http://www.citypaper.com/bob/story.asp?id=10582

Baltimore City Paper Award:

Best Do-Gooders

Jonah House, the Baltimore Catholic Worker
1301 Moreland Ave., (410) 233-6238

Since 1973, the people of Jonah House in Baltimore have fed, clothed, and ministered to the poor, with a Tuesday food bank and Sunday liturgy added to daily prayers each morning. They have begun to restore the historic St. Peter's Cemetery on the west side, and they have built a house and a community there, in a mostly industrial zone off North Bentalou Street, where people from around the world meet.

But the people of Jonah House, part of the Catholic Worker movement founded by Dorothy Day more than 72 years ago, have done much more than that. They've served years in prison for nonviolent acts of civil disobedience. Almost every arrest, every sentence, has come for actions seeking to abolish nuclear weapons. Jonah House co-founder Father Philip Berrigan garnered a lot of attention during his long career of protest and imprisonment. Since his death in 2002, Elizabeth McAlister, Susan Crane, and the other members of Jonah House have continued the work faithfully, joining protests and participating in Plowshares actions with hammers (to pound swords into plowshares). On Dec. 28, 2004, two people from Jonah House hung a banner reading bring the troops home now from the Pentagon, surprising security forces. In May, Carol Gilbert, a Dominican nun, returned to Jonah House after spending nearly three years in federal prison for conducting a Plowshares action in Colorado. Remembering the words of Dorothy Day, who said, “We must forever renounce war as an instrument of policy,” Gilbert vowed to commit her crimes again, first chance she gets.