In 2012, Notre Dame Press published a fortieth anniversary edition of William Oâ??Rourkeâ??s The Harrisburg 7 and the New Catholic Left, a contemporaneous account of the trial of seven defendantsâ??four radical priests, two nuns, and one Pakistani academicâ??for conspiring to blow up buildings in Washington, DC and abduct Henry Kissinger. It sounds like a report from another world â?? a world in which the faces of two antiwar â??Rebel Priestsâ? could appear on the cover of Time.
The Church has changed since 1972. The young Oâ??Rourke begins his account at a Requiem Mass for one of the defense counsels. Prosecutors and indicted federal felons are â??constrained and at rest with one another, united by death.â? He then imagines a collective pilgrimage to Harrisburg for the trial. Oâ??Rourke will end without much evident hope: the government discredited and the Catholic Left broken, with a post-trial Mass in a Harrisburg living room at which the final words are â??We should be dismissed in hope.â? The Church, still distinctive and stubbornly inseparable, is â??tenacious,â? Oâ??Rourke notes, more a â??raceâ? than a â??religion.â? He hadnâ??t been to Mass for a decade before these events. But a vivid Catholic imagination still permeates both the events and the writing of this book, published in the very same year as Garry Willsâ?? account of dissolution, Bare Ruined Choirs.
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