It was September 1972. I had just arrived in Boston as a freshman at Boston University. As a Catholic, I attended Mass at BU’s Newman Center, where I heard about the lettuce boycott in support of Cesar Chavez and the United Farm Workers (UFW). James Carroll, the well-known author who back then was a leftist Paulist priest, sent me to the long-closed St. Leo’s parish church off Harvard Street down from Four Corners, which was the local headquarters of the UFW. I went there regularly to pick up flyers that asked shoppers to show their support of farm workers by not buying lettuce.

Later that month, a couple of college friends and I hitch-hiked to see Cape Cod and we were picked up on our way back by a couple of young women in a UHaul who were moving into Codman Square. Soon after, I started dating one of them, a young lady named Linda who was baptized at St. Leo’s. Our dates mainly revolved around handing out flyers at supermarkets. We married several months later and moved into a street near Codman Square, in St. Mark’s parish, where I got involved in starting a health center.

Since then, I’ve lived in the areas that have been known as St. Margaret’s, St. William’s and St. Teresa of Calcutta parishes. Nearly everything I have been involved with in my life since arriving here has focused on Dorchester, a place that became the geographic center of my life from my very first weeks in Boston. It seems that I was destined to be a Dorchester activist.

So, I was intrigued when heard about the iHeart Radio podcast “Divine Intervention,” which opens with an explanation of the community of Dorchester, a place with “a long history of apartments full of activists.” It’s a riveting story told by Brendan Patrick Hughes, who grew up here, that recounts in ten episodes (six have been released to date) the actions of Boston’s Catholic Vietnam War resisters, largely headquartered at St. Leo’s church, though its members lived all around Dorchester. The podcast describes a time “50 years ago, (when) radical nuns in combat boots and wild haired priests became cat burglars in order to sabotage the draft… and started trading blows with J. Edgar Hoover.”

The story involves Paulist priests and Catholic nuns and their supporters who, during the war, learned how to break into draft board centers and destroy records. This followed their discovery that the draft boards didn’t have copies of draft records, so a destroyed record meant that the person whose record vanished didn’t get drafted. It involves the Dorchester resident and draft resister who asked for sanctuary at the Paulist Center Church downtown (the first time in 400 years that a Catholic church was used for sanctuary) and tells the love story of Brendan’s parents: A highly charismatic Paulist priest, the founder of the Walk for Hunger, leaves the priesthood to marry a remarkable young Dorchester activist.
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Dorchester references abound, and the fun part is that many of the characters in these stories are still in our midst. On a personal level, I have known a few of them, and even traveled with one, but didn’t know their Vietnam-resister history before listening to the podcast.

We know what ultimately happened with the war, but you’ll find this podcast to be both engaging and entertaining. Just make sure your podcast search for “Divine Intervention” includes “iHeart Radio.” You’d be surprised at how many Divine Intervention podcasts there are on the internet.

If you’d like to meet some of these characters, there will be a “Divine Intervention Podcast release party next on Tuesday, April 22, at 6:30 p.m. at the Dorchester Brewing Co. on Mass Ave.  Tickets are free but very limited.

Bill Walczak’s column appears regularly in The Reporter.