And then there were four.
John Hogan — a member of the Catonsville Nine group that brought the argument against the Vietnam War into the homes of middle-class Catholics — died of a stroke on Oct. 3 at the age of 73. He was buried Tuesday in New Haven, Conn.
Hogan’s death is the fifth among participants of the 1968 protest, a May 17 action in which hundreds of draft records were stolen from the Catonsville Selective Service office, doused with homemade napalm and burned on the parking lot.
[A well-known play — “The Trial of the Catonsville Nine” — was written by the Berrigan brothers, Philip and Daniel, the group’s most prominent members. In 1972, Gregory Peck made a film of the play. On screen, Hogan was portrayed by Barton Heyman.]
Hogan was in Baltimore this past April to attend the funeral of fellow Catonsville Nine member Tom Lewis. The surviving members of the group are Daniel Berrgian, a poet and Jesuit priest; George Mische of Minnesota; and Marjorie and Tom Melville, longtime Catholic activists who introduced Hogan to the Berrigans while Hogan was a Maryknoll brother.
A Connecticut native who lived near New Haven, Hogan stayed with friends Brendan Walsh and Willa Bickam of the Viva House Catholic Worker while in Baltimore. Walsh gave the eulogy for Hogan this past Tuesday at a funeral Mass at St. Joseph Roman Catholic Church in New Haven.
“There were three Johns,” said Walsh, paraphrasing his remarks. “The Guatemalan John, who got thrown out of the country by the government and his own [religious] order for helping the poor; the Baltimore John, who was arrested with the Catonsville Nine; and the Connecticut John,” who used his skills as a carpenter to help the poor, especially those living in public housing, where he worked as an inspector.
Earlier this year, on the 40th anniversary of the protest, Hogan was interviewed by Patrick O’Neill of the Garner Catholic Worker House in North Carolina.
“Think of the Vietnam War,” said Hogan, explaining his actions in Catonsville as though leaping to push a kid out of the way of a speeding car. “The pictures coming out of the place . . . the amount of men being killed, and the people over there being killed . .. an enormous thing. How can you but not react to it?”
Hogan’s widow, Joan, said her husband felt exactly the same way about America’s current wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
“Such dire, dire times we are in right now,” said Joan Hogan by telephone from the family home in Connecticut.
She said her husband had devoted most his time in recent years in the practice of Mother Teresa’s adage that most people are incapable of great acts but all can devote their life to small acts of great love.
“It wasn’t anything on a great political scale, it was more just spending time with lonely people, someone who may have just lost a parent or taking someone to pick up their car from the mechanic,” she said. “John did all of those things.”
Rafael Alvarez can be reached at [email protected]
