to feel like the government would turn its guns against young people.

It was and there were so many moments during that time that were so chilling and so devastating about what was what, my god, what is going on in this world? How can this be happening?

Despite the horrifying fact that the government was now deliberately killing protesters, Marianne felt she had a duty to voice her dissent.

I had heard or read in the Globe that there was going to be a demonstration on the Boston Common, and so I packed up the kids, Joe on the backpack and Christian a carriage, and we walked to Ashmun station and go to Park Street and go to the demonstration.

She and the kids marched and sang with protesters all afternoon, and when the demonstration was over, they were walking down Park Street back to the T station when she saw two sets of red double doors across the street.

So I I said, oh my god, there's the pausitor. I should go say hello to Jack's friend. I should go over and say hello to Patrick. And I walk into the building. Just walking into the building, there was.

A reception area and you could feel the aliveness of the place the minute you walked into it. And Pat Downing, who later became a good friend of mine, was sitting at the reception area, and she yells into the intercom system, Patrick, someone's here to see you. I waited a few minutes and I'm just sort of standing around with the two kids, and Patrick walked in. And I was anticipating that a priest would.

Walk in, but Patrick, always in a city's was not at all what one picture is when one thinks of a Catholic priest.

And it was this incredible moment of absolutely love at first sight.

They each quickly tried to brush off what happen and when they locked eyes and said a friendly hello. He had moved his office upstairs from the basement, and he took Marianne and the kids into one of the conference rooms where a bunch of volunteers were working on big projects.

And it was like a war room. It was like a campaign office. And in the campaign office, everybody they were on phones and mimiograph machines and doing press releases. And everybody looks up and Patrick says, hey, how's everybody doing. I just want to introduce you to someone. You know. I don't think I ever told you guys that I was married with two kids.

Right as a joke, paging doctor Freud.

He was so charismatic and magnetic and fun, just fun, light, lighthearted and fun, but really deep at the same time. That's why he was so acharged, That's why he was so magnetic. He didn't take himself seriously. He wasn't egocentric and dopey, you know. So he knew who.

He was and he knew what his life was committed to love and joy and mission and passion and being fully alive in service.

They went up to his new office and she told him all about her ordeal with Mike. In Texas. Patrick had just taken over the chapel for his liturgy extravaganzas, and the first one would be this Sunday.

And he said, why don't you come in to Mass on Sunday night? Why don't you come into the liturgy. I think you'd really enjoy it. And again I'm thinking to myself, really, I was still stuck with this idea of more of the old church. I had not been introduced to the new Church.

Like most adults who grew up Catholic, Mary Anne had long since lapsed and felt perfectly fine being church free, thank you very much. Yet the following Sunday night, she found herself putting Christy and Jojo down to sleep, getting her neighbor to watch them, and slipping down to the Red Line. She got off the train at Park Street and walked up the hill towards the illuminated gold dome of the State House, approaching the Poula Center's iconic pair of red double doors.

So I get to the Paula Center and it is rocking the house. I couldn't believe it. It was so crowded that I had to go upstairs to the balcony because there were no seats left. People were hanging from the brekofters. And I went upstairs. I remember had on a red dress. I remember that, I actually remember the red dress. And I went upstairs and I stood by the banister.

Mary Anne wound up front row center in the standing room only balcony, staring right down at the altar.

The music, music really stirs to soul, really.

In the body back.

And they had a group of people that were playing guitars and.

Singing, Christine Trufont and Antobin, enthusiastic members of the Paula Center Gang.

You couldn't help it. Again, the music was very temporary.

Music was so lively, and then.

It began, do the right thing, do the.

Do it all the time, do it all the time, make yourself right.

Never mind, don't you know you're not the only one suffering.

It was such a joyful place.

There was something greater going on there in the sense that it was more equal. The priest wasn't held any higher than the people, and it was a new concept.

Do the right thing, do the right thing, do it all the time, do it all the time. Make yourself right. Never mind, don't you do you that the only.

Suffer I'll see you up looking and wandering so diligent, crossing the teasers over.

One ANLEI is this is what they.

Really let They could mean a rock, then we could be the pay minsense.

There's a point in the mass when you're doing the consecration you actually hold up the chalice and the host. And Patrick said there was a moment when he held it up and he saw that I was up in the balcony, and he said, oh great, she came.

We'll make it all right.

It'll call around, I'll mention it.

They say it's nothing, but that in reality they ca it someone make it, someone take it day.

Marianne was thunderstruck by her experience that night and decided she was all in.

Because I knew I wanted to be a part of this. I just wasn't sure how you did it, so I was just going to keep.

Showing up, doing time.

Naked in.

Her only problem was a growing crush on a Catholic priest. Patrick was in the throes of having just taken over the entire police center. He didn't need this crush either. He and Floyd were pulling in massive donations at their weekly extravaganzas. But they had started so many programs in their basement and had so many huge ideas for the place that they had ballooned the budget.

But that required some money. Floyd, well, there's no money.

Patrick and Floyd had harnessed the energies of the young and built a bonafide army of do gooding hell raisers. So they took this opportunity to make a statement. And that's when Patrick put together a plan that literally, and I mean this changed the world.

The following Sunday was the first Walk for Hunger.

It was at this moment that Patrick started the Walk for Hunger. This was the project all those people in Patrick's office were working on when Marianne walked in.

The thing about it was it was a very ingenious idea.

This is Bob Cannaane from the Milwaukee fourteen.

Where Patrick genius saw at first in a sense was that people like to do things in order to raise money for good causes, like rather than just going door to door or asking somebody to donate over TV or something like that, there was an action.

Perform Stuck for money, but surrounded by youthful energy. Patrick started the first pledge walk in the United.

States, where the people raising the money feel good about it, and the people giving the money feel good about it because you walk twenty mile, that's great, y'all. I'll give you so much a mile, and things like that. So it was participation that was really.

Key, and his simple idea quickly went viral. These days, there are hundreds of walks and runs and marches for charity throughout the United States, and from Boston, you know all about the Walk for Hunger. This year will be the fifty fifth walk. It's a long standing testament to the better angels of Bostonians and one of our most important rites of spring. But here's the thing to know

It seemed like way more than twenty miles. Tobin to me, it felt like this must be one hundred and miles, And in fact, somebody did go out and measure it afterwards and it was more like thirty.

But even in the midst of what anyone else would call a hellish logistical nightmare, Patrick infused the entire Paula Center community with a certain irrepressibility, even in inclement weather.

And it poured rain. It poured rain. I can't even tell you. It never stopped raining from early morning till late night. It just poured all day long.

It was like a northeaster and it was awful, awful, but we did it and we laughed.

It was like, oh my god.

This is brutal.

And this was a Sunday, which means that night Patrick had a mask to celebrate again.

I got the kids to bed, I leaned babysat, and I got in there by the eight o'clock mass. They were just straggling in. They were just straggling in still at eight o'clock at night, because they had walked twenty five miles and it had been pouring rain that had to stop. And Patrick came in drenched, drenched, drenched with slickers and unbelievable it was. But it was such a feat And I don't know how many people walked at that first I think maybe a couple thousand people.

As he began the liturgy that night, he saw that Marianne returned and their eyes met.

And as I got to know more of what was happening at the center in terms of activism, and as I got to know the people more, it was I just felt like I had died and gone to heaven. I couldn't believe that this community was there for the taking to be part of.

After the leturgy, Patrick invited Marianne to join the gang out for dinner.

Patrick came over and introduced me to some people and all that, and said, folks are going down to the New Deal for pizza, so would you like to join us? That's all I was like, okay, So I asked somebody where the New Deal was, but I didn't really know anybody. So I sort of walked down to the New Deal by myself. The whole gang kind of arrived and I was sitting beside me and Tobin, who I think I

After pizza and beer at the New Deal, Patrick didn't want this new person to get away, so he offered Marianne a ride home Sunday nights.

This habit started that Patrick would offer to drive me home because I lived in Dorchester and I would be walking from the train station by myself. He'd say, how are you getting home? And I would say I'm taking the subway and he'd say, no, no, I'll give you a ride. So sort of like that, and that started probably the very first night.

Despite their romantic tension, they quickly became very close friends. Marianne found more reasons to get involved in the Paula Center. She brought her kids, she sat on committees, and Patrick would drive her home. And as a Bostonian, I can tell you that trip is a schlep. But as their chemistry grew, it might have started getting a little too close for Patrick's comfort, so he bought himself some insurance.

So one Sunday night, Patrick said, I have an idea. This is really good friend of mine. She's actually in the singing group. She's in New Jersey right now taking care of her father, but she's coming back to Boston. She actually just quit school and she's looking for a place to live. And I was wondering, if you want to put her up till she can find a place and she could help you out with the rent, and

Sarah Toci would eventually stand next to mary Anne and Paul in the Brighams, trying to smuggle Paul into the Paula Center for his sanctuary.

I remember them talking and laughing all the time.

Chrissy again, mary Anne's daughter, who was just turning three when Sarah moved in.

And Sarah I remember as having like long wavy hair and a beautiful singing voice, and she seemed sad to me, like there's a melancholy about her.

I am a loner. I always have been, and I'm just the brink of giving it all away.

Sarah left behind a mountain of stenopads and journals. I found them in the same box I found Father X's notebook.

A loner, it's hard to accept, hard to deal with a happy sad night. We're so happy, You're happy, so happy you found a home.

But also she was screaming, laughing all the time. She felt like family.

We just rolled.

Along with my mom's accumulation of her family. So when she pulled someone into the orbit, it just was It just was like, Oh, this is Sarah. Sarah lives with us.

Reading her notes brings you right back to the emotional intensity of your twenties, the thrill of a new friendship, the daily epiphanies about your purpose in the world, the possibility of outrunning your weaknesses.

To believe in God is to get high on love enough to look down on your loneliness and forget it forever. Right mary Anne Big tears.

Late talk.

We just we were the most incredible match.

At long last. Mary Anne had found her people.

Then we had each other to engage with and make sense of the world. For everything I could get my hands on to understand the world, to understand myself, to understand my relationship with God, with the divine, just to know and to understand.

And so was she.

I was hanging up one of her posters in the living room bedroom slash and I turned around to her and I said, do you think you're moving in? And she said, I think I'm moving in? And that was that.

And then the two of them became inseparable.

With Patrick, I mean he would be driving the two of us home on Sunday nights. From the center right, Patrick and Sarah and I became something of a trio.

Hey, Patrick, we hate to finish what we've just begun with you. We still haven't let go of your hands, have we? Are we committed to each other? Are we three committed to each other?

All that fall, Mary, Anne, Patrick, and Sarah became the Three Musketeers. The loneliness that had chased her since her mother died was finally draining away. She knew that this place, packed with singing, laughing people, was a place that could change everything from the inside. In Philadelphia, outside agitators, Anne and Paul were waiting in the bowels of a brutalist courthouse to be arraigned for a draft board raid gone

So I go down there, I meet the lawyer.

Cookie Ridolfi had been on the support team of the Philly raid and brought sandwiches to the hiding raiders the afternoon of the ill fated night. Concerned for Anne and Paul, she came down to the arraignment on her own and found a place to sit in the gallery next to their lawyer. Soon Paul and Anne were brought in by the authorities.

When we went to temp arragnment, the place was crowded with nuns and priests and like Roman calls and habits and stuff.

Anne's lawyer noticed and asked Anne if they were friends of.

Hers, and so I said, well, not personally no, but I think you'd be here for the cause. And he said tell them to move up, because the judge is a daily.

Communicant, meaning, by some stroke of luck, the judge was a super Catholic that went to Mass every single morning. Paul decided this was his opening to raise hell about the beating he took in the police fan.

I brought it up at the hearing.

Yeah, the FED who had beat him up was sitting in the gallery.

He came to testify it, but he was there with his same shoes on, wingtip shoes, and nobody in the peace community in Philadelphia could believe it because he was in charge of the disobedient squad and they had always gotten along with him.

Well.

As Paul blew the cover of this two faced goon from Philly's law enforcement, the mood in the gallery became rather tense. Cookie watching from the gallery was the only person from the East Coast Conspiracy to Save Lives who had come to the arraignment. At this point, one of the movement lawyers turned to her and said, I.

Think you should leave, And I said why, you know, really? He goes yeah, because he said, there's all these manner right here FBI agents. They're going to be very interested in you. I think you should just quietly leave the room and go away, go someplace else.

She looked around and noticed the courtroom was full of wing tips.

So I get up to go out, and every eye is on me. Every man in that room, white man in a suit, wingtips. Their eyes are on me. As I walk out and I get to the front of the building, and I look to my right and there's a whole line of agents. They're leaning against the wall and they're watching me every step. So I think to myself, I can't go back to Susquehanna because they'll follow me.

Susquehanna was the street in Philly's Fishtown section where the raiders had their safe house. That's where everyone was. That's where she needed to go. But she didn't want to lead the FBI right to the door, so she began hitchhiking, criss crossing Philadelphia in the hopes of shaking off any possible tail. Finally, she felt it was safe and headed back to Susquehanna.

And I turn around to open the door to get out of the car, and I'm right in front of the house, and I see the front door of the house open. I see FBI agents standing on the steps of the house, and I realize that this is like a crime scene.

The FEDS had already found Susquehanna. Cookie was walking into a trap.

Get out of the car right in front of the house. And then I pretend I don't know the house, and I make a right turn and I walked down the street, and I can tell this guy following me. And then on that street corner was a little working class neighborhood deli and I went in there and I didn't know what to do. I was terrified, and I stood behind a coke machine, and then the agent came walking in, took me by the hand, and I walked out with him.

The agent walked Cookie back down Susquehanna and brought her into the house. The FBI were turning the place upside down. Most of the raiders were safely at a farm half an hour away. Some were stuck behind John Peter Grady, the mastermind of the whole raid, was pacing on the phone with their lawyer. Cookie walked up to another raider who was sitting in the living room reading a book, and noticed the book in his hands was upside down.

And I'm watching them go through the trash and it's like last night's dinner's garbage, and they're pulling out vegetable skins, and it's just disgusting, going through piece by piece looking for evidence.

Luckily, overnight one of the raiders had removed from the Susquehanna House all the files from the draft board raid and put them in the getaway van. So theoretically the Feds weren't going to find anything until.

The plan was that once everybody got out of the draft boards, there was a plan to take everybody to a farm. That's where they would stay and they would go through the files. So I'm sitting there and watching this guy go through the trash and they're searching everywhere. The geworsi are being pulled out, going through boxes, and right in front of me, I tell you, it must have been maybe two feet in front of me on the table is a little slip of paper with the

Soon the police wagons arrived. They led everyone out in handcuffs except for Cookie, so.

They didn't arrest me, which almost was more punishment because there I was nineteen years old. The FBI just arrested my good friends. I mean FBI, I mean I was nuns were just kind of something, but FBI agents were a big deal to me.

Cookie had no idea what to do.

I walked to the subway, I got in the subway, I went home to my mother, and I am just frozen in terror.

The East Coast conspiracy raiders were doing everything they could to sabotage the human costs of an immoral war, and it was clear now to Cookie that that sabotage would have a cost of its own.

But then now I get a phone call at about six or seven at night.

It's John Grady.

Hey, Cookie, come on, gone down to Ralphs.

We're having dinner.

What so?

Ralphs is an.

Italian restaurant in my neighborhood.

I quickly got I don't know how I got there, but I got myself to the restaurant. I walk in and they're all there, everybody. They had been released from wherever they were taken, and they were having basically a part.

Nobody talks, everybody walks. Even Anne and Paul were sitting there. The judge, the Daily Communicant, had thrown out their case and.

He said, there is no evidence of miss Walsh breaking an enter. She was in a public restroom in a public building, and there are no connections between that and across the hall. I got off Scott free, and Paul the saying.

Anne, Paul, Cookie and all the rest were free to raid another day and to push their luck yet further. Philadelphia had made it feel like, perhaps, for a moment, they might be winning and they could start taking some bigger risks. Divine Intervention is a production of iHeart Podcasts. It's produced by Wonder Media Network and it was created and written by Me Your Host Brendan Patrick Hughes. Exception only talented producers are Carmen Borca Correo, Abby Delk, Paloma Moreno, Jimenez,