Nonviolence

Dan Ellsberg died on June 16, 2023 after a life of courage and conscience. He exposed the lies of U.S. military leaders behind the Vietnam War.

A political crisis poisons a nation’s spiritual life. In 2018, the Honduran dictator Juan Orlando Hernandez used fear, despair for repression. Freedom came by acting on faith and hope.

In 2005, after years of reading about the U.S. military’s bombing  campaigns and torture around the world, I could take it no longer. El Salvador. Guatemala. Then Iraq. So I quit my job at the San Jose Mercury News and made one tiny effort to reclaim a shred of integrity as a U.S. citizen. This is my story.

Today, Palm Sunday, we must pray for the United States which has trained  foreign soldiers at the School of Americas to torture and repress political opponents and innocent civilians in Central and Latin America.

Two local parishioners – one seeking to “live in the truth” and another citing the example of Father Bill O’Donnell – have been sentenced to three months in federal prison for trespassing at the former School of the Americas in Georgia last fall.

The question I ask myself is not about why I went to Georgia but why it took me so long. Once there, I prayed and prayed for God’s guidance and in the end, was holding Domingo’s cross and the poster of the Jesuits when I crawled underneath the fence of the fort.

Two Bay Area Catholics were among 40 protesters arrested Nov. 20 during a prayer vigil and demonstration at the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation, formerly the School of the Americas, in Fort Benning, Georgia.