40 years dedicated to 'a way of life without killing'   By PATRICK O'NEILL in the National Catholic Reporter January 20, 2006

Silk Hope, N.C.

At age 65, Elizabeth McAlister has the look of the grandmother she is; her wavy, short hair is a striking white. Her hands show the calluses of a person familiar with years of manual labor. Her smile is disarming.

When McAlister speaks, however, it becomes clear she is far from your typical grandmother.

“I have been arrested many times,” McAlister said recently to about 50 people who gathered at the Silk Hope Catholic Worker House to hear McAlister lead a roundtable discussion. “I have done civil resistance against what I consider the worst aspect of a criminal and violent culture, and I believe this culture is criminal and violent to its core.”

A former Catholic nun, McAlister left the convent during the height of the Vietnam War to team up with her late husband and former Josephite priest, Philip Berrigan, to oppose the war. The pair, along with Philip's brother, Jesuit Fr. Daniel Berrigan, introduced the nation to a radical brand of Catholicism that helped lead many Catholics out of church pews and into the streets to resist a war that split the nation.

Philip died of cancer on Dec. 6, 2002. At the time of his death, he had spent more than 11 years of his life in jail and prison for what McAlister calls “civil resistance,” a term she prefers to civil disobedience. McAlister has spent about four years of her life behind bars.

Together, McAlister and Berrigan founded Jonah House, a resistance community located in inner-city Baltimore. They raised three children: Frida, 31; Jerry, 30; and Kate, 23.

“I have been asked to speak about civil resistance, and I would start out by saying that it really is a hell of a way to spend one's life,” said McAlister, who, despite a bad cough, puffed cigarettes outside during breaks. “I began this work in 1965, 40 years ago. You're haunted by, you're grieving over and you're rejecting the killing of human beings.”

McAlister's resistance has been combined with “the effort to create a way of living without killing, without violence, without enmity. That has really shaped my life.”

Her life includes residing in intentional community, studying scripture, distributing food to the poor and returning unwaveringly to protests where she is arrested, tried, often convicted and sometimes sentenced to jail or prison.

“I was at the Pentagon on Good Friday, and except when I have been in prison, I have been at the Pentagon every Good Friday for the last 30 years,” McAlister said.

McAlister said she returns to the Pentagon because of the recent wars “all over the globe” being led or promoted by the United States. “We are squeezing hope from those tortured people [in Iraq and Afghanistan]. ...

“I have a sense that we are, each of us, responsible for what this country is doing in our name,” McAlister added. “But the Pentagon is preeminently responsible. The blood seeps from that institution, and on Good Friday we try to make it more visible.”

By getting arrested and going to court, McAlister says she is trying to expose “the crimes our government is committing. The courts will not hear it. They legitimize our government's conduct even though they have to know this conduct is illegal under international law, under the laws of our own nation.

“You can make it legal, but you can never make it right. Slavery was legal, as was the genocide against Native peoples in this country,” she said. “It was all legal; the devastation of our earth for profit; it's all legal.

“The research, the development, the construction, deployment and use of weapons of mass destruction; it's all legal, as is the massacre of Iraq.

“So if they blow up the world, and when they cut down the last tree, it's all going to be legal. Think about it. What does that say to our attitude toward the law? The more lawless this government becomes, the more it prosecutes lawbreakers and the longer it sends them away to worse and worse prison situations.”

McAlister reserved her strongest criticism for the law, and the scores of U.S. citizens who she says are complicit by their silence and inaction in the face of U.S. wrongdoing.

She asked, “What does it say that we no longer anticipate or expect truth or morality from our leadership; that we no longer expect even the news, much less truth, from the media; that we no longer expect justice from our courts and prosecutors and judges; that we no longer expect holiness from our churches; that we no longer expect fidelity in marriage and relationships or respect from our children?

“We no longer expect the seasons to come in their courses or life forms to remain part of our landscape, and that's because of the way we have chosen to live. Because of that, the degradation of creation is almost complete. We light up the night and darken the day. We make of the heavens the high ground for military mastery to dominate not only the earth but space.”

McAlister said her brother-in-law, Daniel Berrigan, got it right in a poem he titled: “The Problem Is Civil Obedience.”

“Why have the vast majority of my contemporaries been so smug and complacent and uncaring and uninvolved?” she asked. “You might ask the same question of yourself. How could we have allowed it to get so bad, so wrong, so sick, so soon? How do we look our kids in the eye?”

To bring about change, people must change first, McAlister said.

“We are, all of us, deeply entrenched in denial, and we have become dependent on all those things that we know are radically wrong,” she said. “We live by robbing nature, but our standard of living requires that we keep on robbing. ... We are unable or unwilling to live within our means. Our way of life is predicated on having more than we need, so much so that most of us don't know what we need.”

Losing her husband and partner was tough, McAlister said. Berrigan missed the birth of his first grandchild, Amos Philip, born to son Jerry Mechtenberg-Berrigan and daughter-in-law Molly Mechtenberg-Berrigan. McAlister said the peace movement also misses Berrigan.

“It's his presence; it's his wisdom; it's his single focus that he always returned us to when we went this way and that way,” McAlister said. “And we don't have that now, and we miss it.”

Berrigan died at the same time that two community members, Dominican Srs. Carol Gilbert and Ardeth Platte, were in jail awaiting a federal felony trial for hammering and pouring their blood on a Minuteman III missile silo in eastern Colorado as part of an antinuclear protest.

Platte, Gilbert, and another Dominican nun, Sr. Jackie Hudson, received prison sentences for the protest. Gilbert was released in May and returned to Jonah House. Hudson was also released. Platte remains in prison.

“It's not an easy thing to talk about,” McAlister said in an interview. “Phil's death was combined with the nuns' being in prison. We were bereft and had to pretty much go back to basics, and the basic is the basic of love one another.”

McAlister received confirmation of Berrigan's presence when she spoke to her daughter Kate on the phone in mid-June, and Kate told her about a dream.

“The dream was that she and I and [friend Jesuit Fr. Steve Kelly] were standing next to Phil's open coffin and he was dead and then he started breathing and moving and sat up and she hugged him and cried,” McAlister said. “And I said to her, ‘He's alive.' And she said, ‘Yeah. Yeah.' Isn't that a wonderful dream? I think he is alive, and I think so many of them that have gone before us are alive.”

In the face of a government that is becoming less and less tolerant of dissent, McAlister says things could get worse for those who resist, and they shouldn't expect any help from a “complicit church.”

McAlister said war resisters should keep doing the work of peace, and “keep doing it with great heart and great spirit and great love ... living among the poor, meeting the needs of the poor as much as you can and then addressing their oppression by those who keep them that way.

“Whoever's pope; whoever's bishop; whoever's senator; whoever's president and attorney general. Those are the things we know we can do and those are the things we know we have to do.”

Suffering is part of the reality of the poor, McAlister said, and working to stop suffering requires a willingness to accept suffering as a consequence of that effort.

“People must open themselves up to the suffering of the innocent,” she said. “We need God's grace and God's presence. We also know that we must keep on giving ourselves. We must keep on trying, because God continues hoping amid the night, and God continues weeping thousands of tears through thousands of human eyes.

“And God continues calling us to put ourselves out there with those who suffer, and you know what? When we do it, it's a pretty meaningful way to live.”

Patrick O'Neill is a freelance writer in Raleigh, N.C.

National Catholic Reporter, January 20, 2006