Fifty Years Ago: My 1970s

Bad time, the 1970s!  Very bad!

A Darkness descended! Overnight, contraception, had become a way of life. From that catastrophe came an inevitable string of train wrecks: a single judicial decision by seven old men made abortion the law of the land. A surge of divorces, out-of-wedlock births, co-habitation,  promiscuity. We had Nixon, a criminal president; and then Carter...decent, intelligent, religious...the exemplar of our debility before the Islamic explosion in Iran and the transformation of the DNC into the apparatus of Death. The Catholic Church in decline and confusion: decreases in vocations and  Church attendance; a plague of clergy abuse of adolescent boys; bishops, clueless, take bad guidance from lawyers and psychologists and are gamed by the predators;  Pope Paul VI, the hero of Humanae Vitae...refined, erudite, saintly, melancholic...is overwhelmed by waves of darkness around him. With a dark inevitability, there progressed the breakdown of the family and all mediating institutions of faith, community and solidarity, as the individual became increasingly atomized in the face of malignantly expansive corporations and state. Even as society polarized between winners and losers, the privileged and the deprived, the red and the blue.

Okay: not ALL was so dismal. We had Star Wars! Civil Rights attained a triumph as all major cultural institutions, even business, institutionally renounced racism. Pentecostalism and Evangelicalism flourished, especially in the Southern Hemisphere, to challenge fundamentalist Islam, a communism-in-decline and the now-decadent secular West. Lay renewal movements and new religious orders enlivened the Church. Pretty much all things human are a mix of the good and the bad; but I give this decade to Satan, by a decisive measure.

For me, the decade was wonderful!

Out of the gate, 1970, I courted and married (as fast as I could) beautiful Mary Lynn. Today, 50 years later, she is still my delightful companion and partner. By the end of the decade we were blessed with three of our seven children. With only $500 in the bank, we were able to buy a spacious fixer-up-er with the help of generous friends and family. We raised our family there and still live there with our son, his wife and their five children. I taught religion in Catholic schools for 5 years; happily worked a variety of jobs for about a year (load trucks, Ford motor plant, paint houses); then took a job at UPS where I worked for 25 years and made good money, as supervisor, to provide for our growing family.

One day I went to visit the Catholic Worker on the lower east side of NYC. I got to the neighborhood and saw a plain, poor, quiet, pleasant-looking old woman sitting on a chair. She blended seamlessly into the low-income neighborhood.  "Can you direct me to the Catholic Worker?" I asked. "Right there" she answered. That was Dorothy Day.

We loved to go into NYC, see a movie, stop a book stores, get a bite to eat. Walking up 6th Avenue, around 12th Street, we came across a man lying on the street. We learned his name was Stephen Trip. I knelt down and talked to him: "Are you ok?" He seemed to like my voice. We spoke. He had overdosed and couldn't walk. We half-carried him to a hosptial nearby; they wouldn't see him. We did a very long walk to where he lived on the lower east side. He sobered as we walked and we became friends. It was a beautiful feeling holding him, walking with him, getting to know him. By the time we got to his house he was feeling better and he was our new best friend. I can never forget Stephen Trip!

One Saturday evening a student called to invite me to his house to meet Mother Theresa. "THE Mother Theresa?" I asked. She came to visit his parapelegic mother. When I was introduced as the sons's religion teacher she looked me steadily in the eye and said: "I hope you are teaching the right stuff!" I stood still, entirely mute, wondering with trepidation if I was teaching the right stuff. Mary Lynn came to my defense: "Mother Theresa you don't have to worry about him, he is teaching all the right Catholic stuff." Mother than advised be to obtain and use Fr. Hardon's Catechism: "Our sisters all use it. He gives what the Church teaches, no more no less." She looked at our one-year-old daughter in Mary Lynn's arms and wondered: "What will she become? Maybe a MC?" "What is a MC?" we asked. She laughed: "A mental case. No! I am kidding. A Missionary of Charity."  Those words were, indeed, prophetic: that precious baby now...mother, teacher, wife, daughter, friend...is a missionary charity in her indescribably gentle, kind, lovely way.

For over a year, 1970, I lived in Manhatten, taught ESL in the South Bronx and then religion at Xavier Prep, and took courses at Union Theological and Woodstock as a mendicant theological student. Alone most of the time and sometimes lonely, I looked forward to see Mary Lynn on the weekend. But I did have three dear friends.

Gilbert Davidowitz. We shared an apartment: the deal was I paid 1/3 of the rent but left from 8 AM to 10 PM so Gilbert could study. An observant, pious Orthodox Jew. Fat, cute, affectionate. A serious, committed scholar of historical linguistics: bookish and intelligent. Severe anxiety! One day he got on an elevator with a strange man; he got bad vibes; he had to go home and stay in bed the rest of the day. One day he told me: "If you could know yourself, as a second party, you would really like you." We had mutual respect for each other's "thick" religions. We loved each other. He died young. I grieved him and that I didn't share a single acquaintance with him. That was a special friend!

George Lissandrello. My roommate from college seminary. Bright, funny, sardonic, sad, creative. Very Italian. I would go down to the lower East Side where he renovated antique furniture. He was part of a lively gay community there. This was the exact time when the Gay Movement burst on the scene. My gay-dar was so weak that I assumed he just happened to have all gay friends, until he confided in me. His friends like me and I them. They had an ambivalent fascination with the Catholic Church. They would ridicule things like bi-location or bodily incorruption, but they seemed to love it. One day George told me solemnly: "The gay life is a sad one." We sat in silence. It felt like a privileged revelation: only silence before such depth. George died of AIDS.

Tony Petrosky.  An administrator at Puerto Rican Community Development Project where I taught ESL. A Puerto Rican hippy. Smart, gentle, kind, wise, musical. Long hair. Later, he told me he lived three years in a teepee on $5 a year. We roomed together for a while, near 50th Street and 8th Avenue NYC which was the red light district. I would pass maybe 20 prostitutes a night but never was  propositioned even once. He would play his guitar and sing sweetly. It was something from heaven.

A neurotic, brilliant, affectionate Orthodox Jew; a tender, gifted Italian in the emergent gay community; a gentle Puerto Rican hippy. That was New York City, for me, in 1970!



Four gracious events changed me and structured the rest of my adult life.

1971-2  As I was courting and marrying, Providence gave me Fr. Joseph Whelan S.J. who taught, at Woodstock Jesuit Theologate, just moved to NYC, courses in Prayer and The Catholic Mystics. By far the best teacher I ever had; possibly the most saintly man I ever knew; he radiated serenity, intelligence, interior depth, and the inexpressible beauty of holiness. He taught me the "kneeling theology" of Balthasar: that genuine theology can only come out of a life of prayer, of closeness to God. He taught me that the great Catholic saints loved Christ in His Church, the actual, institutional, flawed, o-so-human Church. He gave muscle and meat to my Catholic faith that had become light-hearted and dizzy in the atmosphere of liberalism.

1973  I made a Cursillo. I met Jesus Christ as a real person and presence; as God and man; as my personal savior, Lord, and friend. Previous to this event I was steady in my sense of God's love,  love for the liturgy, interest in theology, concern for the poor and social justice. But the cornerstone was not there: I had little sense of Jesus except as an exemplary man. But now, knowing Jesus Christ personally, the center was in place; and radiance from Him made all the other parts make sense. I became an Evangelical Catholic.

1973  Just a few months later, Mary Lynn (one day off her own life-changing Cursillo) and I attended a charismatic prayer meeting. The opening words were wonderful:  "Sit back and relax. Take everything in: the songs, reading, messages, prayers. You don't have to do anything. God wants to do something special for you: give you His Holy Spirit." Wow! What a relief! To that point I suffered a persistent low-grade liberal guilt: a nagging feeling of failure in that I wasn't really helping the poor, not changing the system, not advancing the revolution. My faith was, in part, an oppressive superego that reminded me of my blessings and accused me of not doing enough. This Pentecostal Proclamation was the opposite: God was not expecting anything of me; He wanted ME to expect wonderful things from Him, the anointing of the Holy Spirit! And it came! After preparation and prayers for a New Pentecost I experienced the close, strong, affirming presence of the Holy Spirit...in praise, practical guidance, tongues, inspired reading of Scripture, fascination with the Pentecostal and Evangelical traditions, and a deepening of all my Catholic convictions and intuitions. I lost the shrill, restless and moralistic edginess of my activism. I felt serene and rested, as I yielded to the guidance of a strong, loving hand.

So, out of Cursillo and Charismatic Renewal we, together, converted, or reverted (?) to a stronger, deeper grip of our Catholic faith. Throwing away our poisonous (to a woman's body, to the marital bond, to the immortal soul, to the very fabric of society) birth control pills, we opened our marriage to receive, eventually, seven marvelous children. Additionally, we were able to raise them.... amidst whatever problems, failings, challenges... in an atmosphere of prayer, of nurture by the Church, with a sense of God present. Our singular, really spectacular blessings is that they are all, in their distinctive ways, passing on this legacy of faith.

1978.  Pope John Paul II.  Immediately I saw that this brilliant, valiant, holy, virile, inspiring man was our Moses who would lead us out of the Egypt of the 70s,  into the new Millennium and a Culture of Life. This was our captain, our leader, our role model. Everything about his thought and life, especially his catechesis on the human person and body, was charming, encouraging and strengthening.

The remainder of my productive adult life I rejoiced as a part of the flock...guided by the good shepherd John Paul, and then his sidekick Pope Benedict.   The broader world seemed to continue on its road to perdition, while a rot in the Church also persisted covertly. Weeds and wheat continue to grow together in the gardens of society and Church, and in each of our hearts. I will ever be grateful for the blessings we received in that decade that started now a half century ago.