Vanquishing Violence, Priest Feels Peace

What is the true measure of a human being?

We may think we are a certain kind of person. We may say we are a certain kind of person.

But it’s possible to go through life wearing masks of different shapes and sizes. Without an exact moment that defines who we really are, it’s possible to fool ourselves and others.

Father John McAndrew, an parochial vicar at St. Angela Merici Catholic Church in Brea, thought he knew who he was.

Ordained in 1986, he was a man of God, a follower of Jesus’ gospel of nonviolence. McAndrew had stood on street corners arguing against war and the death penalty. He had condemned all killing, from the unborn to the most hardened criminal, and taken the catcalls and name-calling in response from those who disagreed.

That was talk. Not until two Saturdays ago, an ordinary afternoon after another Mass, did he find out for sure who he was.

McAndrew, 45, had just returned to his garden-level apartment in the church’s courtyard rectory. In an instant, he saw a figure moving in his bedroom. In one of those moments when time stands still, McAndrew knew the man was an intruder.

“Fear took over,”

McAndrew says. “I just saw a figure and I started yelling and yelling and yelling until he came out [into the living room].”

Still screaming and on sheer adrenaline, McAndrew ordered the man to sit in a corner of the room. He did, but as McAndrew reached for a phone to call police, the man lunged at him.

“In the back of my head, I know that all I’m going to do is roar at him. He recognized it about the same moment I did.”

McAndrew remembers the man bringing back his fist and hitting him in the face, knocking his glasses off. The man landed three or four blows, says McAndrew, who is 5-foot-8 and 160 pounds. It was the first time he’d been slugged since sixth grade.

They rolled on the floor back into the bedroom. The intruder, who McAndrew described as an Anglo man in his mid-50s, 5-foot-8 and about 200 pounds, then hit him a couple times with a small wooden folding chair. They knocked over a lamp and struggled back into the living room, where the intruder grabbed a metallic religious artifact and clubbed McAndrew on the head, opening a number of cuts.

Then, McAndrew says, the man got him in a headlock.

“He had me,” McAndrew says. “I couldn’t breathe. Nothing real spiritual came into my mind, just that I couldn’t breathe. In that moment, there was grace in the whole thing. The message came about as clear as I could possibly get it: Quit fighting. Just quit fighting.”

He surrendered, peacefully and quietly.

“When I quit fighting, I went limp,” McAndrew says. “Then within seconds, I could feel his grip ease up on me. That gave me the opportunity to get out of his grasp, at which point he took off.”

Aside from his bloody shirt that remains unwashed, McAndrew and his apartment are back to normal now.

No one would have faulted you for throwing a punch, I say.

“It wasn’t a conscious decision not to hit him,” McAndrew says. “I would have thought that I would. I would expect that under threat to my life, I would respond with some kind of force. I’m still reflecting on the fact that I didn’t.”

Instead, when faced with the most direct threat to his life he’d ever had, he didn’t attack. He didn’t throw a punch, aim a well-placed kick or reach for an object with which to strike. He jokes that his most extreme action was to tear the man’s pant leg.

McAndrew won’t congratulate himself, but I will.

What his nonviolence says to me is that he’s the man he’s claimed to be.

“It’s more like I’m congruent,” he says. “That there is a kind of satisfaction that the spiritual life is my life, not just a piece that I do when I talk to other people, something I do at retreats or Sunday Mass.

At an earlier time, he might not have been so sure.

“I took the vow of nonviolence as a young priest,” he says. “Within 24 hours, I realized I’d made a terrible blunder. I said, ‘I’ll never be able to live this way. It’s the stupidest thing I’ve ever done.’ It was just immediately clear that I was a product of the culture, that I carried in my heart a substantial amount of violence--not necessarily physical violence but a desire for retribution, revenge, and a deep and lasting resentment and all that stuff that’s antithetical to a spiritual life.”

Now he knows he’s fulfilled the vow.

McAndrew talked in church about the episode but didn’t feel preachy.

“I don’t have an answer for what you do with a Hitler or a Slobodan Milosevic,” he says. “I’m standing here upholding the principle that I believe human life is sacred, that we shouldn’t kill for any reason and that I understand the gospel of Jesus as one of nonviolence.”

In the moments he thought he might die, McAndrew says, he found comfort in nonviolence. “If Jesus showed us anything, he showed us how to die,” he says. “He certainly could have defended himself. His was not a message of self-defense. There’s something redemptive about the acceptance of a nonviolent response.”

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Dana Parsons’ column appears Wednesday, Friday and Sunday. Readers may reach Parsons by calling (714) 966-7821 or by writing to him at the Times Orange County Edition, 1375 Sunflower Ave., Costa Mesa, CA 92626, or by e-mail to dana.parsons@latimes.com