Martha Hennessy Speaks in Paris on a Christian Pacifism for the Twenty-First Century
In an age of violence, Martha Hennessy underlines the importance of her grandmother's witness of nonviolent resistance in the face of devastating war, genocide, and destruction.
by Baudouin de Guillebon, first published on the Substack Première Nouvelle. Translated by Barbara Kentish. Edited by Renée Roden.
Martha Hennessy, the granddaughter of Dorothy Day, came to France to visit the art exhibition, Dorothy Day, Changing the Social Order, by painter Francois Rieux. When we met her at Le Dorothy Café in Paris, we found that she is not simply a blood relative of Dorothy Day, but she is of a kin with her grandmother in mind and heart. Her commitment to peace and justice is no less than her grandmother’s.
When you ask Martha Hennessy how long she has spent in prison, she smiles and answers, “Not long enough!” an answer now traditional amongst American pacifist activists, since it was pronounced by Jesuit Daniel Berrigan, founder of the Catholic Peace Fellowship, one of the ten fugitives most wanted by the FBI in the Sixties.
Nothing is enough for this branch of Christians opposed to unjust wars, the military-industrial complex, massive and arbitrary imprisonment, and opposed also to segregation and to the thousands of evils of social disorder. Martha is the spiritual daughter of this movement, which she carries forward in the twenty-first century. She is also the granddaughter of Dorothy Day, co-founder of the Catholic Worker Movement with Frenchman Peter Maurin.
It is specifically to talk about her grandmother that she has come to Le Dorothy Café on June 26. In front of a curious audience, Martha sidestepped the questions aimed at her, and instead prioritized the memory of Dorothy Day, Servant of God, committed pacifist, major figure and “repeat offender” of American Catholic anarchism. Martha told the story of Dorothy’s socialist youth as a journalist and as a suffragette in prison. Martha related her conversion to Catholicism, her struggles with Martin Luther King, and her opposition to all wars. She recalled that Pope Francis threw Dorothy’s name into the center of the American Congress in 2015, as though he were declaring a kind of challenge. “It was Dorothy,” said Martha, ‘who took me by the scruff of the neck and pushed me to take action; she led me where I had never thought of going.”
Martha is not simply an intellectual disciple of the founder of the Catholic Worker; she has chosen to pursue this calling and to commit herself to direct action. One person raised a hand during her talk: “Why do you practise non-violent action? Today, some think that direct action, such as destruction of property, can be more effective. Don’t you agree?”
No, Martha shook her head, “Why seek violence when there are so many other means to oppose the entire system, to these the structures of sin which even eat away at our consciences?” Some activists in the audience did not seem convinced. They seemed drawn to violent action. They muttered.
When we walked through the streets of the tenth arrondissement with Martha, the day after her talk, this question of violence returned naturally to the conversation. She told me, “There is a seduction for violence and destruction which seems to spring up.”
Have Christian pacifism and Christ-inspired non-violent action entirely disappeared, giving way to a new activist generation keen to undo them, and, rather than enduring violent actions, commit them? Martha confirms that the Christian peace movement is much weaker at the moment and lacks charismatic figures.
Martha expressed her sadness at the glee aroused by the murder of Brian Thomspon, the chief executive of United Health Care, on December 4. Like her grandmother half a century ago, Martha refuses to be aligned with assassins. She wants to build, to exemplify, to animate, to act in a life-giving way.
Continuing our stroll, we stepped inside St Lawrence’s Church, where we came across images of several patrons of the Catholic Worker movement: St. Vincent de Paul, St. Louise de Marillac, and little Therese of Lisieux. St. Lawrence’s life was a flight from the claws of the oppressor; he gave away his wealth to the poor and remained in prison, where he healed, cared for and listened to his fellow prisoners languishing there, following which, he was burned to death on a grill. Was he not also a forerunner of Martha’s movement? It is perhaps via the Community of Saints, this living community, that one can best understand Martha’s life.
We sat beside St. Martin’s Canal, named after another saint for the poor, according to the words of the Golden Legend:
“One winter’s day, as he passed through one of the gates of Amiens, he met a beggar who was quite naked. Immediately, using his sword, he cut in half the cloak he was wearing, giving half to this poor man. And the following night, he saw Christ himself dressed in this half of the cloak.'“
Martha began reminiscing, recalling when she was 14 and her brother, Eric, was drafted during the Vietnam War. The grandson of Dorothy Day, a living symbol of opposition to war, put on a military uniform and prepared to deploy to Vietnam. Dorothy called at their house to talk to Eric and ask questions; she could help him take the steps to become a conscientious objector, she said, but her offer revealed the richness and freedom of the title. “You must act according to your conscience,” Day believed. Eric thanked his grandmother, but he wanted to serve his country. He wanted to go to the war on the other side of the world. Dorothy embraced him and demonstrated against the war. Martha joined her. Dorothy met with Eric after the war and celebrated his return with the same love as she had welcomed her friends back home who had gone away to fight in the Second World War. Day believed we must respect each person’s conscience and not cut ourselves off from those who have made the opposite choice from ours – keep up these links between us, even the most tenuous.
“This is one of the most important of Dorothy Day’s legacies to pursue,” Martha added, “We must always respect our own conscience.” This idea is the “Primacy of Conscience” that Jacques Maritain spoke of in “The Primacy of the Spiritual.” Cardinal John Henry Newman, decades before Maritain, also wrote that if he had to propose a toast, he would propose it first to his conscience before proposing it to the Pope.
If conscience is of prime importance, then it must be nourished appropriately, that is, informed. Martha insisted on this during her address. “It is of capital importance, especially in the twenty-first century, to be informed,” she said. Martha cited several publications to read still in operation in the United States: America, the Jesuit Review, the National Catholic Reporter, Democracy Now!, Amy Goodman’s television program, and The Non-Violent Jesus, John Dear’s podcast. It is a sparse list. The rest is up to us to do: our actions can inform our own consciences and those of our neighbors.
This is why Martha demonstrated in South Korea outside an American military base, and why she demonstrated with the Witness Against Torture movement with Carmen Trotta of St. Joseph’s Catholic Worker in New York City, to protest torture in Guantanamo prison. The desire to enlighten our consciences with the truth inspired Martha to be a member of the King’s Bay Plowshare Seven. The Plowshare movement takes its name from the words of the prophet Isaiah, ‘They will turn their swords into plowshares,” and opposes the military employment of nuclear power.
In 2018, seven activists, including Martha, broke into a naval base at Kings Bay, Georgia, where nuclear submarines are housed. They carried a banner that displayed a photograph of Martin Luther King and wrote the words “Love one another” on the ground, and spilled containers of their own blood. One of them read a quote from Pope Francis denouncing nuclear weapons before they were arrested and imprisoned.
During their trial, Martha declared, “I have no criminal intentions: I simply want to prevent a new nuclear holocaust.” Martha shared with me the Plowshares action’s strategy:
First, to raise awareness, and to inform through a noticeable public action. But it doesn’t stop there. The court is the second stage: for it is in court that we can share what motivates us. The court is the ‘extension of the Pentagon’: it is the judges that we need to convert. The final stage of the action unfolds in prison, where we carry out one of the works of mercy, visiting prisoners.”
When Martha talks about her prison stays, she doesn’t seem to notice that she was a prisoner. It was as though she went inside the prison, but remained free—free to help those who weren’t. The Plowshares Seven action cost her 10 months’ imprisonment. During those 10 months, she kept a journal that she has published in several online excerpts. In her journal, she condemned the detention conditions, the drugs that circulate in prison, the punitive rather than merciful nature of the incarceration. She also noted the heavy anguish that stifled her, the claustrophobia, and the cramped quarters with the other detainees. But, in one instance, she also expressed gratitude for the grace of a sudden joy: “All the support and love given by the pacifist community overwhelmed me with joy and gratitude.” The joy did not stop with her, but spread out from the ripples of their own pacifist action. Following the Kingsbay Plowshares’ action, DePaul University in Chicago created the Berrigan-McAlister Prize, awarded to a person or community who exemplifies Christian non-violence. The King’s Bay Seven became the first to receive the award in 2021.
So, the informed conscience can take better action. But how to act, where, and with what actions?
In 2007, Martha reconnected with the New York Catholic Worker House where her grandmother lived, and with the Catholic faith of her childhood. She decided to continue her grandmother’s work. At Maryhouse, she looks after guests, washes the floor, cooks soup, and does the dishes. It is daily charity, pacifism for every day: giving shelter and food to those who need it, allowing them to live in peace. Nonviolence is not solely about seeking international peace but also enabling local, social peace.
So Martha continues to educate herself about the politics of her country, whose vicious machinations she tries to understand. She makes herself ill listening to the speeches of the Heritage Foundation. She paid a hundred dollars to attend the National Catholic Prayer Breakfast this year, “where all sorts of false words are spread about Christ,” she murmured. J.D. Vance was a keynote speaker at the breakfast this year. He talked about his conversion to Catholicism. “He comes across like a lamb,” Martha said, “acting the naïf, and saying that he did not know much about his religion, that he had everything to learn. He is so self-assured that he pretends he is timid.”
Martha was boiling inside. She wanted to get up and scream, to make a noise to denounce Vance’s hypocrisy. But that day, the Holy Spirit was at work in her. It seemed to her that Vance, who had recently converted to Catholicism, still had the potential for metanoia, that he could change his outlook, and her shouts of opposition could prevent this openness to change. She wanted to believe in this possibility of transformation, so she held her peace. A few hours after this event, before J.D. Vance had time to finish digesting his breakfast, he insulted President Volodymyr Zelenskyy of Ukraine at the White House. Their meeting was widely broadcast, and Vance’s rude comments were condemned.
It is essential to find points of agreement, Martha stressed, agreeing with Pope John XXIII, who said: “Christians amongst themselves, but also Christians with the rest of their contemporaries, must find common cause which obliges them to progress together.”
“Gaza, the famine in Gaza, must be one of these points of agreement,” Martha declared. She cited the work of her friend, the peace activist Kathy Kelly, who has been arrested more than sixty times for the cause of peace, who has visited Yemen, Iraq, Afghanistan, Gaza, everywhere where American bombs have crushed innocents. The work of peace, as diplomats know, must always pass through a shared recognition of the facts; the mistakes and evils must be named. We must begin pacifism at this lowest level of the poor and the suffering: the people who need the powerful to grant peace, who demand it, who beg for it.
As the day faded, Martha needed to return to her room and pack. After a visit to the Basilica of St. Denis, she would go on to England, to the Benedictine Abbey of St. Cecilia’s on the Isle of Wight, where a Benedictine sister was expecting her. Martha is an Oblate of St Benedict. In November, along with several members of the Catholic Worker movement, Martha will go to Rome to follow the progress of the beatification process of Dorothy Day. Dozens of boxes from Dorothy Day’s archives were sent to the Dicastery for the Causes of Saints in Rome three years ago, after an intensive process of compiling them in New York City. Martha hopes that the process will move forward and will pray for the next step in the canonization process in a special way on November 29, Dorothy Day’s feast day. Before she left, Martha lifted her arms over us in a blessing: Pax Tecum.
For us, brought up in the numbing warmth of suburban parishes, a strange feeling took hold of us after leaving Martha. A surprising wave swept over us from toe to head, followed by a certainty that we had met a real disciple of Christ, a Catholic of another brand from that which appears normally on the stained-glass windows: a Catholic in flesh and blood, with the quiet force of grace.