Dunleavy's Homily

by Mike Newall

The Rev. Thomas Dunleavy arrived at his rectory desk early on Monday morning. He had a homily to write. That evening, his church, St. Anselm, which is in Northeast Philadelphia, would be holding a tribute Mass for murdered police officer John Pawlowski. The official funeral Mass is scheduled for Friday at the Cathedral Basilica of Sts. Peter and Paul, but the family of the 25-year-old cop, shot twice in the chest near the Olney Transportation Center last Friday, are St. Anselm parishioners. As are the family of Pawlowski's pregnant wife, Kim. A Mass was in order.

Dunleavy had already visited the grieving families. There wasn't much he could say to them. He just listened to their pain. Now, he opened his Bible to the previous day's Gospel reading, Mark 1: 40-45: "A man with leprosy came to Jesus and begged him on his knees, 'If you are willing, you can make me clean.'" He meditated on the similarities between the leprosy afflicting the man in the scripture and the crime plaguing our city — how they debilitate, disfigure and destroy. Then, he began to write.

As Dunleavy wrote his homily, the beat-up intersection of Broad and Olney, where Pawlowski thought his final dutiful thoughts before the flashes of Rasheed Scrugs' pocketed .357 Magnum suddenly ended everything for him, came to life. A policeman sat in a cruiser, keeping watch over Pawlowski's sidewalk memorial, and over the crowd a murdered officer's memorial attracts. A man was hawking T-shirts on behalf of a nonprofit organization that combats gun violence. "Half the proceeds go to the officer's family," he shouted.

"Wake up," another man shouted at him. "How we know you ain't pocketing that money?"

"You wake up," the T-shirt man shouted back.

Television reporters interviewed anyone who would talk. They recited the clichés everyone always recites when another police officer is gunned down in the streets.

"No parenting ... no jobs ... no respect for life ... a tragedy."

Nearby, Dawn Akey stood in the crowd outside the Olney Steak and Beer shop. She was waiting for her husband to come back from the methadone clinic down the street. "People knew him to see him," she said of Scrugs. "He was a bully."

Manuel Dias, a West African immigrant who owns the newsstand near where Pawlowski fell, told his story again — first the thud against his wall, then the two arguing voices, finally the fateful threat: "If you call the police, I shoot you and the police." A few minutes later came the sirens and the gunshots.

Then, in broad daylight, with a police cruiser parked 10 feet away, a young man in a Yankees cap broke away from the crowd and yelled at Dias.

"Why you telling stories, yo?" he said.

"I'm not reporting on anybody," answered Dias, his voice rising in frustration. "I'm just telling what I heard."

A woman sitting on a crate in the newsstand pulled on Dias' sleeve. Rail-thin, her cheekbones pressed through her skin as she spoke.

"I told you to keep your mouth shut," she said to Dias. "They're all part of the same gang."

HALF OFF DEPOT

Why live life at full price?

Dias owns another newsstand across the street, which he shut down a month ago because, he says, everyone he hired to work it would steal from him. Today, with all the police around, he figured it would be safe to pay a kid to sweep it out. The crowd from the Steak and Beer shop formed a circle as the kid put the key into the lock and lifted the metal grating. Rats streamed out onto the sidewalk. Women jumped and yelled, men laughed and a few people stepped in to see if there was anything left worth taking.

That evening, with the crowd spilling out the church doors, Dunleavy held his homily to his chest and took to the pulpit. In the preceding Gospel reading, Jesus, filled with compassion, reached out his hand to a leper, said "Be clean," and cured the man immediately.

"The desire of Jesus to heal, to restore and to make all things well is the desire that motivated Officer Pawlowski to go into the streets in the 35th Police District," Dunleavy preached. "God's power to heal and to restore is one that is available tonight. God sees in us the sorrow, pain and anger that Officer Pawlowski's tragic death has caused."

Soon, a hymn played. The police, the mayor, the priests and, finally, the family processed down the aisle. Outside, the family stepped into a gray limousine. Police officers formed a line of salute. Pawlowski's widow, Kim, stared out the window, over the crowd, at the saluting cops. She is young, grieving and five months pregnant with her dead husband's child. She looked scared.

Dispatch is filed from all corners of Philadelphia. E-mail mike.newall@citypaper.net.