Читать книгу The Kingdom Began in Puerto Rico - Angel Garcia - Страница 11

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The New Parish

Although he has obligations toward all men, a priest has the poor and lowly entrusted to him in a special way. The Lord Himself showed that He was united to them, and the fact that the Gospel was preached to them is mentioned as a sign of Messianic activity. With special diligence, priests should look after youth, as well as married people and parents. It is desirable that each of these groups join together in friendly associations and thereby help one another act more easily and adequately as Christians in a condition of life which is often demanding.

—Second Vatican Council, Decree on the Ministry and Life of Priests §6, December 1965

Unknown Soldier

On September 15, 1958, Neil Connolly set foot in St. Athanasius parish, arriving at 878 Tiffany Street, a three-story rectory next to a large church in the Hunts Point–Longwood neighborhood of the Bronx. Just days earlier, at the assignment meeting in the New York Archdiocesan headquarters on Madison Avenue, auxiliary bishop John Maguire had told him, “It will be a challenge, but I think you’ll do well there.” It was a busy rectory, and he was immediately given numerous priestly assignments. Within weeks of his arrival, Connolly was already visiting neighborhood apartment buildings to give Holy Communion to the sick and the elderly.

Among the areas Connolly visited was “Little Korea,” a few blocks of Fox and Simpson Streets between Westchester Avenue and 163rd Street. It was given the nickname because there were a number of veterans from the Korean War living there, and because of its “wars”—the constant fights and attacks taking place in its buildings and on its streets. The war-zone atmosphere was heightened by overcrowding. Entire buildings in Little Korea were filled with SROs (single-room-occupancy), with spaces originally built as three bedrooms subdivided and then rented out to three different households. SRO tenants included whole families as well as single men.

One day, Connolly was on an emergency visit to a building at 980 Fox Street. Connolly knew that wearing his cassock—the long black clerical robe over his shirt and pants—gave him instant credibility and recognition from the people on the streets, something he had observed in his days in Puerto Rico. He didn’t wear it all the time, but on the street in Little Korea, it was often the right “uniform.”

From prior visits, he knew that many of the apartments lacked hallway lights, which made it difficult to reach the right room and the person he wanted to see. Each building had an unfamiliar mix of odors and sounds, and each had a bad reputation, with a lot of drug and alcohol abuse, especially among the single men. After his first couple of visits, he learned, when entering an apartment hall, to call out to get the attention of the person he was visiting: “Is anybody here?” People in adjoining rooms had no relationship to each other, so he couldn’t really rely on them to find the person he was visiting.

When he arrived that day at the apartment, Connolly saw a couple of detectives standing in the hallway and a person lying motionless on the floor near them. The middle-aged Puerto Rican man had been stabbed to death. One of the detectives looked at Connolly.

“You been here long, Father? You look like a young guy.”

Connolly responded, “I’ve been here a couple of months, maybe.”

The detective looked down and said, “Here, let me pick up the hem of your cassock. You got blood dripping from it.”

For Connolly, this was a startling, thought-provoking moment. First, up to this point in his life, he had never seen a dead person outside of a funeral home. Also, this was a death by violence, something he had never seen in Yorkville. He had only once come close to seeing it anywhere—in 1949 in Madison Square Garden, where heavyweight champion Rocky Marciano’s punch nearly killed Carmine Vingo during one of the Friday Night Fights his brother Denis took him to.¹

Extreme unction, or “last rites,” were administered to Vingo before his ultimately successful recovery. But there was no fame or recovery here. There was not even anyone to describe the dead man to Connolly; no one with any knowledge of his life history, his dreams, or his struggles. Connolly could only use his own prayers for this man’s soul, to give this “unknown solider” of Little Korea some mercy and some meaning. Yet, even if this battle was over, Connolly realized as he looked around at the environment and the police, this was still Little Korea, and warfare would resume soon.

The detectives were Irish, and they didn’t speak Spanish. In fact, they did not speak very much at all, except to communicate one thing: Nobody was going into the room or the apartment. There were no relatives coming around to speak with, so Connolly told the police that he would like to administer last rites to this man. He squatted down, careful to avoid any more blood, and made the sign of the cross on the man’s forehead while reciting prayers. Connolly used a Spanish prayer book, which he kept at all times and treasured; with his very limited Spanish, he could not afford to be without it, and so he watched it like a hawk.

Connolly was still taken aback by the detectives’ casualness. For his fellow Irishmen, the emergency was over. Both a report and a life were finished. For Connolly, however, there was still a sense of emergency about the lost soul and about the building’s other souls.

What kind of place was this, he asked, which showed no mercy to this unknown solider?

Why was the building dark and overcrowded, and why was everyone separated?

What kind of owner would let this building reach this miserable point? How many other buildings were there like this, where people were left to fend for themselves?

Also, he thought, this was likely a recent Puerto Rican migrant. What pueblo did he come from in Puerto Rico? How did he not have family?

Also, was he a baptized Catholic? What sacraments did he receive during his life? And what about the other apartment dwellers’ lives?

He was sure that those living in the rooms surrounding him were also from Puerto Rico. Were they from Jayuya, or San Lorenzo, or Arecibo, or anywhere he had visited just a couple of months ago? There were many stories to hear about the people in this neighborhood and how they got here, he was sure.

Forced Migrations

After arriving in New York City, most Puerto Ricans continued migrating, but now it was done within the city, which is roughly a tenth the size of the island they had just left. They often settled first in densely packed and segregated neighborhoods. Their numbers increased from 244,000 in 1950 to 612,000, or 8 percent of the city’s population, in 1960.² Often arriving with large families, the Puerto Rican migrants were also a much younger and less educated population than other New Yorkers, with a median age of 21.9 years and an education level of 7.6 years.³

In the earlier years of the Gran Migración, Puerto Ricans settled in all five boroughs, with a greater presence in Manhattan and the Bronx. They started moving in larger numbers to the Bronx in the late 1950s to early 1960s, and by 1965, the Bronx became the borough with the highest number of Puerto Ricans in the city.⁴ In 1960, Hunts Point–Longwood, the neighborhood served by St. Athanasius parish, had one of the heaviest concentrations.⁵ As in other Puerto Rican neighborhoods, the settlement was created by several forces—“push” and “pull” migrations produced by laws and institutions.

Among other factors, two major government actions, which the Puerto Ricans were powerless to control, pushed the city’s Puerto Rican population northward to neighborhoods like Hunts Point–Longwood. The Federal Housing Act of 1949 authorized and funded “urban renewal,” the large-scale governmental seizure, destruction, and replacement of “slum” areas in American cities with new housing.⁶ In Manhattan, construction coordinator Robert Moses and the City Planning Department carried out over a dozen urban-renewal projects, also known as “slum clearance,” in poor, segregated Manhattan areas where Puerto Ricans and blacks lived.⁷ Many of those residents were forced to leave their neighborhoods and find new housing, often in other segregated neighborhoods. In addition, the Act, expanding on the 1934 Housing Act, created more government-subsidized public housing developments for working-class people.⁸ Thus, more buildings and neighborhoods were “cleared” to make way for the construction of the new housing complexes, which came to be known as the “projects.” Public housing units for 100,000 residents were created as of 1962 in the Bronx alone.⁹

Leaving the clearance areas in the Lower East Side, Upper West Side, Hell’s Kitchen, East Harlem, Central Harlem, and Morningside Heights, the Puerto Rican migrants took refuge wherever they could, usually near family and friends. Several hundred thousand people were displaced by New York City’s clearance actions, setting in motion an almost constant migration for the newly arrived Puerto Ricans.¹⁰ Not one clearance project was created in Hunts Point–Longwood, however, and so the neighborhood attracted many of those being pushed from other neighborhoods in the Bronx and Manhattan.

The apartments in Hunts Point–Longwood and other southeastern Bronx neighborhoods became available to the Puerto Ricans because of another migration, this one a “pull” migration. During the 1950s, an estimated 1.3 million more white New Yorkers left the city than came in, a phenomenon known as “white flight.”¹¹ Those white New York families mostly “fled” to newly created suburbs in areas north and east of the city, such as Westchester, Rockland, and Long Island.¹² Their new homes were created by another federal housing program, the Federal Housing Administration (FHA) mortgage insurance program, which spurred the creation of millions of homes affordable to working and middle class people in the United States.¹³ Reflecting the racial regime of the 1940s and 1950s, the program required many suburban developments to ban home sales to non-whites, making them more attractive to whites and enhancing the “pull” from urban neighborhoods.

More than 240,000 of New York’s out-migrants left the Bronx, leaving many apartments available, especially in the Southern and Eastern Bronx.¹⁴ But with both “push” and “pull” forces at work, many Puerto Rican migrants struggled to find affordable apartments. Many moved into the next building or the next block and shared apartments with friends, families, and even strangers—a practice known as “doubling up.” Single rooms sufficed as living quarters, as long as families and individuals had access to a bathroom and kitchen. Noting the “doubling up” trend, landlords converted hundreds of apartment buildings into SROs, in neighborhoods often close to the sites of the clearance projects.¹⁵ With public housing developments in the Bronx and East Harlem to the south, thousands of displaced migrants sought SRO buildings and found them along Fox Street and Simpson Street, in Little Korea, and elsewhere in Hunts Point–Longwood.

Hunts Point–Longwood

What the Puerto Rican migrants found was a large and busy neighborhood. There were six subway stations: Prospect Avenue, Intervale Avenue, and Simpson Street on the #2 and #5 express lines, and 149th Street, Longwood Avenue, and Hunts Point Avenue on the #6 local line. One major street, Southern Boulevard, was the second largest commercial corridor in the Bronx, and another, 163rd Street, was a major commercial and traffic road leading to Hunts Point Peninsula in one direction and Yankee Stadium in the other. The Hunts Point Peninsula, with a smaller residential community and a much larger industrial park, was separated from the main Hunts Point area by the eight-lane Bruckner Boulevard and Expressway.

There were blocks and blocks of large five- and six-story multifamily buildings. But as any new arrival could see, there were no open-space recreation areas, just the playgrounds belonging to several public schools in the area and a small Police Athletic League (PAL) indoor recreation center on 156th Street. Hunts Point–Longwood had nearly 89,000 residents officially living in the area as of 1960, 46,000 of whom were Puerto Ricans. It had a median family income of $4,650, which was 25 percent less than New York City overall.¹⁶ Housing conditions and prices in Hunts Point–Longwood posed a challenge for its residents living on these lower incomes, which were earned mostly through factory and service jobs in Manhattan.

Monthly rent increased continuously, from an average of $38 to $60 during the 1950s, but the quality of these more expensive apartments worsened. By 1960, about 28 percent of the neighborhood’s housing units were already officially considered “deteriorating” or “dilapidated,” compared with 15 percent in New York City as a whole.¹⁷ Also, nearly a quarter were officially considered overcrowded, with more than one person per room, which was twice the citywide rate. In the middle of this overpopulated and decaying neighborhood, all that anyone with a little money could do was to survive, even if home was a single room in an unlit apartment. Or not survive, as Connolly saw during his first administration of last rites, before getting back to his next parish assignment.

There was little time between assignments, even though the parish staff of five was large: The pastor, Monsignor Joseph Mastaglio, was joined by Fathers Tom McDonald, Tom McGarrett, Al DeLuca, John Steltz, and Neil Connolly. There were two Spanish Masses on Sunday, and they were regularly packed with worshippers. Every single pew, as well as the large standing-room-only area in the back, was completely filled. And despite the great number of people to greet afterward, this was the easiest sacrament for Connolly to celebrate and learn, even as he stumbled over his first sermons in awkward Spanish.

First Sacrament

Just by itself, the sacrament of baptism was taking up much of the priests’ time. In the early 1960s there were, on average, thirty baptisms on a Saturday, followed by five on a Sunday, week after week for the entire year. At the crest of this wave, the priests at Athanasius baptized fifteen hundred new Catholics a year. Every Puerto Rican in New York, it seemed, wanted a baptism in those years.

Requests for baptisms came in all forms and at all times. Once, a military family came to the church on a Saturday at the last minute, as Connolly was assembling those already scheduled. With siblings, aunts, uncles, and cousins accompanying the young soldier, the mother began pleading her case: “Este muchacho necesita ser bautizado hoy, porque Sabrá Dios lo que le pasará cuando vaya a la Guerra.” (This young man needs to be baptized now, because God only knows what might happen to him in war.)

Connolly replied (in his rapidly-developing Spanish), “But he hasn’t made any of his preparations, he hasn’t taken a course.”

The desperate mother, now also infuriated, looked at Connolly and cried out, “¡Vámonos a la Milagrosa!” La Milagrosa was a Spanish national church located in Harlem. It was one of four Spanish national parishes in New York, established under the original national parish model created by the archdiocese to serve immigrant Catholics. Pastor Ernesto Mayoral, who had taught Connolly in his Cathedral Preparatory Seminary days, would allow baptisms to take place at his church, on the spot, without preparation, for any Spanish-speaking family seeking one. Even with all the baptisms performed by Connolly and his colleagues, they could not compare with the volume of activity at La Milagrosa. At one point, La Milagrosa was reported to have baptized five hundred new Catholics on a single Easter Sunday.

As often as possible, Connolly and the other parish priests did their best to teach and prepare families in advance of the ceremony. But with so many children and adults to be baptized, it was impossible to prepare them all adequately. So, often, there were large-scale group baptisms with many family members in attendance. Within an often boisterous setting, Connolly would instruct those who were about to be baptized, along with their godparents, in the steps involved in the ceremony. He wanted to make sure they responded appropriately, at the right moment and with the right words, to the ritual questions which tested their understanding of the Catholic faith and the meaning of the sacrament.

One day, a baptismal ceremony began with a particularly large group, with different levels of faith understanding and readiness among the participants. Connolly found himself working at length in the pre-ceremony instructions with one particular man, who was having a hard time remembering the response. But Connolly persisted, still attempting to master his own command of Spanish-in-action: “Entonces, cuando yo pregunto ‘¿Qué pide la iglesia de Dios?’ tu respondes ‘la fe,’ entiendes?” (“So, when I ask you ‘What does the Church of God ask of you?’ you say ‘Faith,’ understand?”)

The man nervously answered, “OK, OK, yo entiendo, Padre. La fe, la fe.” (“OK, OK, I get it Father. Faith. Faith.”)

Connolly proceeded with the baptism ceremony and he asked each person present individually “¿Qué pide la iglesia de Dios?” and they each answered “La fe.” Several minutes later, he came to the man who was given the extra preparation, and asked, “¿Qué pide la iglesia de Dios?”

The man looked at him, stopped, and nervously uttered, “Ca-fe.” The entire church audience erupted with laughter. And the comical request for coffee instead of faith reminded Connolly how hard it was to teach the faith under these circumstances: so many people to serve, with such crucial concepts to get across, and with his lingering language struggles.

It wasn’t always rushed. Connolly also offered a one-on-one baptismal course to individual adults. He appreciated that type of education much more than the large gatherings, because it gave him a chance to communicate his understanding of the Catholic faith and the significance of the sacrament. Yet even that approach was challenging, on occasion.

One student, a Cuban woman, would correct Connolly’s Spanish during the session, when she wasn’t discussing how her husband was reportedly down in Florida planning a secret invasion of Cuba. She was looking to make her first Communion, to fulfill some personal obligation she felt to become a Catholic. At the end of one long session of explaining concepts, Connolly paused for a reaction from her to see if she understood a particularly important concept. He was surprised when she stared at him and stated flatly, “Padre, yo no he entendido ninguna cosa que usted me ha dicho esta mañana.” (“Father I have not understood a single thing you have told me this morning.”) But she came back, and she and Connolly persevered until she understood him and completed her coursework.

Another Cuban student also caught Connolly’s attention, but for a different reason. Rafael Collado, a former engineer, had enrolled his four sons in St. Athanasius Elementary School, and Connolly told him that, in order to raise his sons correctly, Rafael needed to have a genuine understanding of what it meant to be a Catholic. “Padre, yo soy una persona de mi palabra. Yo voy a completarlo” (“Father, I am a man of my word. I will complete the course”), he said. So in the evenings, Rafael and Connolly would go through Catholic teachings in the rectory. Sometimes, the sessions would take place at ten o’clock at night, after Connolly finished seeing other visitors seeking counseling or assistance at the last minute. Connolly was impressed with Rafael—he was always prepared, with materials read, and with an appetite for more knowledge. Rafael began getting more involved in the parish after completing the course. In seeing that involvement grow through the following months, Connolly knew he had taught someone special.

Along with the volume of baptismal courses, ceremonies, and other sacraments, Connolly was still racing to learn Spanish, immersing himself further, absorbing all the language capacity and vocabulary he could handle. In fact, a fellow staff priest showed some displeasure with his industry, but for a reason surprising to Connolly. “Hey listen,” he said one day. “Some of the English people, the American people, are telling me that you are here to serve both congregations. They resent the fact that you’re working with the Spanish people.”

Connolly instinctively defended himself. “Well, I am working with both. It just happens that most of the people here are from the Spanish community.” But he learned over the next few months that there had been “wars” in the parish between the English and Spanish-speaking communities, most of them in the early and mid-1950s prior to his arrival, over what languages and cultural groups and activities should be permitted in the church. In fact, except for the one priest imported from Spain every year to help with Spanish-speaking parishioners, the staff of that time was either Irish or Italian, and they were expected by the parishioners to be there for “their” people. As Connolly became more involved with the Puerto Rican and Cuban people, he thus not only created a following but sparked the occasional tension. But Connolly knew from the moment he arrived home from his Puerto Rican summer program that the Athanasius community was “going Spanish,” and so was he.

As a priest, his first concern was always trying to catch up with all of the people and their religious and personal needs. Even with a staff of five, the Athanasius priests could not keep up with even the sacramental needs of the parish. Unlike Rafael and the Cuban woman and a few other individual students, so many people were just coming in for the ceremony of Baptism, with a sense of urgency about becoming a Catholic, but without much understanding of what it meant. But some time during those years, Connolly came to realize something about all the new baptism seekers: Maybe they were looking for salvation, just in case. Like the soldier and his family headed in frustration for La Milagrosa, they did not know how long their lives would last, nor how they would end. After all, it had ended too soon and too miserably for the stranger on Fox Street, for whose soul Connolly had prayed in their only encounter.

In Puerto Rico, as he learned from Fitzpatrick and Illich, many had known lives shortened by tuberculosis, poverty, and hurricanes. They were not necessarily concerned about something he was emphasizing—that their baptism would bring them into a church community, a community of other believers who would follow the teaching of Christ to love one another. He wondered: Of the fifteen hundred being baptized each year, who would join their community? Also, if he could not get them to understand and fully join, then what was he doing as a priest?

These existential questions about priesthood and the Church were brushed aside at the rectory one day by a counseling need. When he heard the German-born parish cook, Marianne Muller, sobbing in the kitchen, Connolly asked what was wrong.

“Oh, how do you get a license? Those men are so cruel!”

Marianne, a Manhattan resident, was married to a brilliant German theologian who was unable to work because of a midlife crippling disease. Marianne had to take charge, and she cooked for the Athanasius staff to provide for her family. But as the burdens of looking after five children and her husband increased, she wanted to drive to be able to make and keep appointments for everyone in the family. So, getting that license was as important for her as it was difficult: She had already failed a couple of times.

Connolly asked, “Well, what happened?”

“Well,” she stammered in her heavily-accented English, “I took the test, and I don’t know why he failed me.”

Connolly asked, “Well what did you do wrong?”

She tried to gather her composure and said, “Well, I was driving and then, to park the car, I drove up on the sidewalk and I knocked three garbage cans down. I don’t know why he failed me.”

Amused, Connolly answered, “Well, you can’t hit garbage cans,” but he also consoled and encouraged her.

But Marianne did not give up, Connolly learned later. She went back one last time and passed the test. Afterward, Connolly thought, This ordinary woman has extraordinary determination. Marianne had struggled again and again with something which he had taken for granted, and which seemed impossible to her. But her choice was between staying in poverty or working every day and learning the seemingly impossible. And after all, he remembered, his own father had five children and a spouse crippled by disease, but he also had worked, and with the help of family, the church, and the union, he gave his family a life with some hope. Marianne’s struggle to succeed was rooted in her commitment, just like Rafael’s struggle to become a Catholic through many late-night sessions with Connolly.

Connolly understood that this deep commitment was essential for himself as well. Without it, he could not handle the overwhelming needs of his parishioners and his constant struggle to provide for them. This was what he and the Church had to be, Connolly thought: committed to its people.

New Priests

But while Connolly kept his commitment, the commitment of others in the rectory fluctuated, as the staff underwent changes. Beginning in 1962, the priests who were there when Connolly arrived were starting to find other places to work. Tom McDonald, Al DeLuca, and Tom McGarrett, who had already been serving as parish priests for nearly a decade, were ready to move on. In addition, the pastor, Monsignor Mastaglio, a saintly old man who had been at Athanasius for decades, had become more reclusive and passive. He now only went out to take the parish dog for a walk or to step out in the back garden, where some local drug addicts would regularly ask him for some spare change, knowing that he was a “soft touch.” He passed away around the same time, and the grateful parish gave him a full funeral Mass complete with music and flowers.

Connolly was joined in 1962 by his good friend from Dunwoodie, Father Louis Gigante, who loved sports as much as he did, especially basketball. Gigante, another graduate of the Puerto Rico summer program and a graduate of Georgetown University, where he was basketball team captain, came from St. James parish on the Lower East Side. Connolly and Gigante had gotten along very well in their seminary days, and they were both “city kids” used to playing and spending time on the streets. Sports would be a way for Gigante and Connolly to bond with the city kids of their new parish. And as the parish became larger and more Spanish, it was time for new energy. For Connolly, Gigante, and another priest—Father Richard Adams, who came on around 1965—were the sources of new energy and welcome changes.

The most important change, however, may have been the pastor. Monsignor Thomas O’Brien came in from a Spanish-speaking parish, St. Paul’s in East Harlem, and he had already worked in a parish up in the East Bronx that was gaining more Spanish-speaking people. O’Brien’s Spanish was very limited, but he welcomed new ideas and people, and so he was ready for the dynamics of Athanasius, with a large staff that tried to carry the load of assignments. Connolly, Gigante, and Adams saw O’Brien’s interest as a signal to initiate things, rather than hold back and wait for the pastor’s permission. They would need both the energy and the freedom to act, especially to engage the many children and teenagers who came over from Puerto Rico. Young people were getting lost in the crowded apartment buildings, in the neighborhoods, and in the often-inhospitable schools with few Spanish-speaking teachers. And the parish priests saw where the lost were being “found” with each passing day.

Saving Youth

After World War II, gangs began operating in neighborhoods across poor and working-class areas all around New York City.¹⁸ By the late 1950s, it was reported, there were eight thousand boys and young men in a couple of hundred gangs in the city, along with three thousand young women in female gangs, often accompanying the male gangs. With names like Egyptian Dragons and the Kingsmen, the gangs served as protectors for their own members and as enemies of the gangs from other blocks. Gangs would chase and beat enemy members who walked on their block, which was seen as an invasion of their “turf” or territory.¹⁹ They also had major confrontations with enemy gangs, called “rumbles,” at predetermined locations, which involved every gang member with every weapon imaginable.²⁰ In the late 1950s, when the numbers of gangs and their memberships rapidly increased, there were reported to be as many as fifty rumbles a year in New York City.²¹

The Bronx was the site of many rumbles in the 1960s as well, primarily in the Pelham Bay Park and Orchard Beach areas, removed from the rest of the borough and the police. But many of the rumblers lived in the South and Southeast Bronx, where young people were used to carrying knives, brass knuckles, and other weapons to defend themselves in case of a schoolyard or neighborhood fight. Hunts Point was the site of some battles as well. One night, at 726 Fox Street, near Little Korea, a battle erupted on a rooftop between Egyptian Dragons, Egyptian Crowns, and Kingsmen, ending in a shooting. The incident led to a trial, which, like other sensational gang stories at the time, caught the attention of the New York Times and El Diario (the leading newspaper of the Puerto Rican community). Threats to the trial court were sent through El Diario offices, warning of death if the defendants were not released.²²

Many organizations serving the Puerto Rican community were scrambling to save their youth from violent gang life, even as they fought against discrimination and the neglect of their communities throughout the city. In September 1959, almost one year after Connolly entered the parish, these organizations even took out a full-page ad in the New York Times, with more than one hundred signatory associations and institutions, including St. Athanasius. The ad denounced juvenile delinquency and pledged programs to confront it, while calling on city residents not to blame the Puerto Rican community for the larger problems of juvenile delinquency.²³

As he looked at the list of signers on the New York Times ad, he was amazed and pleased at the number of groups and organizations active in the Puerto Rican community, including some of the Catholic parishes. One hundred and sixty-two in total.

They included labor organizations such as the Puerto Rican Civil Service Employees Association, the Puerto Rican Workers Association, the Association of Puerto Rican Teachers, and the Puerto Rican Postal Workers Association. They also included unions welcoming Puerto Ricans into their ranks, such as District 65, American Federation of Labor and Congress of Industrial Organizations (AFL-CIO), and several locals of the International Ladies’ Garment Workers’ Union (ILGWU).

There were also business and professional groups such as the Spanish Grocers Association, the Pan American Benevolent Merchants Association, the Spanish Medical Association, the Hispanic Society of Social Workers, and the Puerto Rican newspaper men and women. They also included newly forming groups such as the Hispanic Young Adult Association, an organization including emerging activists such as Dr. Antonia Pantoja.

The full-page ad message in the Times, as well as the organizing effort behind it, was pulled together by two organizations already active in Puerto Rican social, civic, and economic issues: the Spanish American Youth Bureau and the Council of Puerto Rican and Spanish American Organizations. Moreover, the hometown clubs—which had been taking shape since the Gran Migración—were on board. In fact, an umbrella group, the Federation of Hometown Clubs, with representation from each club social in the city of New York, was brought into the effort, led by a dynamic community worker named Gilberto Gerena Valentín. Even the Spanish language media—with four AM radio stations, like Radio WADO and WHOM, and two major Spanish language newspapers, El Diario and La Prensa—threw their weight behind the anti-delinquency campaign.²⁴

Connolly saw that Puerto Ricans, like immigrant communities before them, came together for social, family, labor, education, and other issues. When they left their island country to find a place in New York to live and work, some of them took responsibility for others’ well-being. Sometimes they were educating each other, and sometimes they were supporting one another, and sometimes they were fighting to be heard. With their forces coming together, he thought maybe the gang problems could be stopped. But he wondered if they could reach enough youth.

In the meantime, Connolly’s fellow priest at Athanasius, John Steltz, was doing everything he possibly could with youth. When he wasn’t teaching at Cardinal Hayes High School, Steltz was serving as the chaplain for Spofford House, the large juvenile detention center in the Hunts Point Peninsula erected during the gang era. And, of course, he was also a parish priest, with the related responsibilities. While his command of Spanish was poor, Steltz developed a special connection with Puerto Rican mothers and teenagers, because he found a way to stop some of the young people who were being menaced into joining a gang or were being threatened with violence for leaving one. For every mother or father who asked, Steltz wrote a letter to the police, warning them that “if anything should happen to this young man, you should investigate such-and-such person, leader of this particular gang.” Knowing on what street corner the leader could be found, Steltz made sure he saw the letter. Steltz’s counter-threats worked on several occasions, and word spread to other families, who then came to Steltz for this letter.

After Steltz had already been working on the gang problem for several years, the city government and the media finally began paying serious attention to delinquency and gangs at the end of the 1950s. In 1959, Connolly’s second year, Mayor Robert Wagner officially declared juvenile delinquency “the number one problem facing New York City” and dedicated hundreds of additional police officers to patrol parks and beaches that summer.²⁵ The New York Police Department created a Juvenile Aid Bureau (JAB) to handle youth under the age of sixteen who were considered “antisocial.” Tens of thousands of youth were referred as “juvies” for monitoring and services, and the numbers did not decline.²⁶ An agency called the Youth Board, created in 1947, also ramped up its activity and staffing, funding youth-related projects operated by local social service agencies and institutions. A Street Club program placed “gang workers” in fourteen targeted areas of the city, including the South Bronx neighborhood, which officials labeled “Morrisania” but which actually included Hunts Point–Longwood.²⁷

At one point in the 1960s, seventy “detached workers”—so named because their work was not attached to a specific local organization, giving them flexibility to make decisions and serve at certain hours and locations where the youth could be reached—were working to divert gangs from rumbles and persuade their leaders to enter into recreational, educational, or summer youth employment programs.²⁸ The workers estimated that five times as many were needed to truly make a dent in the problem.²⁹

One such worker in Hunts Point–Longwood was Jack Lyons. A Korean War veteran who played baseball for Manhattan College in the Riverdale neighborhood of the Bronx, Lyons was the sports program director for Athanasius, while also serving as a detached Youth Board worker. With a crushingly hectic schedule, shuttling back and forth between jobs, Lyons gave the parish and neighborhood youth a chance to be safe on the streets. He organized baseball, basketball, and other teams for the Youth Board, and he managed championship level baseball teams for Athanasius at the elementary, high school, and college levels.

Connolly and Gigante worked closely and often with Jack, since they were all sports enthusiasts, and they got to know many of the teenagers that way. They often played pickup basketball games with the youth, on the streets, or in the gym at the small elementary school. But for Connolly, the most important thing was building relationships with the youth and getting them engaged and away from the gangs. Occasionally, their young opponents accused Connolly and Gigante, who were older, heavier, and stronger, of “playing dirty.” Connolly didn’t disagree; in the game of street-level basketball he was quick and tough, because that was what he knew from his own youth.

Connolly had always been ready for a game since his days growing up in Yorkville. He played basketball for hours on end, whether it was in Central Park with his brother Denis, or for a neighborhood team against other neighborhood teams. It was in some of those games against other neighborhoods that he faced some opponents with a rough edge. In one close game against a team of Italians from a Catholic league school team in East Harlem, while waiting for his teammate to take a free throw, Connolly was standing at the foul line, pushing for position. The opponent, frustrated with the stronger Connolly, turned to him and whispered, “You let me get the rebound, or I’ll break your fuckin’ kneecaps.” Although surprised, Connolly got the rebound himself. As soon as the game was over and his team won, he and his friends ran out of the gym before they could even savor the victory. Connolly learned to survive those days, but that era was different from this one, which he called the “zip guns” era, named after the makeshift guns the gang members made at home and often carried in his neighborhood.

Sports programs and Steltz’s letters were working to keep many young men away from trouble, but Connolly and the staff knew they needed to do more. They began to build up the program of religious education in the parish to guide the children and teenagers through their faith formation. Father James Wilson, who was assistant pastor under Mastaglio before leaving to direct the Spanish Apostolate at the archdiocese, had jury-rigged a religious education program using whatever resources he could find. Wilson had worked in the Philippines before coming to St. Athanasius, so he had learned to work within a culture different from his own. He saw the great waves of Puerto Rican migrants coming into Athanasius and knew the younger migrants needed education. Knowing that there was little room at the parish to handle them all, he found a space removed from the church but in the neighborhood: the Hunts Point Palace. The popular dance hall on the top floor of a building on the corner of Southern Boulevard and 163rd Street was large enough to hold the youth.³⁰

Fr. Louis Gigante, college basketball team captain, teaches dribbling skills to St. Athanasius boys. (Photo by Chris Sheridan. Courtesy of Catholic New York.)

Hunts Point Palace was known to the Puerto Rican community of New York City as an entertainment attraction. Connolly would sometimes call the busy Palace—which brought in Latin bands, mambo orchestras, and big crowds every weekend—a “bucket of blood.” Weekends at the Palace always involved dancing and drinking, which often led to fights ending in police and ambulance calls. During the week, however, it became a site for teaching over a hundred school-age children who could not fit into the church hall.

During Wilson’s time, as the class sizes grew and more teachers were needed, the parish reached out for teaching candidates—far out, all the way to Texas. Through a contact, Wilson found four Mexican nuns from Taylor, Texas, who agreed to come each summer and teach religious education. They would travel for days by railcar, sleeping overnight in them, and eventually find their way to Hunts Point–Longwood and the church. When Connolly arrived at the parish and began working with them, he was impressed. They were often dressed like laypersons, rather than religious—often in bomber jackets and dresses—and they carried their own coffee pots with them, a habit acquired from working in camps with migrant Mexican families along the border. He admired how resourceful they were, refusing donations from the parish to pay for airfare and opting instead for the railroad. But Connolly was most impressed with their warmth and openness to the young people. One or the other would often sing religious children’s songs while walking the streets to the church, and they drew children along the way, like modern Mexican Pied Pipers.

More youth were coming in each year, and the parish turned to more places for teaching help. A group from the Convent of the Sacred Heart, an exclusive Upper East Side Catholic women’s school, agreed to teach classes for Wilson, and they stayed on through Connolly’s years. Another group, from the College of New Rochelle, a Catholic women’s educational institution in Westchester, north of the Bronx, also came on board during the early 1960s as summer interns. Finally, in 1964, Casita Maria, a Catholic social service organization from East Harlem, began providing recreation opportunities for the Athanasius students.³¹ Connolly and Gigante often got together with a couple of Casita’s youth workers, John Wright and Milton Robinson, to coordinate programs that would engage neighborhood youth and keep them safe, while supporting the religious education program. In the summer, the parish offered religious education in the morning, then closed up the streets around the church, and Casita Maria organized structured and pickup games. With the help of trained recreation staff from Casita Maria, the parish was also able to organize full-day summer trips to Bear Mountain and other area state parks.

Connolly and Gigante became close enough to the Casita staff that they were regularly invited to attend the organization’s annual fundraising gala at the Waldorf-Astoria. Casita’s leadership, higher-echelon Irish Catholics, along with their friends from the Park Avenue area of the Upper East Side of Manhattan, threw lavish events, and Connolly would occasionally attend. The cardinal and the high-ranking leaders of the city would also attend, as Casita was the premier Catholic settlement house in New York. At one of those events, Connolly, who was never completely comfortable at these high-powered affairs, was asked by an animated Casita board member to say a few words on the radio: A live broadcast of the event was being brought to listeners by the Voice of America, an American-owned government station created during World War II to increase American influence with listeners around the world. His high-society board friend was so excited about Connolly speaking that his awkward message did not matter to her: “I’m Father Neil Connolly, and we are live in the Waldorf-Astoria with Casita Maria, and we are from St. Athanasius parish in the Bronx. Thank you.” With that, Connolly thought whimsically, I have now communicated to the world. Everyone in the world now knows about our special community in Hunts Point–Longwood.

Without parks, the streets surrounding the church became the playgrounds. (Fr. Neil Connolly’s personal collection.)

This collaboration with Casita Maria was a great boost to the parish’s efforts with young people. Prior to that time, parish recreation activities were randomly organized, and trips were challenging to manage. A trip to Bear Mountain was hard to staff, with only a couple of priests who could handle all the Spanish-speaking youth, and so Connolly took help wherever he could find it. They often had priests join them from abroad, especially during the summer, often through some arrangement with a diocesan contact in Spain or elsewhere. One summer, without prior notice or approval, a priest came to Athanasius from Rome, where he was studying. “My name is Chow,” he announced as O’Brien opened the rectory door and saw a Chinese priest. “What’s he doing here?” O’Brien asked. Connolly realized that the Vatican office where Father Chow was studying had never received the rejection letter from Athanasius, saying they were already full of priests. After learning that Chow spoke Spanish and wanted the experience of pastoral work, though, Connolly appealed to O’Brien.

Father Chow remained through the summer and accompanied Connolly and Gigante on their trips to Bear Mountain. On the first, he unintentionally entertained the rest of the Athanasius delegation at the large swimming pool, a popular attraction for the staff and the youth. Chow climbed up to the ten-foot-high diving board and hurled himself into the water, creating enormous splashes and alarming the lifeguards. Connolly and the others pleaded with him to stop, but he declared, “I will get this right.” By the end of the day, Chow had taught himself the fine art of diving, impressing Connolly with his determination and success. Despite all the entertainment value he brought to the day, Chow’s biggest contribution was that he spoke Spanish, so he could communicate with the young people. That meant a lot to Connolly, who was always followed by a large crowd of youth at the park.

When he looked at all of the teenagers in the parish and thought about all those still being recruited by the gangs, Connolly decided that the religious education program needed to do more to reach these young people. So he convinced the others on staff and the volunteer teachers that they needed a full program just for the teenagers, and they agreed to use the little elementary school for this program in the evenings. John Steltz, the lead priest in the parish on youth programs and on the threat of gangs, hesitated, saying, “Neil, I don’t think you need to do this. I think that what we have with the teens is going well, and we shouldn’t mess with that.”

Connolly responded, “But John, so many kids are still getting lost, and we are not catching them. We have to try something.”

Steltz answered, skeptically, “Well, I hope you get some.”

The first night of Connolly’s new program, four hundred teenagers showed up at the door of the little school. They came in from every corner of the neighborhood. Connolly had been so worried about the gangs coming that night, and about fights and shootings near the school, that he called on “reinforcements.” Joe Ryan, a former defensive end with the New York Titans football team, was a brother of Connolly’s seminary classmate and a Youth Board worker like Jack Lyons. Ryan was recruited as the program’s “muscle” to protect the parish school that night. The six-foot-two, 235-pound athlete stood at the entrance alongside Connolly and others as they hurriedly pulled the teens through the doors of the school, with its eight classrooms and tiny gymnasium. The experiment was underway and went beyond everyone’s expectations. Not one incident took place.

After a year, the program found space at 830 Southern Boulevard, a new five-story, forty-room, $10 million structure. On October 17, 1965, several hundred residents were sitting in a makeshift outdoor “auditorium” with folding chairs in the middle of the street, and a stage occupied by Cardinal Spellman, Mayor Wagner, Bronx Borough President Joseph Perricone, Monsignor O’Brien, and the priests and religious of the parish, to celebrate the opening of the new St. Athanasius Elementary School.³² It marked the beginning of a better religious education program for neighborhood youth, including the four hundred new teenagers in the program Connolly had initiated a year earlier. Within a year, there would be six hundred full-time students and more than two thousand religious education students at the elementary school.

At the inauguration ceremony, Monsignor James Hart of Blessed Sacrament parish, on Beach Avenue in the East Bronx, gave a speech in English to a predominantly Spanish-speaking, mostly Puerto Rican crowd, which created some confusion. The often-bombastic orator puzzled Connolly and the others with continuing references to the threat of the “red devil” on First Avenue. After listening for a while, Connolly realized that he was talking about the United Nations and the threat of Communism.

At first, Connolly could not believe it. However, his father, Con, like many a Catholic of his time, was also strongly anti-Communist. In their little apartment on 87th Street, Con had listened to the fiery Sunday afternoon radio speeches of Father Coughlin denouncing the Communist threat and other threats to Catholicism and America.³³ Connolly also remembered, as a young boy, hearing political speakers like Lou Budenz denounce Communism at Holy Name Society breakfasts thrown by his old parish.³⁴ But the young Connolly was not concerned about Communist threats, either then or in his current parish.

There was another thing Connolly didn’t understand when he attended those Communion Breakfasts, or this day attending the school dedication ceremony: why the government officials and political people were there. This was an event of the Church, he thought—of St. Athanasius and the archdiocese. But there was the mayor of New York, seated next to Cardinal Spellman, the two most famous leaders of the city, on the stage above the audience, along with the borough president. Connolly thought, Well, they were supposed to be the most powerful, so maybe their forces could have joined together and stopped the gang problems. These leaders were certainly well protected by the police officers he saw standing around the stage and the audience. But to Connolly, these officers seemed just like the detectives he met on that extreme unction visit in the SRO. The parish could not really rely on the officers to have all the answers about solving crime and juvenile delinquency, which kept on growing and terrifying the families sitting on that very street where the officers protected the powerful people. In fact, Connolly heard, the local police had often relied on the parish, like the day when they called in Steltz a few years earlier to talk a young man out of jumping off the roof of a building on Fox Street.

So, was it just a show of united power between government and Church leaders? Connolly thought. Did they want to use this power for the people? Because, those poor people really needed it.

Also, thought Connolly, none of the officials on the stage—Wagner, Spellman, Perricone—could speak the people’s language. Along with Hart, with his “Sermon Against the Red Devil,” they seemed removed from the hundreds of lives before them. None of these powerful leaders understood the places the faithful audience members had come from in Puerto Rico; or the overcrowded apartments or SROs they were living in; or what they were hoping to find in their new neighborhood, or church, or even the new school. Maybe they needed to get to know these families and their young people, Connolly thought. If they didn’t understand Spanish, they could listen to Connolly, Gigante, and the Sisters coming to the new school. These staff at Athanasius were working with these families and youth every day, and they knew none of those families were worried about a “Red Devil” on First Avenue.

Hart seemed to be living in the old Irish Catholic world of Con Connolly, or the world of St. Athanasius parishioners who fought the culture wars. Like the other staff priest who challenged Connolly about serving the “Spanish” people, and not the “American” people of Athanasius, Hart could not accept the new world in front of him, and he was “taking sides” against the Communists. Connolly, meanwhile, was no longer in the old world of Hart, or his father, or the former parishioners. He was not in the world of the powerful people on the stage, or taking their sides, either. Now, he took sides with the people in the audience and in their streets and homes. They needed his help. And much more than his help.

Connolly celebrates with his teenage Catechism graduates. (Fr. Neil Connolly’s personal collection.)

What Connolly did understand was that he and the staff and volunteers in the religious education program had heard of “devils” on the rooftops of Fox Street, or on the street corners or basement apartments of buildings on Longwood Avenue, Beck Street, and Simpson Street. The threat of Kingsmen and Dragons taking their young men and women away from their families and into a world of zip guns, knives, and chains; initiation-ceremony beatings; and revenge shootings on rooftops—that was the devil their church was protecting them from. For Connolly, this devil came in many colors, those of the jackets each gang member wore as their uniforms for war. Not the Korean War, and not the war in Little Korea, but the war for control of the block and for the souls of the young in Hunts Point–Longwood.

Connolly realized that all the programs for Athanasius youth were created by his predecessors. Wilson had seen that there were needs for religious education, and so he found the Hunts Point Palace and converted a dance hall into a place for building young Catholics. He had recruited the Mexican nuns from Texas and the high-society ladies from the Upper East Side and the women from the College of New Rochelle to fill all the gaps in teaching. He had even found a lawyer and social worker to donate their services to parishioners at the rectory. And there were the sports programs which had been initiated by Mastaglio and elevated to championship status by Jack Lyons, also brought on by Wilson. These programs were the fruits of organizing work done by priests.

Eventually, Connolly came to realize that in a large place like this, a priest could not just serve everyone who came through the rectory door, or just teach each person, one at a time. He had to create programs in the church for religious education, using all the ideas and resources and perseverance he could muster. If he was going to make any kind of a difference to his parishioners, he had to be a program organizer. When he launched the new teen religious education program that drew hundreds of students, Connolly joined the ranks of those organizer-priests.

See-Judge-Act

Religious education was not Connolly’s only assignment, since every parish priest had to take on a few. A second staff assignment gave him another chance to bring in people from the neighborhood into the church. The Christian Family Movement, known to the Spanish-speaking Puerto Ricans as El Movimiento Familiar Cristiano, was one of the parish groups Connolly had to staff as a “lead” priest. It met every Sunday night at six thirty, with twenty-four couples in four groups, each group being served by a different priest, all coordinated by Connolly. Connolly was again forced to grow his command of the Spanish language. During these meetings, he discovered some especially thoughtful and effective members, such as Paul Martinez and his wife, Angie. Connolly found out quickly that they and the other participants were part of a worldwide effort involving thousands of Americans.

Movimiento Familiar Cristiano had international and national roots before arriving at Athanasius. In the early twentieth century, it began as a branch of “Catholic Action,” a movement developed in part by Belgian Canon Joseph Cardijn, a cleric who supported the idea of Catholic laypersons bringing their faith and values into society.³⁵ After World War I, the movement caught on rapidly in countries throughout Europe facing global and industrial upheavals. It united Catholics in groups based on their age and occupational status, with many variants across different sectors of European society. All used a small-group reflection-action approach to exploring Christian values and thinking and applying them to needs “in the world,” however that world was defined—a neighborhood, a workplace, a college campus, or a larger metropolitan area or nation.

The “Young Christian Workers,” known in French as Jeunesse Ouvrière Chrétienne (JOC), harnessed this approach into a method called “Jocism.”³⁶ This was a process known as “see, judge, act.” As a first step, a group of participants had to review some of the current conditions of the world that merited attention and select one that was a common concern (“see”). Then, using the values of Catholic social teaching, as well as research and diagnosis, the group would analyze the condition to determine causes and solutions (“judge”). Finally, the group would develop and carry out a plan of action based on the analysis and the group’s capacity (“act”). “See, judge, act” was accessible and effective to many other Catholic Action participants, who numbered several million people in Europe.

In 1949, Jocism made its way into the United States, when a few dozen married couples coming together to solve community problems, founded the Christian Family Movement in Indiana. A national coordinating committee was formed to advance and spread the practice of “see, judge, act,” which would help American Catholic couples to deepen their faith and marriages by bringing them into the service of the community. Local affiliates were created, along with guide booklets for discussion topics, such as “economics and family life.” Projects initiated by the affiliates included foster parenting, prison ministry, refugee sponsorship, and couples counseling. With a national magazine, Act, and a convention which drew up to five thousand participants, the nationally successful, lay-led Christian Family Movement gave meaning to Catholics throughout the 1950s and 1960s.³⁷ In a recognition of the growing Spanish-speaking Catholic population in the United States, the movement assumed a role in the integrated Puerto Rican–serving parishes in the Archdiocese of New York as Movimiento Familiar Cristiano.

Connolly’s Movimiento group met to look at the realities of Hunts Point–Longwood. One they began to focus on was the difference between the isolation of their New York neighborhood and the openness of Puerto Rican communities, where neighbors and families came together and related to each other in the campo or the small pueblos. Their current neighborhood was block after block of large, crowded buildings with hundreds of apartments and rooms all locked off from each other, and no public place to gather, or a way to pass by a neighbor and say “hello.” It was difficult to build bonds. Neighbors were not so much neighbors as they were strangers, and Movimiento members had a hard time being their “brother’s keeper.”

They needed to break the isolation and harshness of city life and find a way to experience “country life” in Hunts Point–Longwood. So the Movimiento decided to organize a series of summer day trips to the “country” for neighborhood residents, parishioners, and nonparishioners. With Connolly and the other priests, they organized four such summer trips to state parks such as Bear Mountain and Heckscher State Park. Each trip mobilized a large delegation from Hunts Point–Longwood to the outside world, a motorcade of seventeen buses filled with nearly seven hundred people.

Inevitably, these trips had small adventures.

On one trip, a woman was suddenly jumping up and down in her toreador pants. She needed to go to the bathroom, and she was moving around because she could not contain herself, and she wanted to let others know. Connolly was on the bus, and as the leader of the entire trip, he saw this and acted quickly. They couldn’t wait to get to the park, so he told the bus driver to find a place to stop.

“Where do we stop, Father?” the driver asked.

Connolly spotted a place on the road. “That gas station over there. Stop right in front of it.”

Not wanting to stop directly at the small station with a large group of buses, Connolly had the driver stop on the other side of the road. The door opened and the woman ran right across the road, with Connolly running right behind her.

He asked the gas station attendant, who was white, “Could she use the bathroom?”

The attendant looked at Connolly and the woman and said, “OK, yeah.”

Then, while she was in the bathroom, the attendant looked around and saw the bus lineup across the road, one bus after another. He counted them. Seventeen in all.

Connolly thought that the attendant probably never saw a Puerto Rican in his life.

The attendant gave Connolly a worried look, asking, “Are all those other people going to use the bathroom, too?”

Connolly confidently said, “No, don’t worry.”

However, in a minute, everyone was getting off the buses, thinking they were going to use the bathroom, too. Connolly and the movement leaders turned around and yelled, “Please get back onto the buses!”

When they got back on the road, already behind schedule, one of their cheap orange rental buses broke down, and they arrived at the park much later than they planned. They discovered that all of the shady spots in the park, where the shadows of large trees provided cool relief, were taken already by their chief “rivals”—the New York African American churchgoers who also organized large trips to the park. It was a long, hot day. But the delegation of parishioners and neighbors ate, played games and music, and had a good time in the country, in their own version of the campo.

On another day, the summer heat created yet another challenge. Some of the people were feeling a little sick on the return trip from another large trip to a state park, after eating mayonnaise that had spent too many hours in the sun. When they arrived at Athanasius, someone told Connolly, “Father, there’s a lady who’s very sick here.” Connolly took the woman and her husband to St. Francis Hospital on 143rd Street, which was owned and operated by the Archdiocese of New York and had a better reputation than nearby Lincoln Hospital, run by the city government.³⁸ Knowing that a Sunday emergency room would be packed, Connolly “ensured” accelerated service. Before entering the hospital, he reached into the trunk of his car, took off his polo shirt, and put on his clerical black shirt and white collar. He entered the hospital with the woman and her husband and went to the emergency room. An emergency room nurse saw him and said, “Father come here, we’ve got a doctor right here.”

Into the examination room, where they were waiting, a doctor came in, speaking in a German accent. “Father, for what is she here?”

Connolly explained, “I don’t know the whole story, but she ate something. She is sick to her stomach and she has diarrhea, and she was running around wanting to go to the bathroom.”

“Oh. What kind of event did you have?”

“A picnic.”

“A picnic, you say?”

“Yeah, we had a picnic, about seven hundred people, and then she ran off the bus. We had to get her here quickly.”

“I see. Are the other seven hundred coming in too?”

Connolly laughed and said, “No they’re all right.”

While the German doctor was afraid of caring for a massive group, Connolly was taking every step he could for them. He realized, even with such large numbers of participants and occasional emergencies, what these trips meant. To the people who were just from the neighborhood and didn’t know the parish, this was a fun chance to get outside of the neighborhood, of the overcrowded apartments with doors and windows and radiators that often didn’t work. The park represented the beauty of nature, which they had known in their home towns and campos in Puerto Rico. This trip gave them a chance to bring their own foods and drink and music and to share them, and to rekindle the spirit of the home country. It also allowed them to get to know others and, as the Movimiento Familiar Cristiano group had wanted, to break the barriers and isolation that were enveloping the neighborhood, beneath all the noise and busy activity.

Connolly and the staff regularly looked for ways to bring the Catholic faith into the cultural context of the Puerto Rican community in Hunts Point–Longwood. They supported another group, Juventud Acción Católica (Young Catholic Action), which brought together teens and young adults to examine their own issues. Each year the parish was involved in the Fiesta San Juan Bautista, sponsored by the Office of Spanish Catholic Action of the archdiocese, which occurred at Randall’s Island Stadium near the Bronx.³⁹ Also, they celebrated the feast of Nuestra Señora de la Providencia, the Virgin Mary, patroness of Puerto Rico.⁴⁰ Spanish-speaking societies for both men and women were also supported by the parish staff, including the Santo Nombre, Sagrado Corazón, Legión de María, Cursillo, and Carismático groups.

These activities were all encouraged by the Office of Spanish Catholic Action, which had been created in 1953 to guide the archdiocesan response to the Gran Migración.⁴¹ This office was an important source of support for Connolly and the Athanasius staff, as well as every other parish serving the Puerto Rican migration and establishing “integrated” parishes in the archdiocese. Other programs took shape besides the Institute for Intercultural Communication, the summer immersion program at the Catholic University of Puerto Rico. The office initiated a language-and-culture program at Cardinal Hayes High School in the Bronx, which prepared several hundred priests and religious and laypersons staffing the integrated parishes. It established a table at the airport in San Juan to direct migrants to parishes in New York City neighborhoods so that they could find a connection with a Catholic community already active with Puerto Ricans. In upstate New York, a farmworker support program reached out to the Puerto Ricans who came to work in those farms but lacked any kind of community connections.

The Family Services Office at the archdiocese, meanwhile, was providing vital social services to the needy families of the archdiocese, whether it was maternity support, housekeeping, home visitations, family counseling, or youth services. Bronx native Monsignor John Ahern, one of Connolly’s summer 1958 immersion program classmates, was running the borough’s branch of that office, so he often came into contact with Connolly and his colleagues at Athanasius and the other Bronx parishes serving Puerto Ricans.⁴² All of these programs at the archdiocese, and the building of the new school and the operations of the Catholic Youth Organization’s sports programs, gave Connolly and the others vital support.

The Movimiento experience, meanwhile, gave Connolly something else to think about, especially as he struggled to serve a parish with so many needs. Laypersons, he realized, could do some special things in the parish and the neighborhood. After all, they were the ones who had implemented the “see, judge, act” method used throughout the world, right there in Athanasius. It was laypersons who had organized seven-hundred-person trips to help them enjoy the parks and to build relationships upstate with strangers. They identified concerns of the world for Connolly, enabling the people inside the church to engage the people of the world outside the church.

As the priest assigned to Movimiento Familiar Cristiano, Connolly found himself in an unexpected role: He was an “authority-priest,” the one who had to make sure nothing got out of hand and everything was in keeping with Church doctrine, but he was also a “supporter-priest,” the one who helped the laypersons take their process wherever it would lead them. Even if it was just an emergency visit to a gas station bathroom in the suburbs, he could be there to support their initiative. What they thought was a priority was what mattered; that was central to the way “see-judge-act” worked.

Scotch, Tab, and Mission

In setting their own priorities, Connolly and the Athanasius priests had their own work cut out for them, from religious education; parish societies; baptisms, last rites, and Communions to all the counseling and family assistance that people seemed to need. They knew from their early encounters with neighbors, like the visits to Little Korea, and from the sessions with the volunteer lawyer and social worker, that living conditions were getting worse in the buildings, in the schools, and in the streets. They had to start deciding how to respond to these worsening conditions.

Connolly, Gigante, Adams, Steltz, McDonald, and O’Brien discussed ideas during their own priestly “ritual” in the rectory living room. Every night, after a long day, they would pour themselves a glass of scotch—or, in O’Brien’s case, a glass of Tab—and watch the ten o’clock news show. Someone would ask how the day went, or someone would begin to recount some incident they were part of that day. Others would chime in, and sometimes the stories would connect. “Can you believe it” or “I just don’t understand” would enter the conversation as well.

Occasionally, someone would say, “You know what I think we should be doing?” Many ideas were floated on those television-scotch-and-Tab nights, but only a select few actually made it to an action or a plan. But the discussions and the suggestion that the group of priests should act together on some ideas were not just an intellectual exercise, but a social one—a reminder that they were forming some bonds and perhaps even a team. Connolly realized, It was because O’Brien gave them the freedom to create and take action that they took some steps. O’Brien created the climate for those discussions and the resulting projects, and he was proud of it, often boasting about all the amazing work done by “my boys.” The boyish element of their personalities was sometimes manifest in the priests, especially in Connolly and Gigante. They were friends with many of the teachers and staff in the elementary school, including Maria, who was also a stewardess for a major airline. Maria had occasionally mentioned to the priests that she could get seats very cheaply anytime she wanted, for herself or her friends. If Connolly and Gigante ever wanted, she said, they should just let her know, and she could easily get them a pair of tickets.

One Easter period, when their fellow priests McDonald and Steltz were still on the parish staff and had gone down to Puerto Rico for vacation, Connolly said to Gigante, “Hey, let’s go down there and surprise them. We can take Maria’s offer, get the tickets, and we’ll come back in a couple of days before it gets busy.” Within twenty-four hours, they were on a plane to San Juan. Thinking they knew the likely places to eat in the area where other priests had gone, they went to find a place in the Old San Juan district, known for its pastel-colored, Old World buildings, cobblestone streets, and nice restaurants. They strolled along the street at lunchtime and walked up to the windows of a familiar restaurant, guessing they would find their priest friends. Seeing McDonald and Steltz at a table eating, they stopped, smiled, and waved at them.

McDonald and Steltz looked up, stunned, and looked twice to make sure they were not fooled. When Connolly and Gigante came in, McDonald asked, “What are you guys doing here? Who’s back at the rectory?” Gigante and Connolly explained that it was the beginning of the not-so-busy Easter week and that they would only be in Puerto Rico for a couple of days before heading back. They all enjoyed the surprise and, over the next couple of days, a camaraderie that had been developing over the last few years.

Soon, McDonald and Steltz moved on to other assignments. In the meantime, Connolly, Gigante, and Adams were developing a seriousness of purpose as well. They found themselves in a series of staff meetings, creating a mission statement and then using that statement for every meeting after that. The statement affirmed their priorities as a parish team, of committing to the neighborhood and to building parishioners into leaders. At each subsequent meeting the statement, a laminated poster card, was brought to the middle of the room and set up before everyone. As a visual reminder, the mission statement card would occasionally be picked up by one of the priests to make a point challenging someone else’s idea. “What does it say on the card?” Connolly would say to the others. “Does this idea fit with any of our priorities? No. We have to work with our priorities.” Connolly saw that this tool gave him some clarity and some comfort when they were discussing all the possibilities in an increasingly busy agenda.

By 1965, the rectory looked and felt a lot different than the one Connolly saw when he first set foot in 878 Tiffany seven years earlier. So many more initiatives were being carried out than before, and they still weren’t enough, because there were so many more parishioners and neighborhood people than before. Also, people were starting to face harder times, as more people were losing their jobs at the factories that were starting to move away from New York. Connolly and this team of priests needed to do something about these social conditions, but they weren’t quite sure what further steps to take. Whatever they did, he thought, they had to do it together, and it had to be done the same way as Wilson did it when he was running things at Athanasius. They had to be organized about things, and they had to build things the way they were building up the church groups, education programs, societies, and movements.

The “de-Yankeefication” process, which Ivan Illich had hoped would occur within his Puerto Rico program student-priests, had been completed with these Athanasius priests. They were now fully immersed in the lives, language, culture, and fates of their Puerto Rican parishioners. After surviving the thousands of baptisms, the large Sunday Masses, and the ever-expanding religious education and sports programs for the young people, Connolly and his team felt stronger. Connolly felt that he was not just a member, but a builder of a true community in the parish and in the rectory. He was a priest of St. Athanasius, a very busy church, but one that he could finally understand and serve—like the priests of Our Lady of Good Counsel had done for him and his family. Connolly thought, Maguire was right. He was doing well there.

Then one morning Connolly looked up from his mission statement, his busy schedule, his groups and movements, his round of last and first sacraments, and his fellow priests’ scotch-and-Tab television talks, and found that the Church, which he had known all his life, and which he had trained for as a priest, was about to change.

So was he.