When Dissent is Sacramental

Catholic Peace Activists and Nuclear Disarmament

By Jose Benjamin Montaño

In the dark of night on April 4, 2018, seven Catholic activists used a bolt cutter to cross a remote gate at the Kings Bay Naval Submarine Base in St. Mary’s, Georgia. After walking two miles through swamp and brush, they prayed, split into groups, hung banners, struck parts of a shrine to nuclear missiles with hammers, poured their own blood, and spray-painted messages of peace on nuclear weapons.

Choosing to act on the 50th anniversary of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination, the activists went to the base to make real the words of the prophet Isaiah: “beat their swords into plowshares” (2:4). They called themselves the Kings Bay Plowshares 7 (KBP 7) and mobilized to bring attention to the loaded, nuclear arsenal that the United States harbors, as well as to denounce the three evils that King had railed against: "the giant triplets of racism, extreme materialism and militarism."

Later that night, the KBP 7 were threatened with deadly force and then arrested. The next morning, they sat in the Camden County jail, their bail bonds denied. 18 months later, they were found guilty of the four felony charges they were indicted with: destruction and depredation of government property above $1,000, trespassing, and conspiracy. For the nonviolent, symbolic disarmament of the largest nuclear submarine base in the world, they each face up to 25 years in prison.

The KBP 7 knew they would be detained, but as their action statement noted, they could not in good faith continue to “pray and hope for peace while [blessing] weapons and [condoning] war-making.” With all activists approaching their sixties, or well above them, they now endure the possibility of spending the rest of their days behind bars for exposing a lethal force that threatens all life on earth. Not much has changed since King’s “Beyond Vietnam” speech in 1967, when he railed against more than just the triplets a year to the day before his assassination. It appears that “the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today” is still our “own government.”

A Labor of Love

The undertaking at Kings Bay was not the first of its kind. The nonviolent, direct action campaign against war and an unequal global distribution of wealth stemmed from the nearly century-old tradition of communitarian dissidence cultivated in the Catholic Worker movement.

The movement began in the United States in the 1930s, when Dorothy Day and Peter Maurin founded The Catholic Worker newspaper, in part, to neutralize the generational zeal to participate in war. More broadly and constructively, their intentions were to further a project of living in accordance with the justice and charity of their religious principles, and of creating a society where it could be “easier to be good.” The material conditions of struggle and the demands born from them may have changed since the Depression Era, yet the cycle of production and consumption of war-related technologies and disposable goods continues to alienate workers from the products of their labor, and from each other.

For this reason, today’s Catholic Worker movement sustains the aim of cultivating new ways of living to counter the dominating effects of a capitalist system; a system that decimates labor, promotes a global fear of the destitution of war, and deprives humankind of hope for the construction of a better, foreseeable future. It is a massive undertaking, but one guided by faithfulness to love divine.

To materially combat the injustices perpetuated by a capitalist system—propped up by the bureaucracy of the government—the Catholic Workers propose the following: a philosophy of personalism to defend the freedom and dignity of each person; the realization of a decentralized society of worker-ownership, communes, and co-operatives; a “green revolution” to re-distribute resources and re-establish corrupted bonds with the land; and of course a life of nonviolence that entailed the “refusal to pay taxes for war, to register for conscription, to comply with any unjust legislation; participation in nonviolent strikes and boycotts, protests or vigils; withdrawal of support for dominant systems, corporate funding or usurious practices are all excellent means to establish peace.”

For Day and Maurin, to be a good Catholic effectively meant practicing peace, renouncing participation in the violence that characterized the world’s degrading, social and economic order, and furthering a doctrine, proposed by St. Thomas of Aquinas, to guarantee the Common Good—a vision of a society where the good acts of its members are bound up in a common end and are for addressing common needs. To preach for peace alone was not enough. The sinful act of omission in the face of inequity meant that direct action was necessary.

Plowshares Actions

Since 1980—when brothers Daniel and Philip Berrigan and other believers symbolically disarmed a Mark 12A warhead at a General Electric nuclear plant in King of Prussia, Pennsylvania—members of a renewed Catholic Worker movement, including priests, nuns, and missionaries, have participated in numerous other disarmament actions in nuclear facilities, drone operating headquarters, and factory spaces where military arms are produced and assembled. Indeed, the action at Kings Bay marked the latest of 100 similar actions around the world dissenting against militarism and indicting nuclear weapons as illegal and immoral.

The civil disobedience of the plowshares actions became an effort to call attention to the barbarity of war, and in particular, the stockpiling of nuclear weaponry. The premise of “peace through strength” is a sham security strategy that perpetuates the need for a permanent war economy. Through mining, production, storage, and dumping on primarily indigenous native lands, nuclear weapons kill daily. And much like a cocked gun, the threat of detonation is lethal violence already.

The Catholic Workers act on the belief that complicity, too, is violence. The KBP7, accordingly, reject complicity by refusing to remain silent, despite the consequences. In the courts, plowshares defendants have often been denied the presentation of expert testimony, defense justifications, and appeals. As a result of their nonviolent protest, in the past four decades dozens of activists have faced jail and prison time. Again, the KBP7 were no different. Yet complicity can refuse the rejection of it; privilege can persist even after it is spurned.

The KBP7 were cognizant of the racial politics that materially benefited many of the participants—whether due to social and economic status, or their differential treatment by law enforcement and the courts. But perhaps the KBP7 could also nonviolently turn privilege against itself. Their efforts explicitly sought to take their privilege and have it carry them the longest distance that it would go, to spread the message of renouncing wealth and denouncing the system that exploits all those who do not possess it.

“As white Catholics, we take responsibility to atone for the horrific crimes stemming from our complicity with ‘the triplets’,” the KBP 7 action statement acknowledged, but “…[n]uclear weapons eviscerate the rule of law, enforce white supremacy, perpetuate endless war and environmental destruction and ensure impunity for all manner of crimes against humanity.”

Outside of a federal courthouse in late October, Mark Colville, another one of the Kings Bay defendants stated, “[The naval base] is a place where [the government] weaponize[s] the law. And they wield it mostly against the poor, the people who have all the red lined neighborhoods in this county know that very well.”

Clare Grady, yet another defendant, wrote about the political convictions fueling her participation in nonviolent protest in the most explicit terms: “No longer will we scapegoat people of color here and around the world, as savage, illegal, criminal or terrorists. Instead, we will see that they have been living and resisting the real crime, the real savagery, the real illegality and terrorism, perpetuated by this system.”

Perhaps for these express reasons, the courts have reason to silence the activists. Just few days before the trial of the KBP 7 began, federal Judge Lisa Godbey Wood restricted the presentation of any evidence related to a “necessity” defense, international law and treaties restricting nuclear weaponry, and religious and moral reasons for the action. The move dealt a blow to the morale of the group, who had planned to present a defense based on the wording of the Religious Freedom Restoration Act—a piece of legislation often cited by Attorney General Barr and Vice President Mike Pence when politically useful.

In one of his oral statements from an August 2019 hearing, Patrick O’Neill, another member of the KBP 7, denounced the fact that the government was not only refusing to protect the actions of those choosing to act on the premise of their sincerely held religious beliefs, but also resorting to its most restrictive means of interference coupled with severe punitive reaction.

Despite the defense restrictions of the courts, what inspires the direct-action campaigns of the KBP 7 and all other plowshares activists is precisely a profoundly moral, and religious conviction for a global end to war. The faith in peace that the Catholic Workers embody makes dissent against the existence of nuclear weapons, a hyper-militarized state, and the ruling order more than necessary.

For the plowshares activists, dissent is a sacramental rite: an outward sign of inward grace. By heeding God’s call to disarm, the act of hammering is itself an act of transformation for the participant. This transformation is two-fold: when the plowshares disarm the deadly weapons, they withdraw their consent from the violence being purveyed in their name; and by withdrawing their consent, they also affirm the possibility of a life guided by justice and peace.

At no time during the action was anyone threatened at the base. No military or base personnel were put in danger. Only the activists were threatened with lethal force. Yet, it was precisely a kind of lethal force threatening the planet that the group was there to protest. They had targeted Kings Bay because it contains nearly a quarter of the nation’s nuclear weapon cache. The resolute withdrawal from this system of oppression emboldens others to not sit idly.

A Blueprint for a Nuclear Era

On February 2, 2019, the Trump administration’s State Department provided Russia with its 6-month withdrawal notice from the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) treaty. The 1987 agreement banned all of the two nations’ land-based ballistic missiles, cruise missiles and missile launchers and resulted in the elimination of nearly 3,000 missiles. In May 2019, Trump also withdrew the United States from the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), more commonly known as the Iran nuclear deal. Aside from removing agreed-upon legal restraints on missile production and deployment, abandoning the agreements meant undoing decades of nuclear arms control.

Under the auspices of the current US foreign policy directive, the withdrawals also certainly create incentives for the development of an even larger nuclear arsenal. Hawkish anti-Russia and anti-China sentiments across the aisle in the US Congress helped to buffer criticism of Trump, but the move to scrap the accords undoubtedly jeopardizes the security of the world, bringing to mind the slogans of previous decades: prevent omnicide, no to nuclear proliferation.

Back in July 2019, the plowshares activist Patrick O’Neill was quoted saying: “I have no doubt that nuclear weapons will be detonated. I don’t know if it’s going to be by a terrorist or by accident. How do we wake people up?” Decades after the end of the Cold War and after what appeared like a lull in the nuclear arms race, it seems like today’s war games pose the same, existential risks. With an aggressive US foreign policy that maintains nuclear threats intact, paralleled with a renewed McCarthyist hunt against those expressing sympathies for non-intervention and demilitarization, old demands also re-surface. The warning calls of those putting themselves on the line since the Reagan years have not lost relevance.

At a time when America’s progressive coalitions seek to push forward the creation of a decent, domestic society, the progressive movement needs a concomitant outlook that is both broader and internationalist. The Catholic Workers’ appeals to de-nuclearize, de-militarize, and re-distribute global wealth are objectives worthy of pursuit.

Benjamin Montano is a writer and translator covering environmental justice and human rights issues.

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