Bob Begin interview, 21 July 2016

Abstract

Father Bob Begin is a native Clevelander from a large Catholic family. In this interview, he discusses growing up in Cleveland and the forces that impacted his decision to become a priest. Father Begin discusses the changes that occurred in the Catholic Church as a result of Vatican 2 and how those changes influenced his own ministry. He also discusses his involvement in anti-Vietnam activism. His activism included taking over a midnight mass at St. John's Cathedral in Cleveland, Ohio and breaking into the Dow Chemical offices in Washington D.C. as part of the D.C. 9. Father Begin discusses the reasons for getting involved in Vietnam protests and his commitment to reforming the Catholic Church from within. He also describes how his superiors in the Catholic Church, as well as his own family, questioned his decisions and the tension his actions caused.

Interviewee

Begin, Bob (interviewee)

Interviewer

Randt, Naomi A. (interviewer)

Project

Protest Voices

Date

7-21-2016

Document Type

Oral History

Duration

103 minutes

Recommended Citation

"Bob Begin interview, 21 July 2016" (2016). Cleveland Regional Oral History Collection. Interview 750006.
https://engagedscholarship.csuohio.edu/crohc000/769

Related Resources

Protest Voices @ Cleveland Voices

Transcript

Naomi A. Randt [00:00:01] My name is [Naomi A. Randt]. It is the 21st of July, 2016. I’m with Father Bob Begin at St. Colman’s Church. Could you please state your name for the record?

Father Bob Begin [00:00:10] Bob Begin. B-E-G-I-N.

Naomi A. Randt [00:00:14] And we’ll just start with some background information on you. When and where were you born?

Father Bob Begin [00:00:21] Born in Cleveland, 1938. I’m almost dead. [laughs]

Naomi A. Randt [00:00:32] What was your childhood life?

Father Bob Begin [00:00:34] It’s a great childhood. I had six brothers and sisters when I was born, and six more followed. We lived in a double house with my grandparents on the second floor, and we had the first floor in the basement, and my uncle was on the third floor with five children. And it was during the war, there was no- During the Second World War, there was no building going on. It was rationed. They didn’t make cars. There’s no cars between ’41 and ’46. And it was a big family and a big yard, and we always had, like 100 chickens or so in the backyard. So on Saturdays, my mother would clean and dress chickens for the neighborhood and sell them as her own little business. [laughs] That was going on. My father joined the fire department the year I was born, because I was born in ’38, from ’34 to ’38. The Depression was horrible, and he was a tool and die maker, but there was less and less work all the time. So with me coming as the seventh child, he decided to get a job that was going to pay all the time, no matter what, and joined the fire department. And my mother stayed at home, and my grandmother and she kind of raised all the kids in the house. We went to Catholic school, and we weren’t- Most of the people around celebrated their nationality a lot. My mother’s side of the family was German, my father’s side was French, and there weren’t that many French people around, so we never celebrated nationality. And you didn’t celebrate German during the Second World War either. So, in fact, I think they even canceled the cousins picnics we used to have with the German side of the family during the war. I think they were forbidden to congregate. So we were really just Catholic. And I guess if we did anything important, it was Catholic and music. We always had music in the family. There was somebody who could play the piano, and we used to sing just for pleasure, sing harmonies, and we didn’t perform or anything, just loved music. And then I had- My father’s brother was a priest who became a bishop. He was an auxiliary bishop here in Cleveland between 1947 and 1962. In 1962, he became the first bishop of Oakland, California. So during my hippie years, I used to kiddingly call him the bishop of Berkeley. His name was Floyd, Floyd Begin, and his sister, my father’s sister, also was a Sister of Notre Dame in the convent. So we were, if we wanted to look for a model for how we would do social work and make a difference for the poor in the world, the Catholic Church was pretty much the obvious way to do that. So I ended up going to the seminary, becoming a priest. And my first assignment was in South Euclid, which is a middle-income, upper middle-income kind of suburb at that time. Half Jewish and half Italian, probably. And I was there until 1969 when we did our first protest. And then I lost my place to live because the place to live goes with your parish, and I lost my job.

Naomi A. Randt [00:04:33] What year did you enter the seminary?

Father Bob Begin [00:04:35] I entered the seminary in 1952 when I was 14, high school, and I didn’t get out until I was 26 years old in 1964.

Naomi A. Randt [00:04:50] Where did you go for seminary?

Father Bob Begin [00:04:51] We had a seminary right here in Cleveland in Wickliffe.

Naomi A. Randt [00:04:59] What was the name of that?

Father Bob Begin [00:05:00] It was called Borromeo. B-O-R-R-O-M-E-O. The first year, actually, I went to, we didn’t have a seminary for high school. The first year, I went to St. Gregory Seminary in Cincinnati, and then in 1953 they started Borromeo.

Naomi A. Randt [00:05:20] What was that experience like for you in my seminary?

Father Bob Begin [00:05:23] It was pretty horrible. [laughs] It was highly academic. I mean, we had classes, I think, probably for at least six hours a day, and then we had study halls that we, we actually had to be in the study hall and either study or read books. There were intramural sports, which was, I mean, there was everything that you would want to have, but you couldn’t leave the property. [laughs] I think we were allowed to go out once a week on a walk. We had to be back in two hours. And, of course, we didn’t have any vehicles, and we weren’t allowed to go in stores [laughs], so we got to know the neighborhood a little bit with walks. And that was true even through the four years of college, which were on the same property, except I think, once a month you were allowed to go in a store. But we did. We went in stores anyhow. They wouldn’t throw you out for that. You had to figure out what they throw you out for and what they wouldn’t. So it was really very sheltered. In college, we had so many classes and courses. We were taking 17, 18 hours a quarter, a semester. There were semesters. So when the time came to declare a major, I had enough credits to major in philosophy, English, classical languages, and history. [laughs] So I could have picked any majors. I think I picked philosophy and English as a minor, yes. So. And then after that, there were four years of theology, and that was a different seminary. It was called St. Mary’s, and it was on Ansel Road, which is around 90th and Superior. But it was pretty much the same rules. You could go out once a week for a few hours. And we had some experience working with teaching religion and those kinds of things, but very little. And then at the end of that period, you get ordained. So I was ordained in May of ’64, and I began working in June of ’64 at St. Gregory’s Parish in Green Road and Mayfield in South Euclid. It’s now called Sacred Heart, I think. They changed the name when they combined it with some, with another parish. There were four other priests. There were four priests living there. So I was one, the pastor and three assistants, so I was low man on the totem pole. I had very few responsibilities. If somebody else took care of the CYO, the youth group, and somebody else took care of the ladies, I think I was like the convener for the Holy Name Society, which was the men’s group, and the Campfire Girls. [laughs] I was allowed- One year, they allowed me to teach what they called the Inquiry class, which was people who wanted to become Catholic. So I sent a letter. We had all of the people in our card file. This would be like 1967. And if they were in a marriage of mixed religion where one person was Catholic, one was not, they were on a yellow card. So I sent a letter to all the yellow card people and said, I’m not going to try to convert anybody, but if you’d like to become familiar with your Catholic spouse’s religion, feel free to come to this class and bring your spouse with you, whatever. And about six couples came. And the first assignment was for the Catholic party to go to church with the non-Catholic party, which they were kind of shocked at in those days. They thought it was a sin to do that and said, well, if these people are taking the effort to learn what your religion is like, you need to make an effort to learn what their religion is like, get to know the minister, etcetera. So they did that. And then we basically just talked about Christianity in general and the message of Jesus and then how that spells itself out in different religions and in the Catholic religion. And at the end of the course, one man became Catholic who had come alone. He was an older man and had already decided to become a Catholic before he took the course. And no one else became Catholic. And one lady joined the Methodist church across the street, and I wasn’t allowed to teach that anymore. [laughs] That was my first and last attempt at that.

Naomi A. Randt [00:10:32] Did you enjoy teaching that class?

Father Bob Begin [00:10:34] Oh, yeah. It was a great group. I sat them in a circle, and we became friends. They actually continued meeting once a month for years after that because they became best friends with each other. They had shared experiences, and, yeah, it worked out. And they still call me. So sometimes it’s for a funeral, sometimes a wedding in the family or something. So.

Naomi A. Randt [00:10:58] Were you disappointed when they took you off that?

Father Bob Begin [00:11:01] No, it was just a matter of, that’s the way things were in the church. It was pretty, very, very conservative, and it was the time of the Second Vatican Council. So the older priests, not too much in sympathy with what the council was doing, because they were pretty set in their ways, and religion was pretty dogmatic. This is the truth, and we have the truth, and everybody else has some of the truth, but we have all the truth. It was pretty much the way it was taught. So today, I think, and the whole idea of the council, because they actually had people from all different religions at the council besides the bishops of the world, and they actually issued a document on humanism that said to stop calling Protestants heretics and to start calling them our separated brethren, whatever. And we began to start going to each other’s churches and beginning to know. So the idea became implicitly, not explicitly, but implicitly, that we’re all searching for the truth. Nobody really has the truth, and let’s stop being so dogmatic. And eventually, the books that I studied in the seminary, which were like, it was a three-volume set in Latin, our textbooks were in Latin, and it was three volumes of doctrines of the Catholic Church that go all the way back before the Middle Ages and were compiled during the Middle Ages and then added to with each subsequent council of the church. I think those ended up in the basement [laughs] after the Second Vatican Council. So people began to be thinking that the. There was a book called the Primacy of Charity. Okay? So that became- And it’s very much like this Pope. We had Pope John XXIII. Then this Pope is talking about. It’s about love, it’s about mercy. It’s not about dogma. And so, just like he has his people who don’t quite go along with him, this Pope- So did Pope John XXIII, and so did the consul, even though those were unanimous documents that they produced. The last document was probably the most important one, and it wasn’t on the agenda. It was called Gaudium et Spes, which means Joy and Hope. And it was called- Its English title is The Church in the Modern World. One of the cardinals stood up and said, you know, we’ve talked about music and religion. We’ve talked about mass, we’ve talked about sacraments, we’ve talked about priests, we’ve talked about laity, we’ve talked about all these church things. We haven’t said anything about the people and their problems. So this document starts out, if you actually, if you google a sentence like this, the joys and the hopes, the grief and the anxiety of the people of this generation, especially the poor and afflicted, are the joys and the hopes, the griefs and anxieties of the followers of Christ. That’s the first sentence of that document. This is what it’s about. It’s about empathy. Unless we are in an empathetic relationship with people who are suffering in their life experience, then we’re certainly not doing what Jesus did, because he was. And he asked us to love one another the same way he did. So that’s a very important document. And that became like the new Bible for everybody in that generation. And of course, it dealt with peace and war. And the Pope John XXIII had issued a statement on peace himself before that, where he pretty much condemned nuclear weapons, weapons of mass destruction. So we had a lot of ammunition from Rome, which is very unusual. Okay? But no, nothing from the local bishops, who probably hadn’t even read these documents. And if they did, they had no intention of implementing them. So during the years from 1965 to ’68, I think, there was a group called a committee for a council. We wanted to have a council in Cleveland and take a look at the priorities of our religion, our diocese, and compare those to the needs that we saw in the neighborhood. And so we also wanted to take a look at the way we worship and make it more consistent with the worship guidelines of the Vatican Council. So there were various committees that were. And it was hundreds of people, lay people and priests and nuns, who spent time and put a whole document together, which would have been the basis of a strategic plan for a council in Cleveland. And then they presented the idea to the bishop, and he didn’t like it, so they went out and got petitions signed. So they had thousands of petitions to have a council in Cleveland. And of course, the three main items to do with the people were racism - 1966 were the Hough riots - racism, poverty, and war. What is our position on that, and how is it reflected in our budget? Like nothing. [laughs] And the disenfranchisement of the city as churches moved out of Black neighborhoods, etcetera. Cleveland at that time was probably the second most segregated city in the country. Chicago was first, but it was all Black on the east side, all White on the west side.

Naomi A. Randt [00:17:36] Was it primarily younger people that you saw in this committee or council?

Father Bob Begin [00:17:40] No, it was mostly, I think, people, like, in their thirties and forties who were very interested in doing this. And in those days, people went to church every Sunday. They thought it was a sin if they didn’t. And they were raised that way. And they were a little shocked because their high school kids were learning from their teachers that it’s not a sin [laughs] and you don’t have to go. And that was kind of shocking for people. It was a time of heavy transition, and then you had the whole sexual revolution going on in the sixties and seventies as well. So, anyhow, there was a priest meeting, and the bishop came to the meeting. All the priests were there. And he held up this big document with all these thousands of signatures and said, there are priests’ signatures on here. I can’t believe a priest would sign a petition to me. Priests can come to my back door, and I’ll sit down at the kitchen table with him anytime. And then he just threw it across the stage. [laughs] So we decided that he needed to be confronted. And at St. Gregory’s, we had formed a group. I had, like, probably eight to ten groups of people who were meeting in homes, five or six couples each, going through these documents of the Vatican Council to educate them about, this is where the church wants us to go. This is the direction we should be moving in. It’s pretty exciting. And we would always start those meetings talking about the Gospel we would read the next Sunday. So then I got my best sermon material then, because I saw how that Gospel related to their life experience in that discussion, which took about 20 minutes. And so then I could use that in sermons, which was a little different than the ordinary sermon because it would talk about war and it would talk about the problems that they’re having, facing, and their joys, their celebrations. So with that group, we formed another group for some of them that were interested, especially in racism and war and poverty. And it was called a suburban human relations foundation. And it was, the goal of that group was to bring people to a point of engagement on one of the problems, racism, poverty, or war. So we- They committed themselves to six meetings, okay? Maybe it was five meetings. In the first meeting, we showed a movie, a video of someone named Kitty Genovese. Kitty Genovese was raped and killed on the streets of New York, Manhattan. I think there is a movie about it. Screaming loud. Everyone’s looking out their window and watching. No one even called the police. I mean, nothing happened. It’s just a Black woman. No, I don’t think she was Black. I think she was Italian. But anyhow, it was a movie where nobody was even involved enough to make a phone call to the police. And so then we talked about involvement. And so that was the first meeting. And then we gave people a list of things that they could get involved in that would have to do with racism. It could be housing, it could be employment, it could be schools. Education. In 1964, in May, I think May of 1964, or maybe April, they were building a school in Collinwood, the Lakeview school, and they didn’t need to build a school there. And it was a horrible place to build a school. The door of the school opened onto a street. There was no place for kids. It was horrible. There was just enough room to build. And the only reason it was being built was to keep it for Black kids so the White kids wouldn’t have to go to school with the Black kids. Actually, it was in the St. Clair-Superior area, but like 110th, that’s not called Collinwood. It’s called, I forget what that neighborhood is called. It’s a pretty much what used to be a Jewish neighborhood. And that was where the temple is and everything. But anyhow, there was a minister named Ralph Klunder who just stopped the bulldozer, laid down in front of it. And the bulldozer driver didn’t know he was there and ran over him and killed him. It was a huge event. It became the reason we had busing in Cleveland, because it was so obviously that the racism was intentional, and it had to prove it was intentional to make the busing happen. And that was the case that later on, the busing decision was based on. So they could talk about racism, and we would bring experts in to meet with them for three meetings. They could talk about violence and nonviolence. They could talk about poverty. We would bring experts in on that. And they could talk about war. Vietnam War was going on at the time and was really ramping up. So we had a lot of groups that did that. And then the last meeting, the fifth meeting, was a choice for them of anything they’d like to get involved in, either as a group or husband and wife or pairs or whatever. And we would move them to actually engage in one way or another with the problems that they had chosen to discuss. So that was called a Suburban Human Relationship Foundation. It eventually had a storefront in East Cleveland and continued to develop into the seventies. Toward the end of the seventies, they completely ran out of funding, and it pretty much stayed in existence, but it didn’t have any activity.

Naomi A. Randt [00:24:21] What was the reason behind it? Sort of running out of funding?

Father Bob Begin [00:24:25] It was hard to get things funded like that. I mean, it didn’t take much funding. We still had to pay for the storefront and keep that going. And there were fewer groups. It became more of a resource center on peace and justice and a library and a place where people who wanted to learn could come and do things. So it didn’t have enough activity to justify funding, I think, at that point. And strange thing happens to institutions, once you hire a staff person. The volunteers said, well, let that person do it. We’re paying him. [laughs] And the volunteer group kind of disappears. And I became less involved in it because in 1969, when we did that action in the cathedral, a whole group of people who were our suburban human relations group and another group called the Catholic Peace Movement, which was operating out of John Carroll, merged and decided to form a Catholic Worker Community and move to the Near West Side. They were going to move to an inner-city neighborhood general. And then they, they went to different neighborhoods, talked to people, and in those days, Black Power was becoming the thing. So most of the Black neighborhoods on the east side said, we really- This is not a good time for White people to come in here and tell us what to do or even work side by side with us. So we ended up on the Near West Side, which is now called Ohio City and was then called the Near West Side. And it was a great place to live. I mean, people brought a couple of huge houses on Clinton Avenue for, like, I think, seven or $8,000. Four bedrooms, big attics, yards that are now worth about $300,000, $400,000 because they’re in Ohio City, and they fixed them. We bought a house for $3,000 for the adults, the single adults, which eventually started to be called the Hippie House. We had a printing press in the basement, an offset press. But anyhow, as we moved to the Near West Side, then our activity with the suburbs pretty much stopped in the sense of that development. So we took away a good portion of the volunteers because we were now involved in trying to live in and make the problems of the neighborhood our problems. Live in the neighborhood and work as neighbors instead of as outsiders. And primarily so that the parents of children could work out of their homes and wouldn’t be going to meetings all the time, leaving their kids with babysitters and neglecting their first responsibility and bringing the kids, involving the kids in what they were doing. So that was called the Thomas Merton community. Thomas Merton died that year, or died just before that. And he had been like the prophet and the spokesperson for the whole peace movement in terms of coming from a contemplative - he was a monk, so contemplative position. So he talked about the spirituality of the movement.

Naomi A. Randt [00:27:48] You mentioned printing press in the basement. What kind of things were you printing? Newsletters, things like that?

Father Bob Begin [00:27:53] No, there was a draft still, okay? So we were printing- We were helping to print- I think we printed some of the high school underground newspapers for kids. [laughs] We had a couple kids that actually got thrown out of St. Edwards High School who were seniors in the honor society, but talking about protesting against the draft. And so we would stand outside of the schools and hand out alternatives to the draft and how to get conscientious objection, etcetera, or even refusal to go.

Naomi A. Randt [00:28:36] Where students involved that way?

Father Bob Begin [00:28:39] The students were pretty much involved anyhow. And they had a newspaper that was going across the city, so they were pulling themselves together. It was like an underground newspaper. And they were- They eventually did their own printing. We did some of the printing. They did a lot of their own. And in those days, it was- There was like an alcohol mimeograph machine that you could do. [laughs] I mean, it was a horrible copy. Those things faded away, too, as the years went by. But it was either that or cut a stencil or make a plate for the offset. So I wasn’t going to move to the Near West Side with these folks, because this is before the cathedral again. I said, I think if you want to move society, you have to move the middle of society. And we’re in the middle of society. We need to stay here and keep working on it. But the middle of society was kind of treating us as kooks. [laughs] They really weren’t listening. So the other people said, well, we’re going to move, and we’re going to live what we’re talking about, simple lifestyle, and use our resources to see what we can do in a neighborhood. When we did the cathedral thing, I lost my place to live, and I had no place to live, so I ended up on the Near West Side, like most of the people on the Near West Side, because I had no place else to live, and shared an apartment with another priest who was part of the Catholic Peace Movement. His name is Bernie Meyer. He’s still alive. And he was also involved in the Dow Chemical action in Washington with me. The Catholic Peace Movement operated out of John Carroll. It had a group of adults, mostly from Cleveland Heights, east side, but some west siders, and they were bringing speakers in once a month. So they brought, I think, Daniel Berrigan in. They brought a guy named Mike Cullen from the Milwaukee. Fourteen people who had burned draft files, things like that. People to talk basically about peace. Carroll was wide open in those days, was so open to having things like that happen. The bishop in those days had forbidden the Catholic Interracial Council to operate in his diocese, but we arranged to have the national meeting of the Catholic Interracial Council at John Carroll in spite of that. [laughs] And then some of those people became involved with the peace movement. So it was pretty much a time when anti-establishment time was movement time, but it didn’t have any authorities working with it. So you didn’t have a Bernie Sanders. It was really grassroots, and it was involved at the same time with the revolution with drugs and the revolution with the sexual revolution. It followed on the beatniks and went into the hippies and the yippies. Those were the groups of young people that became involved.

Naomi A. Randt [00:32:08] Can you describe a little bit this event that happened at St. John’s Cathedral?

Father Bob Begin [00:32:13] Yeah. What was happening, Catholic wise, with the peace movement was people were standing up in church and reading statements just when the priest is ready to give his sermon, saying, you need to talk about the Vietnam War. Did you know that? [laughs] And disturbing the whole service. And it was happening in big suburban churches, and people were getting arrested for doing that. So we had a group. It was part of the Catholic Peace Movement and part of us who had met with Mike Cullen and a guy named George Mische from the Catonsville Nine. And then some of us went on a retreat with Phil Berrigan for a week and said we wanted to do some kind of an action in Cleveland to confront the diocese with the fact that we’re Catholic and we’re part of a church that’s saying nothing about this war. And I was interested in the war. I mean, why would I do that? I wasn’t that good in history. Never got as far as Vietnam. When you studied it in school. We were lucky to get to the Second World War. But there was a young man in our parish that I taught religion to. He went to the public high school and he had to come to religion classes. And after high school, he went to the Vietnam War. And when he came home two years later, he was just a mess. He was a real- They didn’t have a name for it then, but it was the PTSD. He was just nervous. He couldn’t sit still. He couldn’t stay on the same subject. He couldn’t get a job, couldn’t do anything. He was, no, I wouldn’t have hired him. So I said, frank, what did you do over there? He said, I was a gunner on a helicopter, and we flew low over the floor forests after they dropped the napalm or the defoliants, whatever they were dropping on the forests. And as we flew low over the forest, around the perimeter of the forest, my job was to shoot anything that moved that came out of the forest. So he said, I shot rabbits, I shot deer, I shot women, I shot children, and I shot men. I shot everything that moved. And I could see who I was shooting, and I’m still shooting them every night in my sleep, and I can’t get it out of my head. So I said to myself, even if this is a just war, you can’t do that. This is just immoral. And the bishop has to say something about this. They should be knowing what’s going on. We actually knew more about what was happening in Vietnam than the congressmen. It was amazing. When they started writing books and talking about what they knew, they had no idea what was going on in Vietnam. They were listening to reports from generals, and they were manufactured reports, body counts, whatever was going on. But there was no censorship like there was with Iraq and Afghanistan. So we actually saw pictures on the TV. People were watching in their living room, the bodies coming home. They don’t allow you to have to see pictures of that anymore. People were watching what was going on over there. We had reporters over there, and they weren’t embedded to just see what you want them to see. They could see whatever they wanted. They were very careful not to let that happen with Afghanistan and Iraq. So there was a lot of feeling about it. There was a lot of horrible feeling between college kids and their parents. They had some kind of a deferment, I guess, if they could go to college that they could keep. But then at the end of college, they were going to have to go to this war, and they knew more about it, because now they had friends that had come back, their high school classmates would come back and knew what was going on over there. So that’s one of the reasons we went to Dow Chemical, because every campus in the country had pretty much barred them from coming on the campus and protested when they did come, and they still didn’t change. So anyhow, we decided that we had to confront the bishop, but we didn’t want to interrupt the mass once it was going on and actually didn’t know this, but there’s an ordinance in the city of Cleveland that says you shall not interrupt the church service. It’s a misdemeanor. [laughs] So we said, well, we have two priests we don’t have to do that. And Cleveland, because of the Plain Dealer newsroom, had a mass at midnight every Saturday at the cathedral. So we thought, let’s go to the printer’s mass and we’ll start the mass ahead of time. And the priests who are supposed to say the mass certainly wouldn’t interrupt the mass once you started it, you wouldn’t think they would. So we had a group, and so we got a chalice and we got some hosts and some wine and we had some vestments, and we announced to people, Father Groppi was in town. I don’t know if you’ve ever heard of him, but he was from Milwaukee and he was working primarily against racism. Got arrested a lot with people, and he gave a talk. So most of the Catholic liberals, the old committee for a council, all those people from all over the diocese came to this big talk. And at the talk, we said, come to the cathedral next Saturday. There’s going to be an action. So we didn’t make a secret of the fact that we were going to do this, do something. They didn’t know what we were going to do. So a lot of people came to the cathedral and we came with a group of probably about 30 people in cars, and we were going to start this mass. And then after the gospel, we were going to read a statement that said it was called Christians Who Care. We need to do something about shared responsibility and decision making in the church. That was the first point. And if you would do that and have this committee for a council, then we could treat these issues of racism, poverty and war. And it was just a one-page, pretty much that simple. I don’t think we still have a copy of it anywhere, but we might. So we wanted to read that statement. So as we were driving down St. Clair, no it was Prospect, coming in on Prospect Avenue, passing the, what was then the police station, I think the police station is still there. 21st and Prospect. There were a lot of police cars there. And we said, maybe they’re lining up to come and arrest us, jokingly, because it’s Saturday night in Cleveland, they need a lot of people. So then we went to the back of the church and at ten minutes to twelve, we walked up the aisle, vested, starting singing, and started saying the mass. And pretty soon priests started coming out of the back, came in, and they took their chalice away. But we had our own chalice. And they turned the lights out, turned the lights back on. Somebody went to the pulpit and said, this is not a real mass. These are not real people. Your lives are in danger. We advise you all to leave the church. And we just kept on with the mass and the readings. Then when it got to the- We read the statement, and after we read the statement, a lot of people, most of the people stayed in church. They were kind of interested in what’s going on here. [laughs] And a lot of them came because we had invited them at that Father Groppi event. And Father Groppi said something interesting, by the way, at his talk. He said, you know, if I was doing in Milwaukee, if I was doing in Chile as a missionary what I’m doing in Milwaukee now, my parents and everyone would be so proud of me. But because I’m doing it in

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