Resisting the 'New Nuclear Arms Race'
5 CWers arrested at nuclear sub plant; Ellsberg on a wider concept of holiness; Ohio CW farm heals the land; and Dorothy Day says: ‘just begin.’
On Not Blowing Up the World
With so much going on in the world, it's easy to lose track of the fact that we are in the midst of what many experts call a “new nuclear arms race.” It's not just Russia’s new hypersonic, nuclear-capable ballistic missile or China’s race to expand its nuclear arsenal; here in the United States, the government plans to spend more than $1.5 trillion upgrading its nuclear capabilities—and that’s on top of the $5 trillion that has already been spent on the U.S. nuclear arsenal.
That’s a lot of money for toys you can't use without wiping life off the face of the Earth.
Catholic Workers have been sounding the alarm on the idolatry of nuclear weapons from the beginning. And as this past week's action in New London shows, they’re still out there, getting arrested in the hope of calling attention to the grave danger the world faces.
Some housekeeping
As we continue to figure out how Roundtable can best connect you with the Catholic Worker Movement, we’re looking at some editorial tweaks and changes. You’ll notice one change right away: the community appeals are now folded into the Briefly section rather than standing on their own. We hope this streamlines the newsletter while allowing us to better highlight the communities asking for help.
A correction and clarification
In last week's issue, the story about Peter Maurin Farm in Australia incorrectly said that the farm features a “fleshless” toilet. Jim Dowling wrote to set us straight: the toilet is definitely flushless, not fleshless, especially given that he occasionally tosses a dead rat down there. Roundtable regrets the error.
Also in last week's issue, we quoted an essay about Dorothy Day's friendship with Thomas Merton in which the author characterized the two as having lived lifestyles of “unbridled sexuality.” Given its connotation of promiscuity, that phrase probably Isn't the best to describe Dorothy's lifestyle prior to her conversion.
You said…
In last week's reader poll, we asked you how far you would go to live sustainably. Here's what you said:
FEATURED
5 Arrested in Protest at Nuclear Submarine Facility
Five Catholic Workers were arrested early Monday morning for blocking the entrance of the General Dynamics Electric Boat engineering facility, the design headquarters for the new Columbia-class nuclear-armed submarines. As part of a larger demonstration organized by five different Catholic Worker communities, the five arrested activists prayed as they stood behind 27 life-size images of Robert Oppenheimer mounted on wooden frames. A banner hanging on the images said: “DON’T BE A ‘DESTROYER OF WORLDS’ STOP THE COLUMBIA SUB.”
“Especially now that the movie Oppenheimer is up for 13 Academy Awards this weekend,” Scott Schaeffer-Duffy said, “we want to remind the scientists and engineers of Electric Boat not to repeat the nuclear sins that Oppenheimer regretted for the rest of his life.”
“Destroyer of worlds” references the words of Robert Oppenheimer, director of the project that developed the first atomic bomb: “Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.” The line, taken from the Bhagavad Gita, is featured prominently in the Christopher Nolan film Oppenheimer.
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About 20 activists attended the protest, distributing a leaflet that read in part: “We ask the scientists and engineers at Electric Boat who, according to the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty and (the) Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons, are designing illegal weapons, to consider if they can live with the effects of what they are making….”
The engineers are designing the Columbia-class nuclear submarines, 12 of which are supposed to replace 14 Ohio-class nuclear submarines by 2031. The $114.1 billion project is part of a larger $1.5 trillion, 30-year plan to upgrade the U.S. nuclear weapons arsenal.
The Columbia-class nuclear submarines will each carry 16 Trident II nuclear missiles; each of those missiles will be capable of carrying either eight larger nuclear warheads or 14 smaller nuclear warheads, each of which has an explosive yield of 450 kilotons or 100 kilotons. By comparison, the bomb dropped on Hiroshima, Japan, yielded 15 kilotons of explosive power. Altogether, the completed fleet will carry the equivalent destructive power of more than 46,000 Hiroshima-sized nuclear explosions—enough to annihilate life on Earth.
Tho demonstrators hoped to bring attention to “a new nuclear arms race that is now heating up between the nuclear superpowers in violation of international arms control treaties,” according to Schaeffer-Duffy (Sts. Francis and Therese Catholic Worker, Worcester, Massachusetts). The protesters also drew attention to the fact that the U.S. has deployed a nuclear submarine to the Mediterranean Sea “to enforce Israel’s genocide in Gaza.”
“We come here in the spirit of the 1943 anti-war and anti-Nazi German activist movement called the White Rose to say ‘no’ to the evil conducted by our government,” said Jackie Allen (Hartford Catholic Worker, Hartford, Connecticut).
The action was widely covered by local media.
The five arrested were Jackie Allen, Scott Schaeffer-Duffy, Ellen Grady of Ithaca Catholic Worker (Ithaca, New York), Frank Kartheiser of Mustard Seed Catholic Worker (Worcester, Massachusetts), and Mark Scibilia-Carver of Ithaca Catholic Worker (Ithaca, New York). All five were released and will be arraigned on charges of first-degree trespass and disorderly conduct.
CWs Have a Long History of Anti-Nuke Activism
Monday’s action at the General Dynamics Electric Boat engineering facility was just the latest of several efforts addressing nuclear proliferation being sponsored by Catholic Workers. Later this month, for instance, Catholic Workers will be among those making the annual Sacred Peace Walk, an interfaith journey from Las Vegas to the Nevada National Security Site to protest nuclear proliferation. And in April, Catholic Workers plan to gather in Kansas City, Missouri, to protest at the Kansas City National Security Campus (KCNSC), whose 7,000 employees produce more than 80% of U.S. nuclear weapons’ non-nuclear components.
But the Catholic Worker Movement has consistently condemned nuclear weapons since the first ones were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945. Here are some of the highlights from that history:
September 1945: Dorothy Day writes an outraged editorial condemning the use of atomic weapons against Japan: “This new great force will be used for good, the scientists assured us. And then they wiped out a city of 318,000. This was good. The President was jubilant,“ she wrote, sarcastically. (We Go on Record: the CW Response to Hiroshima)
March 1950: Responding to recent news that the United States would develop a hydrogen bomb many times more powerful than conventional atomic bombs, Dorothy Day pens a column in The Catholic Worker titled The Satan Bomb.
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June 15, 1955: Dorothy Day and six other Catholic Workers stage the first protest of Operation Alert, defying orders to take shelter during air raid drills in New York City. “We make this demonstration, not only to voice our opposition to war, not only to refuse to participate in psychological warfare, which this air raid drill is, but also as an act of public penance for having been the first people in the world to drop the atom bomb, to make the hydrogen bomb,” Day said in a prepared statement (Where Are the Poor? They Are In Prisons, Too). The protests grew in size every year, spreading across the country, until Operation Alert was canceled in 1962.
September 1965: Dorothy Day goes to Rome to testify during the last session of the Second Vatican Council, distributing copies of a special peace edition of The Catholic Worker and joining an international group of twenty women in fasting for ten days. The women appealed for the Council to address issues of war and nuclear proliferation. Two months later, the Council released The Church in the Modern World, in which it decried the nuclear arms race, condemned the indiscriminate destruction of whole cities, and upheld the rights of conscientious objectors. (On Pilgrimage - October, 1965)
September 9, 1980: A group of eight peace activists, including Daniel and Philip Berrigan and others associated with the Catholic Worker, entered the General Electric Nuclear Missile Facility in King of Prussia, Pennsylvania, where they hammered on the nose cones of two Mark 12A nuclear warheads and poured their own blood on documents and files. The group was inspired by Isaiah 2:4: “They shall beat their swords into plowshares and their spears into pruning hooks; one nation shall not raise the sword against another, nor shall they train for war again.” The action became a template for others like it, and marked the beginning of the Plowshares Movement.
July 2012: Sacred Heart Sr. Megan Rice and two Catholic Workers, Greg Boertje-Obed and Michael Walli, break into the Y-12 nuclear processing facility at Oak Ridge, Tennessee, in an action known as Transform Now Plowshares. Cutting through security fences and evading guards and security cameras, the three made their way to the heart of the complex, where they hung banners, poured blood, spray-painted slogans, and prayed as they waited for security to show up. The breach prompted the closing of the facility for two weeks and led to congressional hearings.
April 4, 2018: Seven peace activists associated with the Catholic Worker, later known as the Kings Bay Plowshares 7, entered the Kings Bay Naval Submarine Base in St. Marys, Georgia, which is home to several Ohio-class nuclear submarines. There, they symbolically disarmed the nuclear weapons by pouring their own blood, hammering on a missile monument, and hanging banners with messages against nuclear weapons.
Robert Ellsberg: Enlarging Our Understanding of Holiness
Robert Ellsberg, the son of Pentagon Papers whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg and editor-in-chief at Orbis Books, was recently profiled by the Fairfield County Catholic, the newspaper of the Diocese of Bridgeport (Connecticut).
Ellsberg dropped out of Harvard in 1975 to spend a few months with the Catholic Worker Movement in New York City. A few months turned into five years, including two years serving as the managing editor of The Catholic Worker newspaper.
Ellsberg, a self-described “saint watcher,” is the author of seven books about the lives of the saints, most notably All Saints. He also writes the daily “Blessed Among Us” feature for Give Us This Day, the daily missal published by Liturgical Press. In that role, he writes about people formally canonized in the Catholic Church as well as other holy people who model the spirit of Jesus.
“My own spiritual journey goes back to my work with Dorothy Day, which culminated in my becoming a Catholic,” he told the Fairfield County Catholic. He said it may be part of his mission “to present the saints as they really were…and perhaps also to enlarge our understanding of what holiness means.”
He said he learned from Dorothy Day that the Communion of Saints is much larger than the list maintained by the Church.
“Dorothy Day strongly believed that Jesus meant what he said about ‘When I was hungry and you gave me something to eat,’” Ellsberg told the paper. “When you look at the Beatitudes, I think they describe a lot about people who are not candidates for official canonization but are among the blessed in the eyes of God.”
Read the entire profile here: Robert Ellsberg: A lifetime of studying the saints. You can also read his 2015 essay about Dorothy Day here: The Case for St. Dorothy Day.
BRIEFLY
The Catholic Worker Farm (Hartfordshire, England) aims to raise £10,000 in order to continue its mission serving homeless women and children asylum seekers. “This last year has been incredibly hard for us, as living costs are increasing, and we struggled to raise enough money to pay for our heating oil, rent, council tax, and other utilities,” the community says in its appeal. The farm supports up to 18 women and their children, many of them undocumented immigrants, providing them with food, security, English lessons, and counseling. You can watch a short documentary about the community and make a donation at crowdfunder.co.uk.
The St. Louis Catholic Worker hopes to close on a house on Friday, March 29 (Good Friday). “We still have a few bureaucratic hoops to jump through so we cannot say it's 100% yet, but we don't anticipate any more snags,” the community said in an email to supporters. If everything goes according to plan, the group hopes to have a housewarming party on Easter Sunday or sometime before Pentecost.
Members of the Dorothy Day Catholic Worker in Washington, D.C., joined protests over the weekend calling for a ceasefire in Gaza. CWer Kathy Boylan was quoted by Reuters in multiple media outlets: “We’re dropping some food, and we’re dropping the bombs and the tanks and the bullets and everything else at the same time. That’s what (Biden)’s got to do: stop sending the money and the weapons.” Read more on Democracy Now.
miki shiverick (sic) is looking for community members to join her at the 10-acre MVM Farm in Bergholz, Ohio. Although she’s been doing long-term hospitality there for several years, she hopes to focus on providing rest and respite for weary Catholic Workers going forward. Formerly a co-founder of the now-defunct Gilbert Catholic Worker House in Glenwood City, Wisconsin, shiverick for the past three years has been clearing the land at the farm, which was once the site of a salvage yard. The farm sits at the edge of an abandoned 500-acre sand and coal mining operation. With several dogs as companions, she has been focusing on healing the land and starting a market garden to help provide food security in the area. If you want to join her as a community member or are interested in supporting the farm in another way, you can contact her through the farm’s new listing at CatholicWorker.org.
The Little Platte Catholic Worker community has raised more than $160,000 since January, community members said in an update to supporters. The funds have come from nearly 50 individuals, families, and organizations through gifts and interest-free loans. The community is still actively seeking donations to raise the $400,000 needed to purchase farmland. You can support the community at their website.
Fifty years of service to the Bloomington-Normal area is commemorated in an article profiling Tina Sipula, co-founder of Clare House Catholic Worker. When the house closed in 2015, Sipula continued her work by transitioning to the Loaves and Fishes Soup Kitchen. Read the profile here: Tina Sipula: Pioneering a Legacy of Compassion
Ellen Lewis, who volunteered at New York Catholic Worker after college and volunteered alongside Thomas Merton at Friendship House in Harlem, died on January 19 at the age of 97. Lewis, who served meals at Baltimore’s Viva House well into her 90s, also spent decades working on behalf of incarcerated women. Read the obituary here.
CALENDAR
March 13 - March 24 | Scotland
Martha Hennessy Events in Scotland
March 18 | Various locations
Christians Against Genocide Day of Action
March 21 | Virtual Event sponsored by the Maurin Academy
Personalism Roundtable Discussion
March 23 - March 29 | Nevada
Sacred Peace Walk (Nevada Desert Experience)
April 12 - April 15 | Kansas City, Missouri
Midwest Catholic Worker Faith & Resistance Retreat
May 8 - May 12 | Kent, Great Britain
European Catholic Worker Gathering 2024
A FEW GOOD WORDS
Just Begin
From The House on Mott Street
by Dorothy Day, in Commonweal, May 6, 1938
Because of the crowds of callers and visitors for one or two weeks’ stay, it is harder to get all the work done sometimes than if we had just two or three running the place. More people means more work, as every woman knows. The fewer there are, the less there is to do. The fewer there are running one particular work, the more gets done very often. Witness a clumsy committee of thirty as compared to a committee of three.
Other groups contemplating starting a House of Hospitality will argue, “You have the paper to help support the work.” Yet experience has shown that the work gets support wherever it is started, and the support continues. Some fear that they will withdraw local support from the New York group and the paper. And yet, in spite of flourishing houses in the big cities of Boston, Pittsburgh, Detroit, Chicago, Milwaukee, and St. Louis, they keep going and so do we.
It is true that it is never easy. God seems to wish us to remain poor and in debt and never knowing where we are going to get the money to pay our grocery bills or provide the next meal. While writing this, we have nothing in the bank and are sending out an appeal for help this month.
But we are convinced that this is how the work should go. We are literally sharing the poverty of those we help. They know we have nothing, so they do not expect much and they even try to help. Some of our best workers have been recruited from the unemployed line. They are not going to a magnificent building to get meager aid. They are not going to contemplate with bitterness the expensive buildings to be kept up, and perhaps paid for on the installment plan, and compare it with their state. They are not going to conjecture as to the property and holdings of the Church and criticize how their benefactors live while they suffer destitution.
The trouble is, in America, Catholics are all trying to keep up with the other fellow, to show, as Peter Maurin puts it, “I am just as good as you are,” when what they should say is, “I am just as bad as you are.”
There are no hospices because people want to put up buildings which resemble the million-dollar Y.M.C.A.’s. If they can’t do it right, they won’t do it at all. There is the Italian proverb, “The best is the enemy of the good.” Don Bosco had a good companion who did always not want to do things because they could not be done right. But he went right ahead and took care of his boys in one abandoned building after another, being evicted, threatened with an insane asylum and generally looked upon as a fool. Rose Hawthorne who founded the cancer hospital at Hawthorne, New York, started in a small apartment in an east side tenement, not waiting for large funds to help her in the work.
Once the work of starting houses of hospitality is begun, support comes. The Little Flower has shown us her tremendous lesson of “the little way.” We need that lesson especially in America where we want to do things in a big way or not at all.
Read the entire essay here: The House on Mott Street | Commonweal Magazine
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Thanks to Renee Roden (see her Substack, Sweet Unrest), Zak Sather, and Rosalie Riegle for their help with this week’s newsletter. Thanks also to the National Catholic Worker E-mail List team, whose work provides the leads for many of our items.
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