While Clements came to perceive Cody as despotic rather than prejudiced, he continued to battle racism on other fronts. On the day King died, the priest phoned a black police officer named Edward ”Buzz” Palmer. A few days earlier, Palmer had sought Clements` help to start an organization for black cops, and Clements, considering his career in the church, had begged off. Now, he told Palmer, he was ready to help.
The Afro-American Patrolmen`s League set about exposing racism in hiring and promotions in the Chicago Police Department. It launched the political career of Renault Robinson, who had started as a cop. At the same time the league bitterly divided black and white officers. Clements became a target of the ”Red Squad,” the police unit that investigated people who allegedly posed a threat to national security. Harassment became a part of his life.
One night, for instance, Clements parked his car in a no-parking zone in front of a local drug store and ran in to buy a newspaper. While he was making the purchase, a white officer began to write him a ticket. The man`s black partner told him not to. When the white officer continued to write, the black policeman grabbed the ticket and tore it up. The
confrontation, as Clements remembers it, escalated into an ugly fight in which both police officers drew their guns.
This wasn`t what the priest envisioned when he agreed to become involved with the patrolmen`s league, according to Robert McClory, who discussed the league and Clements` involvement with it in his biography of Robinson, ”The Man Who Beat Clout City.” Instead, McClory wrote, Clements
”had a quixotic vision of unarmed policemen walking the streets of the South Side just as British police do on the streets of London.”
Gradually, the Afro-American Patrolmen`s League slipped into neglect and, finally, oblivion. The league`s demise mirrored the failures of Clements` other flirtations with radicalism, including his association with the Black Panthers. Though he speaks unabashedly of that involvement and still refers to the police shootings of Panther leaders Fred Hampton and Mark Clark as murders, Clements now admits: ”The Panthers failed. Very few of these black operations–the black student groups, the black religious organizations
–survived the test of the `70s.”
This was perhaps his most sobering lesson as a ”consummate realist”: ”If I`m outside (the establishment) throwing rocks, nobody gives a damn. But if I`m inside and I`m raising all kinds of hell, they have no choice but to listen.”
One of the current UPS ”interns,” as Clements refers to them, is from New Orleans, the other from Billings, Mont. Since 1971, a similar pair has come twice a year to Holy Angels from across the country. Usually, they are white, middle-class men. Always, they are mid- to upper-level managers.
”I knew Walter Hook, the national personnel director for UPS,” Clements explains. ”He told me about the problems he was having getting management people to adjust to the influx of minorities into the company.”
To help allay fears and destroy prejudices, Clements for 16 years has been taking UPS managers and immersing them in his community. During their month`s stay, the interns spend a few nights in the homes of Holy Angels parishioners. They ride around in police squad cars, Clements` relations with the local police having grown into one of mutual respect and trust. The interns come to learn that a poor black community is not populated exclusively by dope addicts, pimps, armed robbers and bums. In recent years Clements has appointed Chester Evans to guide this tour. Gaunt and garrulous, Evans handles his assignment well.
When Evans was taken as a baby to be baptized at Corpus Christi, Clements, then a 13-year-old altar boy, was drafted to be his godfather because the intended godparents had not shown up. Years later, Clements helped persuade his godchild to enter preparatory seminary. Evans lasted one year, thrown out because of his radical views about black power.
Evans then bounced in and out of a couple of regular high schools before dropping out completely. He joined the Black P. Stone nation, an outgrowth of the Blackstone Rangers and a forerunner of the El Rukns. ”I felt myself to be a revolutionary,” Evans says. He later became a member of the 21-man ruling group headed by gang leader Jeff Fort. But his power waned when he was convicted of the 1969 drug-related murders of two South Side men. To this day Evans denies killing anyone. During a decade in jail, he taught himself how to paint. He was paroled in 1982, partly because he helped save a female prison guard during a riot at Pontiac state prison.
Clements, who had supported Evans all along and spoken in his behalf at two parole hearings, brought the news of Evans` parole to him. ”Father almost gave me a heart attack,” Evans recalls. ”My knees buckled. The (only other) time that happened was when they convicted me of (the) double murder.” Clements helped Evans adjust to freedom, giving him a place to live and encouraging him to paint. Evans` huge mural of American black history, from the days of slavery through the 1980s, now covers an entire wall at Holy Angels school, and his portraits of Clements and the priest`s adopted sons hang in the rectory stairwell. ”I feel,” says Evans, ”like I`m his oldest kid.”
Actor Louis Gossett Jr. relaxes on one end of a sofa in a Hyde Park apartment and talks about his adopted son. The film star had seen the homeless boy on a television news show and was so moved by his story that he flew to St. Louis and adopted him.
”When he first came to live with me,” Gossett recalls, ”I`d find him eating in the middle of the night. It turned out that when he and his sister lived on the streets, they used to go to restaurants and beg for food. Then they`d take it back to the shelter where they were staying. But if they tried to eat it, the big kids would steal it. So they started hiding the food and getting up at 3 in the morning to eat it in the dark.”
Clements, seated at the other end of the sofa, nods. The story of how he came to adopt each his three sons, Joey, Friday and Stewart, is not so dramatic. But because he happens to be a celibate Roman Catholic priest, his decision to adopt was clearly exceptional, and it thrust him into the international limelight and captured the fancy of film producers.
Now Gossett, an Academy Award winner, is in town to play the role of Clements in a made-for-TV movie.
Clements didn`t adopt Joey because he wanted a movie made about his life. But he wanted to do something that would make his parishioners and the larger black community act upon what he considered a scandalous situation–thousands of black children in foster homes and institutions, and no one willing to adopt them.
It began when Clements organized a parish seminar on the problem with officials from the Department of Children and Family Services (DCFS). As the day of the seminar approached, only 15 parishioners had signed up for it. This lack of response so enraged the priest that four days before the seminar, he did something during a sermon that he had never done before and has never done since: He used the ugly epithet.
”I am stunned,” he told the congregation that day in November, 1980,
”that for the first time since coming to Holy Angels I am faced with a gigantic, colossal, potential failure in that the (DCFS) meeting gives every indication of being a flop. White people must wait two, three and sometimes four years to adopt a white child. There are thousands of black children waiting to be adopted at this moment. Inasmuch as my own congregation gives every indication that they are insensitive about the most precious commodity in the world–human lives–if you niggers won`t adopt, I will.”
Recalling that moment, Clements now says: ”The whole situation needed to be laid on the shoulders of black people by black people. I had thought I was going to be able to get them enthused about this particular problem, but I ran into a brick wall.”
What he also ran into after making his announcement was an ambivalent church hierarchy. Clements says that Cody at first privately forbade him to adopt. But the cardinal relented, he says, under the pressure of a mountain of positive publicity, including dispatches from the Vatican newspaper, L`Osservatore Romano. Through a spokesman the archdiocese released a statement saying only that ”it may be more appropriate for a priest to leave adoption to those who are less encumbered by pastoral responsibilities.” But there was no official prohibition, and to Clements, that was enough.
Clements found Joey through a friend who ran an orphanage. The boy, 12 at the time, was the only one there no one wanted to take home for Christmas. Clements liked the boy and was impressed by his spunk.
After the camera crews had left and the reporters stopped calling, however, life for Clements and Joey settled into a grind. Students at the parochial schools Joey attended called him a sissy; he fought like a mongoose. Eventually, he calmed down, graduated from high school and has just completed a tour in the Navy.
”My father helped me develop a sense of responsibility,” says Joey, now 19 and living during the week with Clements` nephew in Olympia Fields. ”He gave me a sense of knowing when, why and how to say things. He taught me how to deal with people and not stoop to their level.”
In 1984 Clements adopted his second son, Friday. He came from Nigeria, where he had been raised by Catholic priests. Now 19, he`s a track star at Mendel High School and an accomplished soccer player who will tour Scandinavia this summer with a U.S. national team. Friday lives with and cares for Clements` brother-in-law, a widower who lost his legs to diabetes, but, like Joey, Friday comes home to the rectory several times each week. ”Being a priest`s son means I have to go to church every Sunday,” Friday says. ”They know Father Clements everywhere. And because they know him, they know me. I have to be careful what I do outside of here.”
For his part, Clements demands that his sons follow a strict moral code, asking them ”to keep a rein on their lower passions. I have told them they will betray everything I stand for if they go out and impregnate a girl. I have told them it is a sign of weakness to take a girl and misuse her. So far as I know, they have followed my admonitions.” Those admonitions go beyond sexual morality and include other areas of behavior. Clements tolerates very little disrespect and will, for instance, ask his sons to remove their hats if he sees them wearing them inside the rectory.
Stewart, the third to be adopted by Clements, had already been living at the Holy Angels rectory for about a year before his adoption became official in the fall of 1986. ”I was on a television show in Baltimore,” Clements recalls, ”and Stewart, who was 14 at the time, was on it, too. He was living at a Methodist orphanage. He told the audience that he was hopeful they would open their homes to homeless children.”
”I`m too old (to be adopted),` Stewart told the TV audience. ”But there are plenty of kids younger than me who need homes.”
”You`re not too old,” Clements said.
”No,” Stewart replied, ”I`m over the hill.”
”Well,” the priest said, ”if nobody wants you, I`ll take you.”
Stewart Clements, 17, is a smooth talker with a great sense of humor. He is also the last child Clements says he will adopt.
Not long ago, the priest traveled to California to celebrate the establishment of his ”One Church, One Child” adoption program in that state. It was the 29th state in the union to embark on an effort to have black churches persuade families to adopt black children. In Illinois, DCFS officials credit the program with spurring a remarkable jump in adoption requests for black children.
With the adoption program running smoothly, Clements must now devote his energies to rebuilding a church.
The fire that destroyed Holy Angels apparently started in the basement because of defective wiring. The police woke Clements around 4:30 a.m. on June 9, 1986. The priest roused Friday, and together they ran into the 90-year-old structure to save what they could, but there was nothing they could do.
Clements watched the church burn and hoped that his dreams for the parish would not go up in smoke, too. At the time of the fire, Clements says, he had been told unofficially that he was going to be transferred to a parish in the suburbs. Archdiocesan officials, however, deny that there was any plan to move him from Holy Angels.
In the archdiocese, whose 100,000 black members rank next in size only to those of the Brooklyn diocese in New York, Clements is one of just 15 priests exempt from a policy that limits a pastor`s term of office to six years, with a possible one-time renewal for another six years. Because the policy was not made retroactive when it was instituted 12 years ago, it doesn`t cover Clements, who is now entering his 19th year as pastor at Holy Angels.
”Technically,” says Rev. Lawrence McBrady, executive secretary of the archdiocese`s Clergy Personnel Board, ”Father Clements could continue (as pastor) at Holy Angels until he is 70. I know of no plan to move him to the suburbs.” Nevertheless, Clements says, ”I suspect that as soon as the new church is built, I`ll be gone.”
Clements talks very cagily about his future. When asked about a possible reassignment, he says: ”If I were in a white parish, I would not be so preoccupied with economics. Now I spend an inordinate amount of time with schemes to make money. In the suburbs I could concentrate on my priesthood. I would have a lot more time to devote to marriage counseling, programs for the sacraments, recruiting boys to the priesthood, religious education.”
Still, Clements quickly points out that that doesn`t mean he wants out of Holy Angels. ”When I became a priest, I took a vow of obedience,” he says.
”I`ll go where I`m sent, and I don`t want people to say I`m angling to get out or stay in.”
It doesn`t take long, however, to figure out which he`d really rather do. ”I was born near this community,” he says. ”I`ve been poor all my life, and I fully expect to die poor. This is where I feel I belong. That`s one reason I don`t get frustrated, because I don`t expect to ever leave.”
For now, he refuses to worry about being transferred. ”I am 55 years old,” he says. ”I`ve been a priest for 30 years. My energy and vitality are going to wane. I have to follow the guidelines of being a consummate realist, which means I have to carefully cultivate young priests, particularly black priests, so that when I am off the scene, there will be capable, qualified, concerned black men who are able to handle the challenges. But as for my own future, I really believe that I should concentrate on rebuilding this church.”
To go with $1 million in fire insurance collected by the archdiocese, Clements has raised $500,000 to rebuild Holy Angels, $60,000 of it from the movie, which will air in October on NBC. Residuals from the film may kick in another $40,000. But the total rebuilding costs are estimated to be $3.8 million. Consequently, Clements is looking for an angel to provide a big chunk of the $2.3 million he still needs.
The new Holy Angels will in no way resemble its old cathedral-like Greco- Roman predecessor. First, it will be much smaller, its pews seating 1,000 instead of 2,000. Second, it will be what Clements likes to call a church for the 21st Century, an ultramodern design with liberal use of glass and greenery.
Above all, the new Holy Angels will be a black Catholic church in every sense of the word. With that goal in mind, Clements has hired Andrew Heard, a black architect, to design it. The contractors who will build it will be black. And, if Clements has his way, a black priest will be its pastor.
”Blacks in America have always felt like a colonized people living in someone else`s country,” he says. ”We certainly felt that way about the Catholic Church. When whites leave the community, they leave the church
(building) for us to use. (But) it`s their church; it isn`t ours. Now I see that kind of mentality fading away. I see (black) people getting a sense of ownership, a sense of pride.”
Clements usually celebrates the noon mass on Sundays. It is the last of the six weekend masses at Holy Angels. On a good weekend, as many as 3,000 people will show up at the masses now being held in the auditorium of what used to be Oakland Elementary School. Holy Angels originally purchased the abandoned public school building from the Chicago public school system to expand its teaching facilities, but the fire that destroyed the church forced a change of plans.
The auditorium`s floor has been refinished and its walls freshly painted. Red plastic chairs serve as pews. On the stage beneath a crucifix are an altar, a lectern, a portable organ and a drum set.
”Thirty years ago today I was ordained,” Clements tells the parishioners on a recent Sunday.
The 250 people in the congregation applaud. Among them is Gossett, who sits in the front row carefully studying Clements` mannerisms. What he sees first is a priest solemnly leading his people in worship, bowing and genuflecting his way through the liturgy. Then a family counselor urging the parishioners to bring their mothers to church and ”pin a flower on her to let everyone know what you think of her.”
After the scriptural readings, Clements starts to preach, and he is suddenly transformed into a great tent revivalist. He switches from impeccable English to dialect and sometimes slang. ”Everybody splits,” he says, ”but Jesus was always supercool.”
His homily is about faith, the theme of the day`s readings and the anthem sung by the choir: ”Faith that can embrace anything. Faith to reach the unreachable, move the unmovable.”
”We really get behind this guy Jesus when he`s up,” Clements says.
”That`s why on Easter Sunday you couldn`t find a seat in here. But there was plenty of room at our Good Friday service.
”When things are going great, we have no problem being a Christian. But let one of our children get caught up in dope, and you say, `Jesus, I been at church every Sunday. Why is this happening to me?`
”When things don`t go the way we think they should, that`s when we find out how committed we are. Sometimes you and Father Clements feel like we`re batting our heads against the wall. But I don`t see anybody out here with any nail holes in their hands and feet.
”Have we trial and temptations? Oh yes, we do.
”Is there trouble anywhere? Of course there is.
”But we should never be discouraged. Take it to the Lord in prayer. Amen.”
Later, Clements says: ”You know, we`re going to break ground for a new church June 9, on the first anniversary of the fire. People ask me, `Do you have the money?` I don`t need the money, honey. All I need is faith.”
The event at Ditka`s City Lights restaurant, billed ”That`s What Friends Are For,” is a $100-per-ticket buffet and fashion show to benefit the Holy Angels building fund. The women in the crowd are wearing fancy cocktail dresses or long formals. Most of the men are in tuxedos, including Joey, Friday and Stewart Clements, who have been custom-fitted in fancy cuts of gray cloth. A few hours earlier, the three stood in the hallway of the rectory`s second floor arguing about how to put on studs and cufflinks. Now they look perfectly relaxed and very handsome as they mingle in the crowd of several hundred.
Mindful of his powder-blue tux, Melvin Cauley keeps dusting seats with a napkin before he sits down and holding a huge hand under the finger food he scarfs down. Cauley, who is 6 feet 7 inches tall, is more than handsome; he looks so good he is downright captivating.
”Are you Michael Jordan?” a woman asks the tall young man.
Cauley offers a goofy look, a giggly smile and a demure ”No.”
Clements, in his clerical suit and Roman collar, stands by the door greeting people as they enter. ”I want you to let in anybody who says they are my guest,” Clements had warned the benefit organizers earlier. ”I don`t want anyone embarrassed.”
Two of his sisters, their husbands and children are here, plus an entourage from the parish, but the priest really has no idea who most of these people are, only that they stand to contribute $20,000 toward his new church by evening`s end. So he is gracious, if not terribly talkative.
Finally, Mallette arrives, also in clerical attire and with a cane that helps support a plastic hip when he walks. Clements greets his old friend, and the two of them huddle in a corner of the entry, chatting. There is strength in familiarity, even for a person with as high a profile as Clements. There is also a sense of perspective. Behind the priests, on the portable stage erected in the middle of Ditka`s, dancing waiters and waitresses are bumping and grinding through a routine unnervingly provocative of the ”lower passions”
that Clements warns his young sons against.
But, as they say, that`s entertainment, and later, after receiving a dry roasting from his sons, parishioners and fellow priests, Clements mounts the stage, this time wearing a stunning ivory tuxedo as part of the evening`s fashion show. He walks to each corner of the stage and bows, then kisses the hand of Renee, a beautiful model in a revealing dress and, arm-in-arm, escorts her away. Afterwards, when the TV crews flock to him for interviews, Clements dons a top hat that matches his suit.
This is as close as George Clements will ever get to being a dandy, but he`s not displeased with the effect. He has, after all, spent a lifetime shocking people to open their minds. He revels in showing that black people are not of a single ilk, that they are, to use his words, ”intelligent and stupid, rich and poor, a whole myriad of things.”
But he reserves most of his energy and theatrics to debunking one particular notion, namely, that black people are dependent, needy, not able to handle their own affairs. ”I have proven,” he says, ”that you can take poor black people and you can get a good admixture of pride and self-respect and you can get over, as they say in the ghetto. You can succeed. Here`s what I`ve debunked: The myth that we`ve got to have somebody propping us up. That is pure bull excrement. We can make it by ourselves.”
