Gentlemen Prefer Blondes

“I'd rather become a good husband than a bad priest”
-- St. Thomas More


Frank Mininni knew more about Friedrich Gogarten than anyone in America.   Karl Barth called Gogarten our "dreadnought."   This had something to do with Lutheran theologians and dialectical theology, or secular theology.  Don't ask me what that means.   I still don't know.   I took the course because it was the only theology course open and I needed to meet the theology requirement.

A Navy friend of mine liked to recollect having a class with Henry Kissinger  at Harvard.  He went in one day and asked for an appointment to discuss his term paper with the professor.   The secretary thumbed through the appointment book and then stopped, remembering something she needed to ask.  Awkward pause.   Are you a graduate student?   No.   I'm sorry.  Professor Kissinger doesn't meet with undergraduates.

You could walk into Frank's office anytime he was around (for that matter the office of any Holy Cross professor).  He didn't even have a secretary to guard the door.   Mr. Mininni I don't understand this Gogarten guy.   HELP.   I understand, Jim.   Gogarten's ideas are complex, and very difficult to translate.   They make more sense in the orginal German.

(Jesus, Frank, I grew up with women who were native Gaelic speakers, fiercely anti-English, and deeply religious.   They said the rosary daily and would tell you that every act of your life was a prayer.  And you want me to learn German to understand somebody explaining religion in a world without religion?   For heavens sake, Frank, as far as we're concerned English is a foreign language.)

Wasn't Gogarten a Nazi?   Frank explained that Gogarten never joined the Nazi party.

None of that mattered.   Frank was a rock star as far as I was concerned.   He'd left the Jesuits to marry a gorgeous, tall blonde German woman named Erika.   I timed my visits for the end of the day, hoping I'd be there when Erika dropped by to escort Frank home.   One smile from her could carry a young man through an entire lonely, celibate week at Holy Cross.

The Tire King of Long Island

My grandmother liked to announce to her friends that her oldest son was going to be a priest and her youngest a doctor.   This was fine with my father until he was old enough to notice girls.  He started to get very uneasy about disappointing his mother, who was, shall we say, formidable.   Then came the party for the sons of a friend who were young Jesuits bound for the the missions in the Philippines.   It was a proud day for the Carnegie Hill Catholics, young men marching off to do the work of Christ.   Grandmother introduced my father and his brother to the young Jesuits with her routine introduction:  "This is Tom, my youngest son.  He is attending Notre Dame and is going to be a doctor.  This is Jim, my oldest son.  He attends Holy Cross and is going to be a priest."   The young Jesuit abruptly interrupted her.  Something only a Jesuit would dare to do.  Something only a Jesuit could survive.   "Eleanor, my child, the vocation to be a priest is the boy's decision and the boy's decision alone."   My father gave a silent prayer of thanksgiving.   My grandmother never said another word about the priesthood.   Perhaps if there'd been more Jesuits around to counsel ardent Catholic mother's the Church would have had less trouble with priests who chose the wrong vocation.

Jobs were hard to find during the Depression.   My father found one working in a garage pumping gas and fixing flat tires.   He worked out a way to change a flat truck tire in 5 minutes when it usually took 30.   He was happy working with his hands.   His mother wasn't.   One day she announced you're starting at Fordham Law School next week.   I never applied to any law school, says my father.  I've taken care of it, said his mother, and of course she had since she played bridge with the dean's wife.   My father said he was never happy as a lawyer.  Who knows, he said, if I'd have stood up to mother, I might have been the Tire King of Long Island.

Boston College Minority Recruitment

Boston College’s motivations for recruiting black students were both internal and external. The externals included a visit in May by four investigators from the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare, looking into whether the University was dispersing its federal money in harmony with provisions of the 1964 Civil Rights Act.

This followed a 1967 letter to U.S. Jesuits from their beloved superior, Fr. Pedro Arrupe, insisting that “American Jesuits cannot, must not, stand aloof” from the claims and demands of “the Negro.” Arrupe specified that Jesuit universities would need to assist blacks in meeting entrance requirements and provide them with “special scholarships.”

Boston College’s Black Talent program was up and running by the fall of 1968. The program sprang from a “Negro Talent Search” launched earlier that year by outgoing president Michael P. Walsh, SJ, with a $100,000, four-year commitment to scholarships and recruiting—a substantial sum for a University that routinely found itself strapped financially. (A year’s tuition then amounted to $1,600.) According to varying official accounts, the Negro Talent Search yielded between 34 and 48 new black students for that September.

-- Boston College Magazine
http://bcm.bc.edu/issues/spring_2009/features/power-of-the-people.html

The Sands of Iwo Jima

Mike Quinn had a snapshot that hit the back of the net
from 50 feet out in the blink of an eye.

The big fella didn't get to die upon the Sands of Iwo Jima
some noble last words upon his lips.
He was blown to smithereens
somewhere outside Da Nang
by a rocket manufactured in Kiev
brought in by sea from Vladivostok
and lugged down the Ho Chi Minh trail
lashed to a bicycle seat.

They buried what was left of him on a gray day in Charlestown
The Marine honor guard in their dress blue uniforms
white hats and gloves
folded the American flag that draped his coffin
into a neat triangle
and handed it to his mother for her trouble.

Four years too late
they mined Haiphong harbor.

The Black Pope

From:
Thy Honored Name: A History of the College of the Holy Cross, 1843-1994
-- Anthony J. Kuzneiwski
In 1947, William Healy was the only clergyman to attend a State House hearing on a Fair Education Practice Bill.  He endorsed Branch Rickey's experiment of integrating professional baseball and sought the integration of Holy Cross, writing, "No boy will ever be denied admission to Holy Cross because of his color."  Ten years later, William Donaghy used the athletic program to promote equality by prohibiting competition against segregated teams.  But favorable policies could not, by themselves attract qualified African-American applicants.  In 1965, Father Swords reported that minority enrollment stood at twelve.  Although he wanted to do more, he conceded that "some very sad [academic] experiences... cause us to be cautious -- maybe too cautious."  Then, slowly, the civil rights movement altered circumstances.   In 1968, about 700 students marched to a local demonstration following the death of Martin Luther King, Jr.;  the following year, Holy Cross became the first large school in the country to join Project Equality, an organization that urged the boycott of businesses that discriminated against minorities.... 

This movement recieved a tremendous boost on Jesuit campuses in November of 1967, when Pedro Arrupe [28th Superior General of the Society of Jesus, aka the Black Pope] issued a letter on the racial crisis in the United States.  Linking blacks and Hispanics together as victims of "racial injustice and grinding poverty," he pointed out that American Jesuits had a mixed record in opposing racism: "It is embarrassing to note that, up to the present, some of our institutions have effected what seems to be little more than token integration of the Negro."  This weakness, Arrupe argued was connected with an erroneous view of human nature, a tendency to accept stereotypes, to be isolated from the poor, and to accept prevailing attitudes uncritically.   The result was "our past failure adequately to realize, to preach, to teach, and to practice the Christian truths of interracial justice and charity, according to our Jesuit vocations."  To remedy the situation, Arrupe set forth ten new policies, including renewed efforts to increase minority enrollment....

*  *  *  *  *
Father Arrupe, to a degree, was guilty of anachronism.   Most Jesuit schools until recently served regional communities in the North where there were few Hispanics and blacks.  Moreover,  this was still an America where a serving Supreme Court Justice, Hugo Black, had been a member of the Ku Klux Klan.  Black had made his Alabama political bones in 1921 by successfully defending E.R. Stephenson for the murder of Father James  E. Colye.   Colye's offense was marrying Stephenson's daughter to a colored man.   Though he'd renounced the KKK, to his dying day Black was a committed anti-Catholic.

By the 1960s, however, demographics were no longer an excuse.  By then the great Black migration had peaked bringing millions of African-Americans from the South to the northern cities of Chicago, Boston and New York.    Jesuit schools, notably Georgetown, were establishing a national presence.

Father Arupe had been a missionary to fascist Japan where in days gone by Catholic missionaries, including members of the Society of Jesus, had been martyred by burning and beheading.   At Hiroshima Father Arrupe had had the atomic bomb dropped on his head and afterwards ministered to the casualties in the ashes of the first nuclear holocaust.   What Jesuit could look him in the eye and say that he was afraid of being lynched in Mississippi or Alabama... or South Boston.

Don't Join the Army Son

No they never taught us what was real
Iron and coke
And chromium steel.

When I turned 18 and became eligible for the draft, my grandmother who was aloof to say the least looked me in the eye and said: "Don't join the Army, son. They'll use you for cannon fodder."

Never mind Tammany Hall. The most powerful political constituencies in New York City were women's clubs like the Catholic Daughters of America. St. Patrick's Cathedral was built by the pennies and nickels of Irish servant women. The Jesuits' opulent St. Ignatius Loyola Church at Carnegie Hill was built by and for Catholic women whose mothers may have been cleaning women, but whose fathers had been wildly successfully in the iron business and played poker with JP Morgan and Andy Carnegie. (Carnegie was a Gaelic speaker, by the way) The Sacred Heart sisters educated the daughters of the most successful. After Otto Kahn died the elegant sisters set up shop in his mansion, Palazzo Della Cancellaria style (Papal Chancellery). The Kennedys and Mara (as in football Giants) weren’t even on the social radar for women like my grandmother. If they were acknowledged at all it was Kennedy the rum runner and Mara the bookmaker.

The women's political power rested on three pillars: votes, money, and the prestige of the Union army. Ellen Ewing Sherman was Queen Bee in the New York City after the Civil War. She was as ardent a Catholic as they come. How could Mrs. Astor refuse an invitation or request to donate to Irish relief from the wife of General William Tecumseh Sherman? The general resided in New York City after the Civil War until his death in 1891. These days the New York Times feigns complete bewilderment when it’s accused of being anti-Catholic. What totally and permanently pissed off New York’s Catholic women was The Times stationing a reporter outside the door of the Sherman house while the general was dying. Incredibly they were on the lookout for the comings and goings of Catholic priests. When they caught one, The Times published the “sordid” revelation that the great general had been given the last rites of the Catholic Church (certainly against his will), creating a minor scandal. Sherman’s brother had to publicly explain to The Times that, although Sherman wasn’t a Catholic Christian (just baptized and married so), Catholic sacraments were welcomed by the general because they greatly comforted his family. 
 

The women had their own priorities. It wasn't accepting "gratuities" that ended my grandfather's good friend Jimmy Walker's political career. It was taking up with showgirl Betty Compton and publicly leaving and divorcing his wife that was the end of Jimmy. In the category of strange but true, you’ll find Representative Joseph Gavagan addressing the Catholic Daughters of America on why the Bible had to be kept out of the public schools: the King James Bible is a Protestant plot to seduce Catholic children. Crazy as it sounds this was a hot topic for Catholic women in the 1930s because even into the 1960s the old Irish were telling stories about per-Civil War New York when the city nearly went up in flames over whose Bible, if any, would be taught in the public schools.

While many New Yorkers like to march with the original Fighting Irish, the 69th New York Infantry (aka, the Irish Brigade), my grandmother and her friends wouldn't have been caught dead anywhere near a St. Patrick's Day parade. When she was a young girl, the pirate Dan Sickles still hopped up and down 5th Avenue, a living testament to the horrors of war. Sickles, who'd been married to the “natural” daughter of Mozart's librettist by Archbishop Hughes, had had his leg blown off by a cannonball at Gettysburg leading the city's famous Excelsior Brigade. (Sickles life playbook was Mozart’s Cosi Fan Tutte farce about soldiers and fiancé swapping. After philander Sickles shot his wife’s lover, his attorney Thomas Meagher, 1848 Irish rebel and Irish Brigade commander, got Sickles acquitted of murder based on a then unprecedented plea of temporary insanity. Like Spencer Tracy, Sickles remained within the women’s Pale because he never left his wife).

My grandmother came of age when even more of the Fighting Irish were maimed and died, in what was a savage, bewildering, utterly pointless First World War. Two generations later and yet another war, the sleepy child who nestled against her bosom in a taxi one rainy night on a ride through Washington Square and up 5^th Avenue  had grown into a man.  Would the Tiffany mosaics and cold Carrara marble of St. Ignatius Loyola Church be of any consolation if she again were wearing black?
 

In 1969 anti-war demonstrations led by the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) broke out at Holy Cross College, a Massachusetts outpost of New York’s Irish. Black students led by Supreme Court Justice to-be Clarence Thomas staged a walkout. Charles Horgan who was the head of the Holy Cross trustees told the college president he’d support him in whatever decision he made regarding disciplining the black students and the SDS. Horgan was also the law partner of Felix Muldoon, the Democratic lieutenant who'd told Flynn to back Roosevelt in 1932: we need a Dutchman not a Catholic [Smith] to deliver our message [Rerum Novarum]. Muldoon was also the husband of my grandmother's friend from her schoolgirl days with the Sacred Heart sisters, the formidable (ferocious) Agnes Muldoon. There were two birds on Horgan's shoulder. He didn't even need to tell the college president what they were saying:
#1. "We have worked long and hard to pry the Black vote out of the Republican grasp. Don't screw this up."
#2. "The friends of Agnes Muldoon want to send a message about the war. Your SDS aren't the only ones who want to use the Blacks to deliver it. For God's sake save me from Agnes Muldoon!"