LENTEN REFLECTION: Blessed are those who work for peace

On Ash Wednesday, 1997, Phillip Berrigan and five others, calling themselves the 'Prince of Peace Ploughshares’, entered the Bath Iron Works (BIW) in Maine, USA, and boarded the USS The Sullivans, an Aegis destroyer. They hammered on the ship's steel hatches and poured their blood on them. All were arrested, and subsequently sentenced to prison terms ranging from 6 months to 2 years. The following is a statement prepared by Phil Berrigan for his court appearance. We print it here because the statement confronts many of the principle issues facing Christians today.

I am a Depression brat, living my early years following the Great Crash in 1929. Our family of eight, six boys, was desperately poor. Our parents came from poor roots themselves, and never forgot the Poor, always sharing their few resources with the unemployed on the road, and with the Poor of our neighbourhood. Consistent with that experience, I have always tried to share any bounty with the Poor. At Jonah House in Baltimore, the community where I live, twice weekly for 23 years we shared a ton or more of fruits, vegetables, fish and packaged goods with poor neighbours. With such a history, how else could I look upon the USS The Sullivans, a billion dollar monstrosity, as other than a theft from God and God's creation, as robbery from the Poor (one out of five American children go to bed hungry every night), and as a blasphemous rejection of God's commandment 'Thou shalt not kill!'?

Another factor contributing to my intent is the Catholic Church, which has given me the Word of God, the Sacraments, and the Cross of Jesus Christ. My ancestors were Catholic from Ireland and Germany, my roots are Catholic and I am nourished by a 2000 year old tradition — and ennobled by great women and men — prophets, scholars, non-violent revolutionaries, martyrs.

I carried my faith with me when I boarded The Sullivans. My faith brought me there — my faith helped me control my fear, my faith sustained me through the consequences of disarmament.

Another spiritual contribution to my intent on Ash Wednesday at the BIW is community. For 24 years I have lived in a non-violent resistance community, holding all things in common like the early Christian communities — working for our living and our work of justice/peace with our hands. Such communities take their inspiration and sustenance from God's Word, from the teaching and works of Jesus and his apostolic community. A non-violent resistance community has several benefits: first, it is a microcosm of the human family; second, it allows a style of life radically simple; third, it is the inspiration and support for resistance. Community allows both faith and sanity in a world increasingly deranged.

A final factor nourishing my intent at the BIW was experience. My experience as one trying to be a Christian tells me that 'Thou shalt not kill!' and 'Love your enemies!' are interpersonal laws certainly, but global and cosmic ones as well. My experience as a World War II soldier saw North Europe flattened and 70 million people dead. I learned later that Japan was suing for peace in 1945 and that President Truman had no need to use the BOMB at Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Instead, he used it to revenge Pearl Harbour, and to intimidate the Russians. My experience in New Orleans in 1962, during the Cuban Missile Crisis, indicated that President Kennedy and Mr Kruschev risked millions of Americans and Russians in an insane game of nuclear chicken. Kruschev blinked, else you and I would not be here today. Experience proved to me that you and I have been subjected to scores of nuclear war threats (25 at least from the American side) and broken arrows, i.e., accidents with major nuclear weapons systems — many of which would have been misinterpreted to end in nuclear exchange. Experience has taught me that we have the bomb and military because of imperial ambition, because of production and profits abroad and because we have learned to make the deadly business of warmaking profitable. Half of one percent of our people control 37% of the nation's wealth, fortunes invariably made from war-making.

Experience with ecological studies prove to me that the U.S. military is the world’s greatest institutional polluter, having sown the planet with radioactive toxins from testing and deployment. Experience has proven to me that we can't have guns and butter— that we have sacrificed our poor and our cities to the nuclear and interventionary killing machine. Forty million Americans languish below the poverty line, while cities are ridden with slums and crime — their infrastructures decaying and crumbling. Experience has taught me that our country has spent more on nuclearism and war since 1946 than the rest of the world combined, $14 trillion conservatively, money robbed from the poor, starving and homeless. Experience convinces me that war and violence is corrupting the spirit of the American people, reducing our politics to bribery and corruption, our economics to exploitation, our religion and education to triviality, our culture to
insignificance and foolishness, our ecology to poison and disease.

Finally, experience with both the Gospel of Jesus Christ and the United Nations Charter, the Geneva Conventions, the Nuremberg Principles and the World Court Decision convinces me that our action aboard the USS The Sullivans was both a right and a duty to take every non-violent measure to stop the deployment of that hellship. Our efforts were modest indeed, but nonetheless, hope remains that the American people will awaken to the lawlessness and danger and terror of their government's war-making. (Already -- March 27th-30th, 1997 -- 84% of Americans favour elimination of their country's nuclear arsenal. And 87% want the United States to negotiate an agreement to eliminate nuclear weapons.)

My state of mind in boarding the USS The Sullivans included the poverty of my upbringing and my revulsion of injustice toward the Poor. It included my Catholic Christian training -- my love of Scripture and Sacrament and the Church's teaching about compassion and justice. It included also the nourishment and stamina imparted by over two decades in a non-violent resistance community. Finally, I brought my experience with me as I boarded that Aegis destroyer -- as a Christian battling to embody the non-violent imperatives of Jesus -- as a World War II soldier, who later woke to the terrible waste and death of that conflict -- as a teacher in New Orleans in October 1962, when the lives of millions of Americans and Russians hung in the balance -- as a veteran of streets, courts, and jails over three decades.

My intent in boarding the USS The Sullivans was not vandalism, not sabotage, not destruction of government property, but rather, the conversion of war material that in its perverted state, had no moral, legal or political right to exist. The prophecies of Isaiah and Micah require that we convert swords into ploughshares and spears into pruning hooks. And Christ's imperative 'to love our enemies' implies that we disarm our weapons -- become in fact, weaponless.

In the scores of times I've been arrested for peacemaking, I've always stood by for arrest. Always, I've refrained from hurting anyone -- police or bystanders -- hurting them physically, verbally, psychologically. Always I've taken responsibility for my actions, serving both long and short prison terms, unjust though they be. Always, I've appeared for court when an indictment requires that.

The Beatitudes of Matthew include: 'Blessed are the peacemakers, they will be called children of God!' My friends are peacemakers, and I try to be. Let God, this jury and the American people render a verdict.