He and a Radcliffe student focused their attention upon the Preterm clinic in Brookline. John insists his tactics were different from those of other anti-abortion activists: "Our interest wasn't in trying to judge or confront the women who were there. But it seems to me there's a difference between the women who are (seeking abortions) and the people who are making money off that. To be able to love the clinic operators involved confronting them with what they were doing. We let them know we had no power, that we were just going to sit there between the machine and their ability to use it." Their attempts at dialogue with the clinic personnel were "limited," however, and the police were called in.

"We expected we'd get some long jail sentences because we'd decided to keep going back until we got locked up." But they were never imprisoned. "I think it may have had something to do with pure chance, and something to do with our age, and something to do with the fact that these were Irish Catholic judges and this was the abortion issue."

Friends at Harvard were not entirely sympathetic with John's point of view. "I knew that taking a stand on abortion would alienate a lot of people," he remembers. "I don't think I lost any friends. I got a lot of acquaintances angered at me. But I understood and respected where they were coming from.... I think that once people realized I was not interested in coercing women, or enacting legislation that would get the power of the state behind them to prevent them from having abortions), they could better understand what I was doing. But there was a lot of anger."

At one point, John withdrew from further sit-ins at Preterm and returned to college. "It seemed that going back wouldn't be an act of hope or love. There's so much ambiguity, complexity, and violence structured into the society that leads to abortion, that makes pregnancy a problem, a woman's problem." This thinking led him to try and develop support systems for the women who changed their minds. "We were taking people into our house in the South End, so that anyone who wanted to leave the clinic had a place to stay for a while. (Some of them) later testified at our trial that if we hadn't been there that day they would have gone through with something they really regretted. But I don't think we did enough. We just didn't have enough people with us to be able to offer the support--a real context--for doing something as dramatic (as sitting in.)"

He shifted his activities toward urban shelter issues and peace activities, concerns which led him to volunteer at a Catholic Worker soup kitchen in the south End and take a half-time draft counseling job at the Pax Christi Center on Conscience and War. "I think the values that led me, partly against my grain, to take some stand against abortion are the same values that led me to say there's something wrong with the city when its supposed development depends on forcing poor people into the streets," he explains. "And there's something wrong with deciding that our national definition of freedom and our rights to resources enable us to support slaughtering people in Latin America and actively prepare for world war with nuclear weapons. To be human," he believes, "means more than looking out for Number One."

To this end, John has lived the last three years in group situations in which inhabitants share food, money, shelter, and prayer. This "gospel-based lifestyle," he says, "helps sustain me for the long haul." His religious faith, which he rejected in adolescence and reclaimed during college, has helped to shape his political response. Among his housemates and partners in activism have been Quakers, Episcopalians, and Buddhists--all of whom have inspired and challenged his faith. "I find much more hope living in communities with people who have made traditional religious vows that also include lay people," he points out, emphasizing his delight in living with people both younger and older than himself. "I definitely see that as a religious community."

While his religious practice is very different from that of many Catholics around him, John realizes his approach is essential to his present identification as "very Catholic." "I don't think there was ever a time I dogmatically rejected God, but there was certainly a time I wanted nothing to do with institutional religion. Looking back, it seems to me I could not have accepted Catholicism in any way if I had not ditched all it was. There's so much within the church as an institution that's incredibly contradictory to the message it's supposed to be proclaiming." Paraphrasing his friend Daniel Berrigan, he says, "I'd love to leave it, but where else would I go?"

Maintaining the spiritual element in his life "is a real effort," John explains. "It's much easier for me to walk into Draper knowing I might face 30 days in Billerica than it is to sit quietly in a chapel and pray and meditate for 20 minutes." But he tries to guard himself against what he calls "an idolatrous activism" by drawing upon the example of Dorothy Day, Dom Helder Camarra, and other Catholics in the activist tradition.

Part of that tradition involves patience in the face of uncertainty, and, save for the possibility of imprisonment, John Leary has few immediate plans. "What seems to be important now is finding people to live with, pray with, and work with, and see what comes from there. I think there's a tremendous temptation for those of us graduating from Harvard to jump from one speeding train to another, even if it's a downwardly mobile one. I have a commitment to what's happening here, to the people I'm living with, to the soup kitchen. But I see a need not to jump into any new things right now."

He now sees the individual foci of his activities in a larger context of "margination"--"People being marginal, useless to the system. The campesinos in El Salvador who are being gunned down because they want to structure their society in a way that will help them out, or the people on the streets of Boston, or the women who end up without support in raising their children, or the children who get killed in the process of abortion--one thing they share in common is that the people in power in this society have decided they're not as valuable as other people." John believes any attempt to help and empower these people contributes to a new community. "I see the issue now as not so much constraining things like nuclear weapons or abortions, but as building that community where those things will be unnecessary."

Chuckling, he adds, "There's still part of me that says it's too simplistic, too naive, too impossible...and it may be. But one of the things I've lost in the last few years is cynicism--and certainty. Those are in abundance at Harvard. It's really (expected of you) that you be cynical and be certain. One of the things Robert Coles said...is that people take a course expecting everything to be in neat little boxes so they can say, 'Now I've got that all figured out.' But I don't...."