Resurrecting a cemetery, demonstrating for peace:
members of Jonah House work to restore a historic West Baltimore graveyard and bring about the collapse of the U.S. empire.

Baltimore Sun, Monday June 14, 2004
Antero Pietila

continued:
The cemetery's "only paying customer," according to McAlister, is Leonce Rabillon, a French-born sculptor of the rich and famous. He died in 1886. But for all these years, a payment has been made with clockwork regularity for the perpetual care of his grave.

St. Peter's Cemetery surely holds a top rank among Baltimore's best-kept secrets. At 22 acres, it is huge. But it is almost impossible to find off Moreland Avenue, west of Bentalou Street, where a tire-shredding plant hides it from the outside world with mountains of rubber and rows of trailers. Other neighbors -- a National Guard armory and several low-income housing complexes -- insulate it further.
In the 1960s, Berrigan, a World War II veteran, emerged as a nationwide figure in the Vietnam-era anti-war movement. He led the Catonsville Nine, who doused homemade napalm on a small bonfire of draft records in the Catonsville draft board's parking lot. After the Vietnam War ended and many activists sought new causes, Berrigan, with McAlister on his side, continued their protests, serving long sentences in prison for their actions.

Three Jonah House members are serving time in federal prisons. Carol Gilbert and Ardeth Platte, both Dominican nuns, were convicted of vandalizing a nuclear missile silo in Colorado. Gary Ashbeck was sent to prison for trespassing at the U.S. Army's School of the Americas at Fort Benning, Ga.

Jonah House is part of a nationwide movement of anti-war groups.

Sarah Rose Clune, 19, its most recent recruit, described herself as one of the "young people who are curious, thoughtful, wondering what to do with their lives." Raised by parents who belonged to the Catholic Worker movement, an old social-activism group, she joined Jonah House because she felt "it has values of my own."

She has studied organic gardening in Europe and can demonstrate her skills in the Jonah House garden, where peanuts, sweet potatoes and kiwis grow. In return, she learns from such movement veterans as McAlister and Crane that the struggle is long.

"I go back to Kennedy and LBJ and Nixon and Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan, the previous Bush and this Bush; it's a long history," McAlister said. "But we have to fight this insatiable hole in the ground that is the Pentagon."