They did what?!"
Those were the only words I could mutter when Ralph Moore answered my question. We were walking east on Preston Street on Thursday afternoon, headed toward Greenmount Avenue. A cadre of marchers followed Moore, most of them students and staff from St. Frances Academy. Carl Stokes, the former city councilman who is now director of operations for the Bluford Drew Jemison Math Science Technology Academy, brought about 15 sixth-grade boys from the charter school, located in the 1100 block of N. Caroline St., to participate in the march.
City Council President Stephanie Rawlings-Blake joined the march, as did City Councilwoman Mary Pat Clarke and Baltimore State's Attorney Patricia Jessamy. All were there to protest the rampant drug dealing that has now all but crept up to the very doors of St. Frances Academy.
Moore, the director of the community center at St. Frances, sent out e-mails May 1 letting everyone know about the march. I've known Moore for years. We met through a man we both - to understate the matter - admire immensely: retired Johns Hopkins University Chaplain Chester Wickwire.
I've always known Moore to be even-tempered, calm and a man who would go out of his way to help even the drug dealers he was leading a march against. What had they done, I wondered, to get Ralph Moore, of all people, in such high dudgeon? So I asked him.
"They stashed drugs near a statue of the Blessed Virgin in the school grotto," Moore answered. Dealers also used a vacant lot next to the nearby convent on Brentwood Avenue - where nuns who teach at the school live - as a testing area to hand out free drug samples. That's when I gave my reaction to Moore's answer: "They did what?!"
I'm telling you, I didn't know I had any good Catholic left in me. Oh, there's plenty of bad Catholic left, believe me. I rarely attend Mass, I eat meat on Fridays and haven't been to confession since black folks were called Negroes. I've been known to say - and frequently - that while I've never doubted God's existence, I do doubt his sanity on an almost daily basis.
But that might change now. These sacrilegious scofflaws dealing drugs around St. Frances have managed to arouse the long-dormant good Catholic in me. (I guess I should try for the total truth here: make that "virtually dead good Catholic in me.")
