I knew a friend of his who was lecturing in theology at St. Joe’s. When I told him I was avoiding the theology department, he made me promise I would get in touch with him.
Back in Philadelphia, true to my word, I went to the theology department and introduced myself to John Malinowski. We talked and talked. When I got up to leave, he offered to drive me home, although it was far out of his way. We stopped at a bar for happy hour and didn’t leave for many more hours—all of them happy. After that, we were nearly inseparable. I guess it was love at first sight. It marked a change for me to feel attracted to someone who was not out of reach. Jack was good-looking, articulate, critical, conscientious—the sort of person who entered the seminary in those days, though he never did. He was in tune with all the new thinking in the Church. He was drawn more toward social activism than supernatural intervention. He grew up in Mahony City, a tiny mining town full of churches and surrounded by a devastated landscape of strip mines. He had studied history at Duquesne and theology at Notre Dame, and was earning his PhD in religion at Temple University while teaching at St. Joe’s. We soon got an apartment near the college, where I lived while he came and went, fulfilling his duties as a proctor at a college dormitory.
In June 1967, I graduated from St. Joe’s and married Jack. The wedding was a bit tricky to organize, as I was an agnostic, although still a very Catholic one, and Jack was still a Catholic, although a very agnostic one. Those gathered around us urged us to be married in the most liberal church in the city. There was also the fact that Jack was teaching theology at a Catholic college. I saw the need for compromise, but I was resolute in my rejection of inauthenticity. The night before the wedding involved intense negotiations with the officiating priest, who was Jack’s brother (which was already a compromise, as I would have preferred Greg). I refused to profess anything I did not believe or promise anything I would not do. I was adamant about not promising to obey. I also declined to be given away by my father. Jack and I walked up the aisle together. It was not a lavish affair. I made my own dress and he wore his best suit. We had a buffet for guests in the church basement. The bill from the caterer was far higher than we had expected, because it turned out that someone had sent an open invitation to radical Catholics all over the city, who flocked to it. It featured the latest in progressive church singing and participation. I met for the first time some of Jack’s friends, such as Kevin and Dorothy Ranaghan, who were leaders of a new charismatic renewal movement in the Church who hoped to persuade Jack to join. He had shown me their letters, which kept getting stranger and stranger. I was curious to meet them. They were warm and friendly, but there was a huge gap between us. Jack and I both thought that this movement was seriously unsound. They were speaking and singing in tongues, becoming obsessed with ecstatic experiences and turning away from political engagement.
I had been intending to go away to pursue a PhD in philosophy. I applied and was accepted and offered fellowships to a number of graduate schools and planned to go to Purdue, but decided to stay in Philadelphia and do my postgraduate studies at Temple, because of Jack. It was a compromise, not only in city, but in milieu. I wanted to move away from Catholic circles and study in a more secular setting, focusing on philosophy, not theology. I was now in a secular institution, but still surrounded by a Catholic subculture, particularly the radical Catholic set. At the same time, my relation to religion still felt far from settled. I was an agnostic, but it was a deeply uncomfortable position. I still wrestled with basic cosmological questions. For my PhD, I took courses in religion, philosophy, and history, primarily at Temple, but also at the University of Pennsylvania and City University of New York. Many of my fellow graduate students were Catholics, some of them ex-priests in the first days of their laicized lives. They were great company and we had much in common, but they were still within the Church in ways that I wasn’t. They would react indignantly to the latest statement by Cardinal Krol, but I no longer cared what he said. They were organizing underground masses. They sang and played guitar beautifully, but I couldn’t believe with them that bread and wine became the body and blood of Christ. They asked me to sign a petition supporting the ordination of women. I would have gladly done so a few years earlier, but since I no longer saw the point of having priests at all, the gesture felt pointless.
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