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INTRODUCTION

What Led to This Book?

So, I am not a writer by trade, and some have accused me of not being a good storyteller. But some years ago I read Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States (highly recommended, in order to see that the little people in all corners of the country have not just sat and accepted injustice), and I thought that it would be so good to have a “people’s history of the South Bronx.” I wanted to share some of the stories of good South Bronx organizing efforts, as told through the leaders involved in them while it was becoming “the South Bronx”—a designation that is only around fifty years old, despite the far longer history of human settlement in the area. My feeling was that these efforts were missing from the history books on the South Bronx and on urban history in general. Since Father Neil Connolly had been involved in founding a social action organization I worked in, I thought, OK, I will start with Neil Connolly. That should be easy, I thought.

Hah.

Neil Connolly, I discovered, was a history of the South Bronx all on his own, given all the initiatives and projects for community and justice he was involved in over the years, so I decided I would focus on him and see what happened. What I found out, as I explored his story over the course of six years, is that a lot of growth happened to this person while he was in his South Bronx era. (A very good story of his Lower East Side era, just as long a period of time, would be well worth telling, too, and may be in the works.)

I got to know Neil Connolly while I was an organizer at South Bronx People for Change. I had the great benefit of becoming part of this organization because my mother told me, just months after I graduated college, to stop whining about things like “Oh, where is community?” and “I want a sense of community” and, instead, join up with the local Social Action Committee at St. Anselm’s parish. I was told by my mother to put my money where my mouth is. Since the committee was meeting in the building next door to ours, I had no excuse for not attending.

I fell in love with these concepts of social justice, social action, and organizing that drove this group, and I found my community there—first as a volunteer, then as a staff member, and finally, after a couple of staff and life changes, I became the executive director by default.

Suffice it to say that, as far as organizing or directing, I did not really know my elbow from a hole in the ground. (Ivy League education teaches you only so much, and I wasn’t even very good at that.) But I really got into the organizing with the guidance of others, including the chairman of the board, Neil Connolly, who kept coming in, sitting down, and meeting with me and recommending a solution, or, if he didn’t have one, talking to someone who could. He brought a great deal of optimism to those meetings.

Then we moved on, as people do. But my contact with Neil Connolly continued, and years later, we reconnected in a more in-depth way. Simply put, it began when he made an offer I couldn’t refuse.

At his request, I joined his board of directors for Grand Street Guild, an affordable housing organization sponsored by St. Mary’s parish in the mid-1970s, and in the process I found out that he was up to quite a bit in his new community on the Lower East Side. As pastor at St. Mary’s, Neil Connolly was automatically chairman of the board, per the Guild’s bylaws. He was putting together a panel of new members who were “experts,” and he called on me. (Business degree. Don’t ask.)

I have to admit, I really, really did not want to join any boards at the time, but again, Neil Connolly was asking, and I couldn’t refuse him. He had always been there for me, and I felt I should be there for him. He had helped me years earlier, at a time when I was still growing up, figuring out how to solve problems, and learning how to build an organization. An overwhelming time, sometimes. Okay, often.

I came to appreciate that Neil gave, and asked others to give, so that we could have a community of giving. That’s the way things should work in this world, according to Neil Connolly. And the increased interaction gave me an opportunity to find out about his experiences and his evolving views of his priesthood in the South Bronx, one after another. So I have tried to capture some of them here.

The other thing I discovered, in approaching the writing of this book, is that there were always two arenas that Neil Connolly was relating to in his South Bronx era: the Church and the world. It complicated things when I was writing about his growth as a priest, because this took place in a historical context, and there are two histories: one of the Church—mostly the Archdiocese of New York, sometimes driven by events of the Church in the United States, and sometimes by those in the global Church—and another of the world, the secular context in which his priesthood was unfolding. Following his story, and placing him in those two arenas in a historically fair manner, was a big challenge. But it became important to me because his learning to grow in both arenas, I concluded, was important to him.

What is written here are some of the events in Connolly’s life, as well as the growth. The stories were told by Connolly in a series of two dozen preliminary interviews, which were recorded and transcribed by me, and edited and converted by me into the original first-person chapters. Then I conducted research related to the stories and included them, with Connolly’s approval, in the story. Afterward, I went through a series of revisions, which were reviewed in another two or three dozen review sessions with Connolly. In each round of revisions, I was looking to blend the Connolly story and the history so that they were closely related to each other. If there were events going on or groups carrying out activities that Connolly was not aware of or could not have ever been aware of, with few exceptions, I tried to stay away from them. Eventually, I turned story into a third-person biography within a historical context—the changing of the Church, the migration and poverty of the Puerto Rican community to form what would become the South Bronx, and the powerful institutions which affected both events.

A note about writing style: I try to represent Neil’s thoughts as faithfully as possible, using italics to express his thoughts, as conveyed to me over the six years of manuscript sessions with him. Otherwise, if there is dialogue between him and someone else, it is in quotes, as transcribed from quotes in my recorded interviews with him or from quotes I wrote during the sessions. I hope this style works.

Why the South Bronx?

Why not?

First, it has been my home for all of my life in New York City—all except my first five years in Puerto Rico, and a few in New Jersey, when I was in college. I grew up here with my family, having the experience of living in public housing when most tenants were working-class households headed by someone who was working. I also had the benefit of a Catholic education, first at St. Anselm’s Elementary School next door, when the nuns still wore habits until 1970, and then at Regis, the Jesuit Catholic high school on the upper east side of Manhattan, where the scene became a little less formal but very positively challenging in the early 1970s. Being in the very stable housing projects, studying downtown, and going to college in New Jersey shielded me from some of the major changes taking place in the South Bronx at that time—what I call in this book the “unholy trinity” of epidemics that swept across the area.

But the South Bronx was still my home. I saw and heard about gangs and drugs and got robbed for change a few times, but I played a lot of handball and some stickball and basketball, and I had some very good friendships with the guys and gals from different floors of the building I lived in. I got to learn to love soul music and a little salsa around the neighborhood, and I heard a lot of salsa at the social club we went to on some Saturday nights, where my college-educated father and his friends from the hometown of Cabo Rojo had a little too much to drink—more times than we liked—and my brothers and I laughed and played. In the meantime, my mother, while being his companion through all this, was steadily working in the local public school, learning to become a teacher in college at night while assistant-teaching during the day at P.S. 25, the first bilingual school in the area. She did that while raising us three boys with all her Catholic, Puerto Rican might to urge us to become good, educated, moral human beings.

Second, South Bronx history has been told less than completely over the years, or it has been told flat-out wrong. This book is far from making it complete, but it makes an attempt at a fuller history, a story that is the result of Puerto Rican migrations, segregation, a people surviving some epidemics and government policies, and their growth as a community within a Catholic setting.

Some people have written books or analyses or have done documentaries about the experiences of a family or a particular community of the South Bronx during its defining period—after the Second World War through to the late 1970s/early 1980s. They have done very good work on how the South Bronx became a large area with several hundred thousand people, with organizations being created by the people working every day to make it a livable area. Thankfully, good works about the South Bronx are often being created to give the right perspective.

The South Bronx is a profoundly American story. Its history reminds us of how a growing number of neighborhoods were hit by poverty and poor housing, then had these issues ignored or addressed in varying ways, mostly poorly, by institutions, like the Church and the federal government, and by landlords.

Also, the South Bronx has been, for me, a largely Puerto Rican story. I have great respect for the experiences of the African American community and the struggles of the African American families who lived in the South Bronx of the 1940s through the 1980s. The Bronx African American History Project, initiated and cultivated at Fordham University under Professor Mark Naison’s steadfast leadership, has continued to capture those experiences.

Yet the area has a strong Puerto Rican flavor for me, as someone who grew up in this mostly Catholic setting. So that is my emphasis in this one story of the South Bronx. The Puerto Rican experience also defined the experiences of Neil Connolly during this era, as he learned to serve that community and be part of that community. Does the Puerto Rican experience of that time go beyond the southeastern and southwestern areas of the Bronx? Yes, it does. In the many news articles I read to piece this book together, the city government’s inability to react to the unique and ongoing mass migration of Puerto Ricans all over the city gave me the sense of a massive entity playing constant catch-up with this rapidly changing, dynamic people and their situation.

Finally, I wanted to write about organizing in the South Bronx because South Bronx People for Change was a defining experience for me, revealing to me that the South Bronx was a much greater and broader experience than my own upbringing. Everyone should know it as well. When people say “the South Bronx,” most are referring to an area south of Yankee Stadium. By the time I got to People for Change in 1980, it had already reached all neighborhoods up to Fordham Road. It was a “city,” not a neighborhood. Most proposals we wrote for the organization noted that the South Bronx’s population was equivalent to that of the city of Milwaukee, Detroit, or Boston at the time. By way of comparison, the population and neighborhood size—and the issues related to poverty and segregation—of the South Bronx would be equivalent to six historically poor “slum areas.” Think Central Harlem, Washington Heights, East Harlem, the Lower East Side, Bushwick, and Bedford-Stuyvesant all put together.

At People for Change, we addressed some of the issues in this “city” through the network of Roman Catholic parishes, which had stayed in these neighborhoods through all the area’s ups and downs. Traveling through all the neighborhoods, going to nighttime meetings in local schools, and visiting leaders’ apartments gave me a very good sense of how large and complex this “city” was. Therefore, it is worth many, many stories and analyses.

Why the Church, Why a Priest, and Why This Priest?

These are troubled times for the American Roman Catholic Church. During a long period of immigrant expansion and growing wealth in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Catholics in the United States built thousands of institutions—schools, hospitals, universities, orphanages, and more—along with thousands of parishes organized into nearly two hundred “dioceses” and “archdioceses,” each covering a substantial area of land and governed, respectively, by a bishop or an archbishop. Although the Catholic Church began as a despised and feared minority in the United States, by the time Neil Connolly was born and as he entered seminary, it was at the height of its national power and strength. What changed between then and now? Many things, some covered in this book as Connolly experienced them firsthand. But today, many dioceses and religious orders are confronting long-lingering issues of clerical sexual abuse, committed by priests and enabled by their superiors, against young people who trusted them and believed they were agents of God, and whose lives have been damaged or ruined. This has caused great disaffection and disillusionment among those who have been loyal or long-term Catholics, whether they were directly impacted by the abuse (self, family, friend, or a worshipper) or indirectly impacted, hearing about it on the news and ashamed or disgusted by this abuse.

There has also been some bad financial news for several dioceses, and there have been closures of parishes and their schools, despite ever-increasing numbers of Hispanic and Asian Catholics around the country. These negative financial developments have often been related to the abuse issues. But there have also been increasing levels of economic inequality suffered by Latino Catholics, who contributed the greatest growth to the Catholic Church in the last few decades, but who might not have contributed as much financially as they might want, with many having incomes that can barely sustain their families. But, whether they are middle class or working class, I believe the Latinos/as could be wooed to support their Church in every way possible, with a different kind of Church that emphasizes community over institution, that gives them—us—a full stake in every aspect of the Church. With priestless parishes continuing to grow, where can the future leaders of the Church be found? Wherever two or three are gathered … those are the leaders.

I am not an expert on priests, or on the life of priests, by any means. But I did get to understand a couple of things in the course of working on this book and in my discussions with Neil. Officially, the priest has been expected to be the leader of the parish, the most basic local unit of the global Catholic Church, carrying an extraordinary, some say impossible, responsibility on his shoulders. Priests have had an ever changing role to play in the American Catholic Church and the lives of Catholics. Their search for understanding what they can and must do has, in my opinion, been influenced and maybe turned upside down by factors in Catholic Church history, including Vatican II (of which more later in this book), and by the postwar era, both of which opened up priests to a fast-changing world full of conflicts and issues.

The fact is that there have been countless priests who have given their lives to help people and done good things, including those who have saved lives; comforted, fed, and housed people; grown communities; and given laypersons and religious full and legitimate roles equal to their own in those communities, and they should be celebrated.

There were others who were very equally worthy ministers—priests, religious, and laypersons—who all worked and lived for what has been called “the Kingdom of God” in the South Bronx. They all built a Church community there. They supported Neil Connolly, and he supported them. Their vision of the Church was that it should be fully committed to realizing the full dignity of every human being, Catholic or not.

But I was captivated by the fact that, at a unique time in history, and in a unique place, this man found his reasons for becoming, being, and staying a priest. Those who knew him often say that he was the best priest they knew. He went on a life journey, defined by his time in history, his place in the nation’s poorest and most famous slum, and his drive to reach his highest self.