The Human Voice Means More

One week to the day after Quaker Norman Morrison burned himself to death outside the Pentagon, Roman Catholic Roger LaPorte, 22, a student at Manhattan's Hunter College, doused his clothes with gasoline and set himself aflame on a street corner outside United Nations headquarters. Like Morrison, he chose immolation as a way to protest U.S. warfare in South Viet Nam.

LaPorte lived for 33 hours, mostly in a coma, before dying. From the hospital, he sent a message to friends, saying: "I want to live." A Catholic priest felt sufficiently convinced of his contrition to give LaPorte the last rites of the church.

In Catholic teaching, suicide is a mortal sin; according to canon law, a Requiem Mass may not be said for someone who takes his own life. Presumably because LaPorte lived long enough to regret his action, the church allowed a memorial Mass, which took place in his home town of Tupper Lake, N.Y. His remains were buried in consecrated ground.

Like Morrison, LaPorte had long shown a deep religious sensitivity and an interest in pacifism. He had tried to join a Trappist monastery, but was rejected as too young. Later, he spent a year as a student in a Vermont seminary. Since 1963, LaPorte had served as a part-time volunteer with the radically anarchist and pacifist Catholic Worker movement, to which David Miller, the jailed draft-card burner, also belongs. Other volunteers recalled him as devout and quiet, a normally cheerful youth who drank, smoked and dated occasionally.

Although the 35-year-old Catholic Worker has no official connection with the church, its members generally adhere to the rules and teaching of the faith; many attend Mass and receive Communion daily. Thus, after LaPorte's death, a spokesman for the movement expressed "shock, perplexity and grief," and publicly urged other protesters "to employ other means in expressing their commitment."

What perhaps was most pathetic about the Morrison and LaPorte suicides was the futility of such attempts at martyrdom. Where dissent is harshly silenced, spectacular means of protest may be needed; within the ample means and methods of U.S. democracy, a human voice means more than a human torch. "The mark of the immature man is that he wants to die nobly for a cause," Psychoanalyst Wilhelm Stekel once said, "while the mark of the mature man is that he wants to live humbly for one."

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