A00005 - Mary Nerney, Advocate for Women in Prison

Sister Mary Nerney, Advocate for Women in Prison, Dies at 75

By MARGALIT FOX

Published: December 5, 2013

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Sister Mary Nerney, a Roman Catholic nun who was a nationally known advocate for female convicts, in particular those who were survivors of domestic violence, died on Nov. 27 in Manhattan. She was 75.

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Clarence Sheppard/New York Daily News

Sister Mary Nerney, left, with Veronica Talbert. Sister Mary was the founder and director of Steps to End Family Violence.

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Her death, from cancer, was announced by the Edwin Gould Services for Children and Families, a New York social services organization with which she was long associated.

At her death, Sister Mary was a consultant to Steps to End Family Violence; she was also the program’s founder and former director.

Established in 1986 under the aegis of Edwin Gould Services, the Steps program provides legal assistance and psychological counseling to battered women, including those imprisoned for killing their batterers.

It also assists battered men, as well as family members who witness domestic violence.

Sister Mary previously founded Project Green Hope, nowGreenhope Services for Women. Begun in New York in 1975, the organization helps reintegrate female ex-convicts into society, or serves as an alternative to prison, by teaching women the construction trades.

Her efforts through that program to establish a halfway house for women released from prison inspired a television movie, “Sister Margaret and the Saturday Night Ladies,” first broadcast on CBS in 1987. The film starred Bonnie Franklin in the title role and Rosemary Clooney as a former convict.

In real life, Sister Mary did establish such a house, a brownstone on 120th Street in East Harlem. Needing to renovate the building — and knowing that without marketable skills a great many former convicts return to prison — she started a program to teach female ex-convicts trades like carpentry, masonry, plumbing and electrical work.

By 1980, The New York Times reported, a group of those women had moved into affordable apartments in the building they had renovated, and many went on to careers in construction. Project Green Hope later acquired and renovated three more apartment buildings in the neighborhood.

The daughter of Irish immigrants, Mary Nerney was born in Manhattan on June 8, 1938, and reared in the Washington Heights neighborhood there. After graduating from St. Jean Baptiste High School on the Upper East Side in 1956, she joined the Sisters of the Congregation de Notre Dame.

“She’s only going to last two weeks,” Sister Mary later recalled her father saying. “She likes fun too much.”

But she persevered, taking her vows in 1958. She later earned a bachelor’s degree from Catholic Teachers College in Providence, R.I., and a professional diploma in school psychology from St. John’s University in Queens.

Sister Mary began her working life as a teacher, psychologist and principal at Catholic schools in New York City and elsewhere; in the mid-1970s, she started counseling women at the Rikers Island and Bedford Hills correctional facilities.

At Edwin Gould, Sister Mary established the Incarcerated Mothers Program, which helps keep the children of inmates out of the foster care system by placing them with family members. Otherwise, as she told The St. Paul Pioneer Press in 1997, “when you sentence women to jail, you sentence the whole family.”

Sister Mary, who lived in East Harlem, is survived by a sister, Nancy Balboni, and two brothers, Thomas and James.

To prepare for her role in the telefilm, Ms. Franklin, who died in March, spent time watching Sister Mary at work. “She was very soft-spoken,” Ms. Franklin told The Los Angeles Times in 1987. “Yet she had to be as tough as the women she was dealing with. They weren’t Sunday school kids.”

A00004 - Paul Mayer, Ex-Priest and Peace Activist

Paul Mayer, 82, Ex-Priest and Peace Activist, Dies

Neal Boenzi/The New York Times

The Rev. Paul Mayer speaking on behalf of dissidents in 1969.

By PAUL VITELLO

Published: November 29, 2013

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Paul Mayer, a Jewish-born former Roman Catholic priest who was at the forefront of peace and social justice campaigns for five decades, for a time working closely with the radical pacifist priests Philip and Daniel Berrigan, died on Nov. 22 at his home in East Orange, N.J. He was 82.

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His son, Peter, said the cause was brain cancer.

Mr. Mayer converted to Catholicism as a teenager and gave up the priesthood in 1968 to marry a former nun. But he said he still considered himself a priest — just as he still considered himself a Jew.

“Jesus never stopped being a Jew, and frankly I don’t think I could stop being a Jew even if I wanted to,” he told the psychotherapist Alan Levin in an interview for a forthcoming book, “Crossing the Boundary.”

He wore the priest’s collar for the rest of his life. He also became a devotee of Navajo religious tradition and the philosophy and practice of yoga.

In the 1960s and ’70s, Mr. Mayer helped the Berrigan brothers plan some of their highly publicized antiwar sorties, including the 1968 raid on a draft board office in Catonsville, Md., to remove and burn draft files in the parking lot outside. He also coordinated underground support for the Berrigans when they went into hiding, hunted by the Federal Bureau of Investigation as among its 10 most wanted fugitives.

In 1971, Mr. Mayer was named an unindicted co-conspirator in an alleged plot to kidnap Henry A. Kissinger, the national security adviser to President Richard M. Nixon, supposedly to ransom him in exchange for an end to the war in Vietnam. The defendants contended that the F.B.I. had fabricated the plot with the help of a paid informer. Mr. Mayer headed the defense committee for those charged in the case, known as the Harrisburg Seven. While awaiting trial, Mr. Mayer officiated at the wedding of two of the defendants, the Rev. Philip Berrigan and an activist nun, Elizabeth McAlister, at the federal detention center in Danbury, Conn.

The trial, in 1972, ended in a hung jury, after which the government dropped all but minor charges against Father Berrigan and Sister Elizabeth.

Mr. Mayer was a Benedictine monk for 18 years at St. Paul’s Abbey in Newton, N.J., before being ordained a Catholic priest in the mid-1960s. In 1966 he met Naomi Lambert, a nun at the time with the order of Medical Mission Sisters, while traveling in Mexico. They married two years later. By the time the Vatican relieved him of his priestly duties in 1971, they had had the first of their two children.

The couple established a commune of sorts, called Project Share, in East Orange, where they and a group of families lived together and supported one another in two adjacent six-unit apartment buildings.

His marriage ended in divorce in the 1970s. Besides his son, he is survived by a daughter, Maria.

Mr. Mayer continued a life of extravagant disregard for conventions. In 1972 he toured villages in North Vietnam that the Communist authorities said had been carpet-bombed by American planes. He visited Cuba many times to deliver medical supplies, in defiance of the United States trade embargo.

In 1973, while heading an American delegation to the World Peace Congress in Moscow, he caused a stir by criticizing the meeting’s sponsor, the Soviet Union, saying it was waging “a campaign to silence” any of its citizens “who seek to express their rights.” In response, his own delegation of activists stripped him of his leadership role.

Paul Michael Mayer was born in Frankfurt on Feb. 24, 1931, to Ernst and Berthel Mayer. After Paul and a younger brother, Franz, were expelled from school as Jews under Nazi decrees, their father, a concert pianist who worked as a salesman, and their mother, a nurse, immigrated to the United States with their children in 1938.

Mr. Mayer lived in an orphanage while his parents and younger brother stayed with relatives for about a year, until they could afford to rent an apartment in the Washington Heights section of Manhattan.

His decision to convert to Catholicism at 16, he said, reflected a “driving adolescent drive to belong.” The writings of Thomas Merton, a Trappist monk and Christian mystic, cemented his commitment, he said. After being ordained, he was a parish priest in Panama.

He took up the cause of social justice when he joined the civil rights march from Selma to Montgomery, Ala., in 1965. Almost 50 years later the passion had not subsided.

In an unpublished memoir he completed shortly before his death, he recalled his arrest in December 2011 during the Occupy Wall Street protest: “I found myself climbing a 15-foot linked iron fence to cast my lot with this visionary youth movement that was sweeping the planet.”

A00003 - Paul Crouch, Founder of Trinity Broadcasting Network

Paul F. Crouch, Who Built Evangelical TV Network, Dies at 79

Mark Boster/The Los Angeles Times

Paul F. Crouch and his wife, Janice, were the face of TBN.

By EMMA G. FITZSIMMONS

Published: December 1, 2013

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Paul F. Crouch, a television evangelist who founded the Trinity Broadcasting Network with his wife and turned it into the world’s largest Christian television network, died on Saturday. He was 79.

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His death was confirmed by the network, which said he had suffered from degenerative heart disease for a decade.

Mr. Crouch served as the face of Trinity Broadcasting, along with his wife, Janice, expanding it from one station in Southern California to thousands of stations across the world. He often appeared on camera, microphone in hand, quoting from the Bible and delivering his upbeat brand of Christianity.

But he also faced criticism over lavish spending of the millions of dollars in donations collected through the network. Last year, his granddaughter accused the network of financial improprieties, and her father, Paul Crouch Jr., was forced off the staff.

Paul Franklin Crouch was born in St. Joseph, Mo., on March 30, 1934. His parents were Pentecostal missionaries who had lived in Egypt. He took an interest in ham radio as a boy and was a licensed operator at 15.

He graduated from the Central Bible Institute in Springfield, Mo., where he worked with other students to build the campus radio station. After graduating, he managed the television and film unit for the Assemblies of God church.

He and his wife, who met in 1956, founded Trinity Broadcasting Network in 1973 and bought their first station, now called KTBN-TV 40, in Santa Ana. They embraced satellite technology, broadcasting to other states and eventually overseas.

In a video tribute by the network on Saturday, Mr. Crouch could be seen on camera celebrating the network’s expansion to new cities. “All over the country, they’re coming to know Jesus,” he said. “Church, I think we ought to rejoice because the whole world is getting saved.”

TBN now runs on 84 satellite channels and more than 18,000 television and cable affiliates, according to the company. Mr. Crouch was the host of a show called “Behind the Scenes” that aired until recently.

The network runs sermons from prominent preachers like Joel Osteen and aired a special this month featuring the Rev. Billy Graham. This year, Mr. Crouch interviewed Rick Santorum, a former Republican presidential candidate, on his show.

The network also owns the Holy Land Experience theme park in Orlando, Fla.

Some Christian leaders have criticized the Crouches for preaching the “prosperity gospel” — the message that if you have faith in God and donate generously, you will profit in return. In 2010, donations to TBN totaled $93 million. The Crouches had multiple homes, including his-and-hers mansions in Newport Beach, Calif., and used corporate jets valued at $8 million and $49 million each. In 2010, Mr. Crouch’s salary as president of Trinity Broadcasting was $400,000; Mrs. Crouch’s as first vice president was $365,000.

In 2012, Mr. Crouch’s granddaughter Brittany Koper went public with the accusations of financial improprieties. Ms. Koper told The New York Times that her job had been to label extravagant personal spending as ministry expenses. But a lawyer for the network said Ms. Koper and her husband had been fired by TBN and accused them of stealing $1.3 million.

The dispute took a toll on the family. Her father left the network, where he had served on the board, saying that getting caught in the middle of the dispute was “one of the hardest things I’ve ever had to endure.”

Mr. Crouch is survived by his wife; two sons, Paul Jr. and Matthew; and several grandchildren.

Mr. Crouch often traveled overseas with the network and filmed episodes of his “Behind the Scenes” show in London and Rome. In one episode this year, he reminisced about how the network found an audience in Africa, noting that one time when he arrived at the airport in Nairobi, Kenya, immigration officials recognized him. They “praised the Lord” and patted him on the back, he said.

“That’s God,” he said. “He’s opening these doors, and we’re going through them.”