Paul Mayer, 82, Ex-Priest and Peace Activist, Dies
By PAUL VITELLO
Paul Mayer, a Jewish-born former Roman Catholic priest who was at the
forefront of peace and social justice campaigns for five decades, for a
time working closely with the radical pacifist priests Philip and Daniel
Berrigan, died on Nov. 22 at his home in East Orange, N.J. He was 82.
His son, Peter, said the cause was brain cancer.
Mr. Mayer converted to Catholicism as a teenager and gave up the
priesthood in 1968 to marry a former nun. But he said he still
considered himself a priest — just as he still considered himself a Jew.
“Jesus never stopped being a Jew, and frankly I don’t think I could stop
being a Jew even if I wanted to,” he told the psychotherapist Alan
Levin in an interview for a forthcoming book, “Crossing the Boundary.”
He wore the priest’s collar for the rest of his life. He also became a
devotee of Navajo religious tradition and the philosophy and practice of
yoga.
In the 1960s and ’70s, Mr. Mayer helped the Berrigan brothers plan some of their highly publicized antiwar sorties, including the 1968 raid on a draft board office in Catonsville, Md.,
to remove and burn draft files in the parking lot outside. He also
coordinated underground support for the Berrigans when they went into
hiding, hunted by the Federal Bureau of Investigation as among its 10
most wanted fugitives.
In 1971, Mr. Mayer was named an unindicted co-conspirator in an alleged plot to kidnap Henry A. Kissinger,
the national security adviser to President Richard M. Nixon, supposedly
to ransom him in exchange for an end to the war in Vietnam. The
defendants contended that the F.B.I. had fabricated the plot with the
help of a paid informer. Mr. Mayer headed the defense committee for
those charged in the case, known as the Harrisburg Seven. While awaiting
trial, Mr. Mayer officiated at the wedding of two of the defendants,
the Rev. Philip Berrigan and an activist nun, Elizabeth McAlister, at
the federal detention center in Danbury, Conn.
The trial, in 1972, ended in a hung jury, after which the government
dropped all but minor charges against Father Berrigan and Sister
Elizabeth.
Mr. Mayer was a Benedictine monk for 18 years at St. Paul’s Abbey in
Newton, N.J., before being ordained a Catholic priest in the mid-1960s.
In 1966 he met Naomi Lambert, a nun at the time with the order of Medical Mission Sisters,
while traveling in Mexico. They married two years later. By the time
the Vatican relieved him of his priestly duties in 1971, they had had
the first of their two children.
The couple established a commune of sorts, called Project Share, in East
Orange, where they and a group of families lived together and supported
one another in two adjacent six-unit apartment buildings.
His marriage ended in divorce in the 1970s. Besides his son, he is survived by a daughter, Maria.
Mr. Mayer continued a life of extravagant disregard for conventions. In
1972 he toured villages in North Vietnam that the Communist authorities
said had been carpet-bombed by American planes. He visited Cuba many
times to deliver medical supplies, in defiance of the United States
trade embargo.
In 1973, while heading an American delegation to the World Peace
Congress in Moscow, he caused a stir by criticizing the meeting’s
sponsor, the Soviet Union, saying it was waging “a campaign to silence”
any of its citizens “who seek to express their rights.” In response, his
own delegation of activists stripped him of his leadership role.
Paul Michael Mayer was born in Frankfurt on Feb. 24, 1931, to Ernst and
Berthel Mayer. After Paul and a younger brother, Franz, were expelled
from school as Jews under Nazi decrees, their father, a concert pianist
who worked as a salesman, and their mother, a nurse, immigrated to the
United States with their children in 1938.
Mr. Mayer lived in an orphanage while his parents and younger brother
stayed with relatives for about a year, until they could afford to rent
an apartment in the Washington Heights section of Manhattan.
His decision to convert to Catholicism at 16, he said, reflected a
“driving adolescent drive to belong.” The writings of Thomas Merton, a
Trappist monk and Christian mystic, cemented his commitment, he said.
After being ordained, he was a parish priest in Panama.
He took up the cause of social justice when he joined the civil rights
march from Selma to Montgomery, Ala., in 1965. Almost 50 years later the
passion had not subsided.
In an unpublished memoir he completed shortly before his death, he
recalled his arrest in December 2011 during the Occupy Wall Street
protest: “I found myself climbing a 15-foot linked iron fence to cast my
lot with this visionary youth movement that was sweeping the planet.”
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