If Nuns Ruled the World

by Jo Piazza

  “If I go in, I will observe the goodness of the women. I could minister to the women and them to me,” she said.

  I asked her if she had any regrets about what she had done to the Y-12 facility and she gave her head a small shake. I tried another question. “Any regrets in general? About your life?”

  She sighed. “I just wish I had done something about nuclear weapons earlier,” she said. “I’ve known about this since I was nine years old, but it took me so long to finally do something.”

  In 2005, the Society of the Holy Child Jesus gave Sister Megan permission to join the Nevada Desert Experience, an activist group based in Las Vegas that organizes spiritual events near atomic test sites in support of nuclear abolition. Still, she wanted to take things further than a small protest here and there.

  She was inspired to break into Y-12 by the work of another nun named Anne Montgomery. In November 2009, two Catholic priests and Montgomery, then eighty-one years old, along with two grandmothers unaffiliated with the Catholic Church, cut their way through two fences of a US naval base near Seattle and smeared the base with fake blood to protest nuclear weapons. That base was a home port for eight of the nation’s fourteen Trident nuclear submarines and reportedly had one of the largest stockpiles of nuclear warheads in the country. The five successfully cut through three chain-link fences and penetrated a “shoot to kill” zone where nuclear weapons were said to be stored in concrete bunkers. They were apprehended and detained by Marines, and later, a jury convicted them on a range of crimes, including conspiracy to trespass. A US Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit upheld their convictions, and Montgomery served more than three years in prison.

  Sister Anne was sent home with an ankle-monitoring bracelet that kept her on a tight leash, but Sister Megan was allowed to drive her to Mass every Saturday night.

  How can I get involved? Sister Megan had asked Sister Anne during one of their drives.

  “Call Greg Boertje-Obed,” Sister Anne told her.

  Mr. Boertje-Obed was a Presbyterian Iowa farm boy who had joined the ROTC so that he could afford Tulane University before going into active duty at Fort Polk in 1981 in the midst of the Cold War. He left the Army as a conscientious objector and returned to New Orleans, where he found a home in nuclear disarmament activism. While living in Jonah House, a Catholic Worker residence in Baltimore, he met his wife, Michele, and had a daughter. They scheduled their protests against an array of weapons facilities to ensure only one of them would be in jail at any given time so that someone was able to raise her.

  Twenty-six years later, Sister Megan called him. After nearly six months of contemplation she set her sights on the facility in Oak Ridge, and together, they began planning their Y-12 action in late 2011.

  “It was very organic. It was responding to the needs of the times,” Sister Megan said. “I knew that my health was good. The moment was urgent.” All of the information on Y-12’s layout was available online. It was more than enough for them to make a map and plan how they would break into the facility. It was easier than they thought it would be—until they were caught by Kirk Garland.

  We arrived safely in Washington, DC, and then kept in touch through e-mail and phone calls for the next nine months. It was nearly a year from that first hearing I attended in Knoxville that a verdict was finally passed down.

  After just under two and a half hours of deliberation on May 8, 2013, a federal jury of nine men and three women found the protestors guilty of injuring the national defense and damaging government property during their break-in, a conviction with a maximum prison sentence of thirty years.

  The two US attorneys argued that the defendants targeted and intruded upon the facility in Oak Ridge to disrupt its operations and that such a disruption imperiled national security.

  “When you interfere with Y-12, you are interfering with the national defense,” Jeff Theodore, the assistant US attorney for the case, told jurors in his closing arguments. The defense argued their clients never expected to make it as far as they did and that their goal was to promote the cause of disarmament through symbolic action.

  Sister Megan smiled peacefully as the bailiff read the verdict.

  “Guilty on all counts.”

  She flipped her palms open and raised her eyes up to the Lord. Dan Zak from the Washington Post was in the audience and couldn’t take his eyes off of her. He described the moment perfectly to me: “She was just this beacon of acceptance and love even though this heavy judgment had just been levied against her. She was so completely Christlike right then.”

  Her supporters sang softly: “Love, love, love, love. People, we are made for love.” Sister Megan blew them a kiss as she was whisked away.

  Seven months later, Sister Megan sat in prison awaiting sentencing. She spent Christmas that year in the Irwin County Detention Center in Ocilla, Georgia. In February she was handed a thirty-five-month jail term. She was content. Her lawyer, Bill Quigley, promised me that she was in “terrific spirits and really good health.”

  Her only complaint, as always, was that the prison wasn’t warm enough. To keep the cold at bay she wore two jumpsuits and long underwear, and wrapped a blanket around herself. According to Mr. Quigley, she never has a down moment. “For Megan this is a win-win situation. She always thinks it is a blessing to be exactly where she is.”

  2.

  The Nun on the Bus

  We’re faithful to the Gospel. We work every day to live as Jesus did in relationship to the people in the margins of society. That’s all we do.

  —Sister Simone Campbell

  Now, Sister, you and your fellow nuns have clearly gone rogue. You’re radical feminists,” the comedian Stephen Colbert said with a straight face as he reprimanded Sister Simone Campbell on his Comedy Central television show.

  It was a hot June afternoon in the summer of 2012, and Mr. Colbert was shaking his head, even though a hint of a smile danced at the ends of his lips.

  Sister Simone, dressed in a white blazer over a turquoise blouse, a jazzy patterned skirt, and a simple strand of pearls replied with a sly grin: “We’re certainly oriented towards the needs of women, and responding to their needs. If that’s radical, I guess we are.”

  “Yes, yes, that’s radical feminism,” Mr. Colbert retorted.

  Just a few days later, the conservative radio host Rush Limbaugh, with none of the satire, took a more mean-spirited jab at her and her “posse” of radical sisters.

  “You know what the nuns are doing? The nuns have gone feminazi on everyone,” Limbaugh said. To put that comment in perspective, the right-wing host’s comparison of the Catholic sisters to the Third Reich came just months after Limbaugh called Georgetown University Law student Sandra Fluke a “slut” and a “prostitute” when she testified in front of the House of Representatives on the importance of requiring insurance plans to cover contraception for all women.

  If you don’t know who Sister Simone is, then you are probably wondering what she had possibly done to command all of this attention. In the spring of 2012, Sister Simone was the mastermind of a brilliant rebranding of what it meant to be a nun in the twentieth century. She organized NETWORK’s Nuns on the Bus, an epic road trip across America protesting the Republican “Path to Prosperity” budget plan proposed by congressman and vice presidential candidate Paul Ryan, that sought to slash the national deficit by $4.4 trillion by cutting funding for food stamps, social services, and other things desperately needed by the poor.

  That tour turned Sister Simone and a handful of Catholic sisters, most well into their sixties and seventies, into media rock stars.

  In the months that followed, Sister Simone appeared on every major news network in the country and on dozens of radio programs. They loved her at Comedy Central. While she was doing a segment with Daily Show correspondent Samantha Bee, the comedian jokingly asked her if she got a new car every year l
ike the priests did. Sister Simone replied honestly that her order was poor, so she rode her clunky Schwinn everywhere. After the segment, Sister Simone admitted to the producers that one of her sins was bike envy. She had once ridden her brother’s new lightweight Trek mountain bike and had fallen in love with it. A few weeks later she got a handwritten note from Ms. Bee and her producer, Miles, thanking her for being a guest and a good sport. They also let her know they had called her brother, asked for the model number of his bike, and purchased her an exact copy. All she had to do was pick it up.

  “It’s like heaven,” she told me when I admired the bike while we were having coffee in her one-bedroom apartment in DC with a prime view of the Jumbotron for Nationals Park. Sister Simone lives in an attractive residential neighborhood in the Southwest Waterfront area of DC. It is just a 1.6-mile, or about a nine-minute, bike ride to her office on E Street.

  I was in the audience when she spoke, to a rousing standing ovation, at the Democratic National Convention in Charlotte, North Carolina, just a couple of months after her appearance on The Colbert Report. When DNC organizers first asked her to give a speech, she told them she had three requirements: She wanted to tell the crowd that she was pro-life. She wanted to tell the story of her people, the ones she met on the road. And she wanted to say that everyone was welcome inside her big tent. When they agreed too quickly, Sister Simone thought she probably should have asked for more.

  Those in the crowd whispered to one another as she took the podium. Most of the delegates weren’t entirely sure who this plain woman approaching the stage, sandwiched on the schedule between the governors of Colorado and Delaware, was. She started by introducing herself: “I’m Sister Simone Campbell, and I’m one of the nuns on the bus. Yes, we have nuns on the bus and a nun at the podium.” That broke the ice. Onstage she conveyed a politician’s charisma—the Bill Clinton of nuns—coupled with a mother’s warmth.

  She fairly and pointedly put down Congressman Ryan for exploiting his Catholic faith on the campaign trail. Part of the candidate’s stump speech focused on how his Catholicism nurtured his individualistic pull-yourself-up-by-the-bootstraps­ philosophy. “Paul Ryan says this budget is in keeping with the moral values of our shared faith. I disagree,” Sister Simone said, to rousing applause. She touted the truth she had learned along her trip: “Together we understand that an immoral budget­ that hurts already-struggling families does not reflect our nation’s values. We are better than that. I urge you. Join us on the bus.” She ended her speech with the crowd already on its feet. “This is what Nuns on the Bus are all about. We care for the Hundred Percent.”

  Sister Simone later told me that she had been prepared to be ignored up there. “They told me to be ready to just talk over the hum of the arena, but when I got up there, it went silent.”

  “Holy moly,” said the voice in her head when she was onstage. “They’re actually listening to me.”

  Delaware governor Jack Markell came up to her in the green room after her speech.

  “I hear you’re a tough act to follow,” he said.

  “No, no, no,” Sister Simone responded kindly. “I’m sure you’ll do just fine.”

  Sister Simone carries herself like she is someone you should know, with her shoulders back, chest proud, and a stride of military precision. She shouldn’t have been surprised when later that day a group of teenagers stopped her on one of the streets of downtown Charlotte. “You’re Sister Simone Campbell!” They jumped up and down with excitement and asked to take a picture. “You’re one of the people we wanted to meet at the convention.”

  NETWORK’s Nuns on the Bus began their journey, one that would span nine states and 2,700 miles, stopping in homeless shelters, food pantries, and health-care facilities for the poor, on June 18, 2012.

  Their bus driver, Bill, the owner of a silvery mullet and an ever-present Journey T-shirt, had actually spent the previous summer driving the remaining members of that very anthem rock band across the country. I wondered how the gig with the nuns compared with driving around a bus full of aging rock stars.

  “A little different,” Bill said with a shrug when I asked. “No drugs. And it’s quiet. Other than that, no difference. They are some nice ladies.”

  They kicked off the road trip outside the Fort Des Moines Hotel (where the nuns were offered free rooms) in Des Moines, Iowa. Rekha Basu of the Des Moines Register noted that from up the street it looked like a rock band had stopped in town. “Except rock stars wouldn’t be up that early,” she said. Swarms of people crowded the sidewalks, including reporters bumping up against one another, hoping to get a clear shot of the women as they climbed off the bus.

  “Even the moniker had an edgy feel to it—sort of like ‘Popes in the piazza,’ from the days of Father Guido Sarducci on Saturday Night Live,” Ms. Basu said. Mature women in the crowd held up large signs written in magic marker: you go girls and all for nuns, nuns for all.

  The tour’s first stop was at the Ames office of Rep. Steve King (R-IA), a supporter of Congressman Ryan’s budget. The nuns planned to present the congressman’s staff with a copy of The Faithful Budget, an interfaith, economically sound approach to the country’s deficit reduction program drafted by a consortium of Christian, Jewish, and Muslim religious organizations, which called for increased aid to the poor and cuts in military spending.

  They had made an appointment at Representative King’s, but when they arrived, the congressman’s office was shuttered and empty, with a typed note attached to the glass door that read, “Out in the field with constituents. Not available.”

  Sister Simone slid a copy of the budget underneath his door. It wouldn’t be the first time they were snubbed by Republican lawmakers along the way.

  The fans wildly outnumbered the enemies, but the nuns did encounter some naysayers on the road. One local abortion foe in Iowa posted an online diatribe against the traveling nuns: “Sorry, Sisters . . . affirming people in their sodomite sin, promoting the slaughter of the innocent preborn, and being in arrogant disobedience to the church (and by extension, to God himself) is scandalous and utterly anti-Catholic.”

  Coming face-to-face with Rep. Paul Ryan was a priority, and the sisters made their first attempt in Wisconsin at the candidate’s hometown office in Janesville. They were greeted by plucky members of his staff who told them that Congressman Ryan was not available. The nuns handed a female staff member a copy of The Faithful Budget.

  “I had no idea the beauty of this city. I had no idea the size of this city. I am clearly a person from out of town,” Sister Simone told the crowd outside of the lawmaker’s office as news outlets swarmed her. She charmed them with her easy smile. “We’ve driven through this fabulous farm country. Farmers know what it is like to be part of a community. You can’t do this stuff alone.” One supporter there was in awe of the fact that she found herself attending a rally in support of nuns at all. “When I was in Catholic school, nuns were not my heroes and I never thought I would see the day where I forgave them and they were my total heroes,” she said. It was a frequent occurrence that members of the crowd would find themselves surprised to be at an event in support of nuns. One of the things that the nuns heard over and over again on the road was, “I’m not religious, but I love your message.”

  Congressman Ryan was in DC that day and issued a statement defending his budget plan against the Nuns on the Bus: “Economic stagnation, and a growing dependency on government assistance, continues to push this country toward a debt crisis, in which those who get hurt the first and the worst are the poor, the sick and the elderly, the people who need government the most.”

  Early on, the sisters discovered the importance of centering themselves before beginning each day’s journey, in order to keep from getting on one another’s nerves.

  “We prayed a half hour together every single day before we got going. It was essential,” Sister Simone said. “The one da
y that we missed prayer, we were gnawing on each other in the first hour. Everyone was tense and we weren’t connected.”

  From then on, no matter how late the sisters stayed up at night or how early they had to rise in the morning, often before the sun, they made sure to put in their thirty minutes of group prayer and meditation. “A lot of it was just letting go of control and all the pesky influences the ego brings about,” Sister Simone said.

  On the road, the nuns continued to spend their time with the poor, the sick, and the elderly—the ones who did indeed need the government the most right at that moment. Unlike Congressman Ryan in his ivory Capitol, the sisters spent their time on the margins of society, just as the Gospel preached. It was about bearing witness. It was about being present in a way that politicians have long stopped being present. “I can’t tell you how many people we have cried with,” Sister Simone told me. “When I get to be with them, I can tell you that I will never forget them, and in return, they get to know that they aren’t alone.”

  This sense of being with the people who need her help the most is integral to Sister Simone’s faith. When I asked her about her connection to God, she hesitated and told me it is hard for her to speak about it in any way that would make sense. She described it as this intuitive and yet odd thing. What she knows is that she feels a deep connection to God when she is in the presence of the people she feels called to serve.

  “When we are faithful,” she said, “we have to let our hearts be broken by the people around us, and if we let our hearts be broken open, we can feel the deeper call of the Gospel. That’s what the bus was about, broken hearts.”

  Sister Simone collected people’s stories on the way, and she can recite them all from memory. The names of the people she met on the road fly off her tongue like individual prayers. Billy, Matt, Mark, Jini . . .