The snowshoer was blaming Pope Pius XII for what sounded to me like a 1951 papal encyclical, an “Address to Midwives on the Nature of Their Profession.” The poor midwives, I was thinking, when I saw the cops cross the barricades; the cops who’d been watching Elliot were coming our way. I knew the snowshoer was hurrying; she saw the cops closing in. “But just you wait and see what Cardinal O’Connor and his craven supporters say about us! We’ll be condemned for infringing on their freedom to worship!” Mr. Barlow cried. I could see she’d lost half her listeners even before the police broke through and dispersed the few followers still surrounding the snowshoer. A woman with a reproductive-freedom sign was the last one who went away. When the cops closed in, the little English teacher took hold of my hands; she was delighted. “Finally—I was thinking the cops would never come!” Mr. Barlow whispered to me. This was when I understood she was trying to get arrested; it struck me as a rather roundabout way to find out if Em had been arrested, and where the police were holding her. Elliot Barlow would be right, of course—concerning what Cardinal O’Connor and his craven supporters would say about the Stop the Church protesters.

As for the die-in: some protesters had thrown themselves on the floor of the central aisle of the cathedral to symbolize the victims of AIDS; some had chained themselves to the pews. A guy had blown a whistle and shouted, “You’re killing us!”

That same year, the American Catholic Bishops had explicitly condemned the use of condoms to stop the spread of the AIDS virus. Cardinal O’Connor had advocated abstinence instead of condoms—“good morality is good medicine” was one way he put it. During the disrupted service in St. Patrick’s, Cardinal O’Connor had told his parishioners: “Never respond to hatred with hatred.” Nora would have pointed out that the cardinal hated homosexual acts, a woman’s access to abortion, safe-sex education, and condoms. Over the protesters’ shouts in St. Patrick’s, the cardinal had led his parishioners in prayer; he had handed out a written homily, to replace his regular sermon.

Mayor Koch was sitting in a front-row pew at the interrupted Mass. The fink mayor would criticize the demonstrators. “If you don’t like the church, go out and find one you like—or start your own,” Ed the Cock would say. His time as a mayor was running out; Ed Koch would become a movie critic. What Nora would have said is anybody’s guess.

The New York mayor-elect, David Dinkins, and the New York governor, Mario Cuomo, said they “deplored” the Stop the Church protest. Finks for the cardinal, Nora would have called them.