What distinguished the activists in San Francisco, beyond their unusual organizational sophistication, was their proximity to power. The Catholic Church wasn’t merely sympathetic to the causes of social justice in Latin America; its archbishop, John Quinn, an eloquent, silver-haired Californian in his midfifties, was at the forefront of the opposition to the American war effort. He also happened to be the president of the National Conference of Catholic Bishops in the late 1970s. In
