Catholic anti-war activists join huge NY protest

Editor's Note

Coverage of the Republican National Convention. NCR Washington Correspondent Joe Feuerherd and contributor Patricia Lefevere are covering the Republican National Convention all week. Watch NCRonline.org and read the Sept. 10 issue of National Catholic Reporter for additional stories.

Jesuit Fr. Edward Coughlin blessed a crowd of worshippers attending Mass at St. Francis Xavier Church on Aug. 29, praying for their peace, safety and welfare and giving thanks to God for their "generosity of heart." The crowd, which included more than half of the early Mass attendees, dispersed not into a war zone, but into one of this city's largest anti-war marches.

Xavier's associate pastor, Jesuit Matt Roche, said he was not surprised that almost two-thirds of the congregation left Mass to participate in the demonstration. "This is an unusually aware parish. It's a very political community and a politically aware parish with many interested in politics and committed to actions for peace and justice.

More than 700 persons come to the parish soup kitchen, which is held once a week.

Many of the parishioners include religious sisters who work or reside in the area.

The parishioners joined a throng of activists estimated at between 150,000 and 400,000, comprising some 800 groups affiliated with United for Peace and Justice - organizer of the demonstration. They moved from Washington Square and the streets of Chelsea up Seventh Avenue to Madison Square Garden, where this week the Republican National Convention will nominate George Bush to serve a second term as president.

If these demonstrators had anything to say about it, the script would be different. Their protest was not a rally for "Kerry for President" so much as a giant public critique of the Bush administration's policies on war, the economy, healthcare, social security, nuclear weapons, trade policy, education, the environment, immigration, labor and human rights.

Protestors sang, chanted, drummed, shouted and waved banners, placards and puppets to demonstrate their anger at the current state of the union. They used pathos and humor for emphasis. Several carried flag-draped coffins representing the nearly 1,000 men and women killed in the Iraq war.

A group of "Billionaires for Bush" donned tuxedos, evening gowns and cocktail glasses all the while ordering "more tax cuts" as their beverage of choice.

"I was simply blown away by how many different people and how many different messages were here," said Freda Berrigan, who was in the lead off section of the march, representing the national committee of the War Resisters League. The League, which prides itself as the oldest continuous protest group in America, drew many Catholic activists, including Jesuit Fr. Simon Harak, who has served as the anti-military coordinator of the group for a year.

Marching alongside the League were members of the Catholic Worker, of the Kairos Community-Plowshares New York and of the Atlantic Life Community, a network of resistance communities stretching up and down the East Coast. Besides New York and New Jersey protestors, others arrived from Boston, Baltimore, Hartford, Philadelphia, Chicago and more than 1,000 from the San Francisco Bay area.

Kairos member and veteran Plowshare activist Elmer Maas told NCR he was not just marching against the "pre-emptive" war in Iraq, but also against the array of weapons being planned and manufactured by the military to "ensure our global, our almost cosmic dominance of air and space."

Members of the Kairos and Plowshare contingent remembered in "our hearts, our minds and our statements" Oblate Fr. Karl Cabot, and the three Dominican nuns -- Carol Gilbert, Ardeth Platte and Jackie Hudson -- who are all serving time in Colorado prisons. The sisters hammered on missiles and spilled their blood in late 2002 "to bring to consciousness and to life the fact that the U.S. has more than 10,000 nuclear weapons while it was preparing to go to war against Saddam Hussein who had none," Maas said. "The sisters exposed the lies behind Bush's war even before it started," he said.

Other sisters at the march pointed to the absence of the Catholic hierarchy in the fight to prevent both the war in Afghanistan and Iraq. "The bishops have not called the faith community to ponder the injustice of these kinds of war," said Dominican Sr. Arlene Flaherty, director of the 30-year-old Intercommunity Center for Justice and Peace here.

Flaherty noted that Cardinal Edward Egan would give the invocation at the Convention. While that may go with being the leading prelate in the host city, "unfortunately, this will be the sound bite Catholics hear all across the nation."

The nun visited her "Dominican family" in Iraq in 2000 and took their cause to the U.N. Human Rights Commission in Geneva. She also demonstrated on behalf of Iraqi citizens -- along with some 100 other New York-area religious leaders -- outside the United States Mission to the United Nations.

Flaherty believes the "incredible increase in poverty and its effects on our children" is directly related to the escalating costs of militarism and the Bush administration's low regard for the welfare of the poor and of families. It's "crucial," that the bishops "who talk about the renewal of communities" start to "connect the dots" between the wages of war and the poverty and lack of healthcare of millions of Americans, she said.

For Dominican Sr. Kathleen Phelan, who serves on the elected leadership of her congregation's Eastern Province, the march was another opportunity to exercise her First Amendment rights. Phelan, who proudly displayed her "I have family in Iraq," button said she was amazed to see so many armed soldiers in the train stations and on the sidewalks of New York since the Republicans came to town.

Several Catholic marchers took issue with the Republicans' choice of a city that had been so devastated on 9/11. "It is a crass exploitation of the recent trauma to come here now," said Mary Ragan, a director at the Psychotherapy and Spirituality Institute, in Lower Manhattan, near Ground Zero. "Any use of footage of 9/11 further exploits the grief of families whose grief needs to be held in private."

Ragan pointed to the horrific physical and psyche blow hurled at the city three years ago, but also to the outpouring of kindness that followed the evil -- from New Yorkers and from people around the world. She compared Sunday's march to one of the many rituals that followed 9/11 in the city. "A march like this can be used for healing."

Marcher Vince Comiskey, who brought his 76-year-old "not very good knees" to the march, noted that a Republican counter-demonstrator at Madison Square Garden held out a sign reading: "I am pro-life." Comiskey wanted to tell her that he too is pro-life, but "I am not pro-war, or pro-death penalty," said the veteran campaigner who, along with his wife, Joan, represented Pax Christi International at the United Nations for many years. He regretted that the size of the rally made dialogue with Republican onlookers difficult.