Two Spiritual Revolutionaries

Abstract

Miguel Marmol was born in 1905, in Ilopango, El Salvador, near where the air base through which a good deal of the U.S. military presence in Central America is funneled now stands. James Carney was born in Chicago in 1924 to a very proper Roman Catholic family of German-Irish extraction. Marmol grew up a street urchin, who did not know who his father was for many years; he prayed to the Virgin and St. Francis, believed in "spirits," and, as a young adolescent, joined the local unit of the National Guard and toyed with the idea of becoming a soldier. Carney, by contrast, had a conventional and sports-obsessed all-American boyhood, unusual only for its religious devoutness. He won a football scholarship to Jesuit-run St. Louis University, injured his knee, and spent the Second World War as a noncombatant with the U.S. Army.

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