He never made pope:

...seven return.' He illustrated with the B-l bomber: 'Good, diligent work had achieved, under the Carter administration, the cancellation of the B-l program...

...Sister Evelyn Ronan at the Harvard-Radcliffe Catholic Stu-dent Center, who knew him from the time he was a freshman, had a slightly different theory...

...With John what appeared on the outside as social activism was a serious con-frontation internally with the mystery of iniquity, a confronta-tion that grew out of his radical Gospel stance...

...Leary took a year off from studies and lived in several different communes of religious young people in Cambridge and the black ghetto of Boston, communes that tried to provide bed and board to people off the street...

...For John Leary it all exploded in a few hours...

...He kind of shrugged, with a slight smile, and said, 'If we really believe in God . . .' He didn't finish the sentence...

...At the wake in Haley House," Gordon Zahn reported, "with John laid out in a plain wooden coffin on top of his sleeping bag, it was astonishing to see the crowds pouring through there: white, black, people of every race and religion and class, even a man who had given him a lift a year before when he was hitchhiking...

...I couldn't continue that way...

...It also led to early burnout...

...Charles McCarthy, now a Melkite priest, was John Leary's spiritual advisor for several years...

...It was even more astonishing to realize that such a young man could have such an impact on people...

...Eventually he wound up at Haley House, and then returned to Harvard to write his thesis on Catholic theories of violence and non-violence...

...He organized a human rights group, did a seventy-two hour vigil and fast with Mobilization of Survival at historic Faneuil Hall in Boston, got involved in the peace movement, and then began sitting-in at an abortion clinic in Brookline...

...The man who slept in the bed in John's room the night before told of accompanying him on the subway to his job at Pax Christi in Cambridge, the Catholic peace organization...

...John had a sensitivity, an awareness of the pain of others, that was relentless...

...It implied a whole lifetime...

...The doctors at the hospital tried hard to get the heart going again...

...John was still struggling," Kathy said, "about his vocation, whether he should marry or be celibate, how he should spend the rest of his life.," But they agreed that "his spiritual depths were very deep, his communion with God was unique and strong in a way that was unusual for anyone, and especially for one so young...

...You have no real idea how he has matured...

...This led to arrests, which led to jail, which led to release by Irish Catholic judges who apparently did not care too much for abortion themselves...

...Under the circumstances that has to be classified as political ambition...

...I talked to Kathy McKenna and Bonnie Wilkins, two young women who had worked with him there for several years...

...that's a good thing to do, to help him out.' Then I started thinking about why mostly illiterate people are in prison...

...Soon it was replaced by the Cruise and the Pershing and the B-1.' So he was directing his energies toward the root cause, in people's hearts-this was his vocation...

...They discussed the arms race and John recommended that' 'I read Merton's intro-duction to Gandhi on Non-Violence...

...I could find nothing I wanted to identify with in the traditional right-to-life movement...

...He liked that saying of 'The greatest sin of the age is making the concrete abstract.' To give up on the small act of love, to ignore the immediate pain of others, was for him to give up on the revolution...

...He would just give it away...

...He went into Harvard with political ambitions...

...I protested that this did not sound like the John Leary that Gordon Zahn at Pax Christi described, the Leary of "a sunny disposition and bubbling good nature," the young man who could kid with Zahn about starting a Pax Christi commune and "running naked through the woods...

...He wouldn't let me buy him anything new, nothing, not even new pants for graduation...

...Suppose it all explodes in a few years...

...You could look in those eyes and see all the way, right into heaven . . . The goodness was so powerful, the honesty was unlike anyone I've ever met...

...They had started the trip with John "uncomplicatedly asking if I could use a few bucks 'to get around...

...You get rid of one...

...You can develop a theory of racial inferiority, but that doesn't make sense once you get to know people...

...This was how he described the experience several years later: "I started out saying, 'Well, there's somebody in prison who needs some help reading...

...Jogging back to Haley House at the end of the day, he dropped dead on the bank of the Charles...

...By the age of six he had settled on president of the United States...

...At Haley House they were not quite so ready to canonize him...

...And all of a sudden the child you were leading by the hand all those years is leading you by the hand...

...He had a sense of pity in the face of sin, pity for the sinner, whoever he was...

...When he died, they distributed a leaflet about him at Draper Lab, the center for research on nuclear missile systems, where John had regularly demonstrated and been arrested more than once...

...Once he got to know people a lot of things didn't make sense...

...I'm inclined to agree with Sister Evelyn about the pain," he told me...

...It's something I didn't want to do," he said later...

...When he arrived at Harvard John had rejected institutional religion, but, strangely enough, rediscovered it at Cambridge...

...John Timothy Leary came out of Harvard, class of '81, magna cum laude, and died little more than a year later, described by most of those who knew him as pretty close to a saint, summa cum laude...

...Wasn't joy an essential part of Christian faith...

...The consensus of his friends was that he died of' 'burnout,'' lack of food and lack of sleep...

...Then I met some people through the peace movement, some of them feminists, who felt there was some-thing wrong about abortion - that it was a form of violence and injustice...

...He did not see people in terms of sociological categories, along the normal antagonistic lines - oppressors, oppressed, Sandinistas, Somozists...

...But finally, Polman recalled, she said quietly,'' When your child comes home and tells you what he' s been doi ng, someti mes you don' t really listen completely, because you're just thankful he's not in trouble or on dope...

...s leading you by the hand...

...At her home in Vernon she talked about her dead son with Dick Polman, a columnist for the Hartford Courant: "He did one thing that drove me bananas...

...The pain and joy were concurrent," she said...

...When he reached the seventh grade he got himself nominated to the environmental board in his home town of Vernon, Connecticut...

...By senior year in high school he was running the local youth campaign for Mo Udall in the '76 race for president and came within two votes of getting elected a delegate to the Democratic convention...

...The day he died, last August 31, John started the day at Boston's Haley House, a Catholic Worker refuge for homeless men where he slept on the floor and worked in the soup kitchen...

...He joined Phillips Brooks House, the social service center at Harvard, and began visiting inmates at Norfolk prison...

...At the age of four he told his family he would be elected pope some day...

...Sister Evelyn Ronan speaks of John in terms that one might hear at a beatification process in Rome...

...At the Catholic Center he attended a program in Christian non-violence given by a man who was to have a profound influence on his life, Charles McCarthy...

...One of the Cambridge cops who arrested him took a leaflet and read it...

...Paul Hood, one of his co-workers, recalls, "In our last morning worship together we sang the hymn, 'O God, our help in ages past.' Later I suggested to John, 'In the verse that says, 'Time like an ever-rolling stream bears all its sons away,' let's use 'kids' not 'sons...

...He was very conscious of the theme of the suffering servant in the Second Isaiah, which was of course central to Jesus's consciousness...

...John replied, "You're just trying to get my goat...

...Tears were clearly visible in his eyes...

...He said it was a little like the Gospel and the seven devils...

...I said that the concept of vocation troubled me...

...Studies got squeezed in...

...He clarified his perspec-tive, which he said he was still struggling with...

...And how he spoke - there was this incredible combination - the boyish, boyish face, and from that boyish face would come a voice with such strength and authority and intelligence...

...Then I started thinking about the violence and brutality and injustice of prisons, and what connection that has with the structure and bias of our society, with how black people are a small percentage of the population but the over-whelming majority in prison...

...There was no evidence of damage...

...Compas-sion of others had become the dominant experience of his life, I believe he died of an excess of pain...

...John Leary's mother Rosaleen deserves the last word...

...I started realizing that from seven in the morning until one the next morning I was spending most of my time calling people or going to meetings or working out at the jail...