The Plowshares Eight, a wonderful group of badasses, from left to right: Fr. Carl Kabat, Elmer Maas, Phil Berrigan, Molly Rush, Fr. Dan Berrigan, Sr. Anne Montgomery, John Schuchardt, Dean Hammer. Photographer unknown.
6. You find mentors: On September 9, 1980, Father Dan Berrigan and his brother, ex-priest Phil, both of the Catonsville 9, joined seven others to act under the Biblical directive to “beat swords into plowshares.” They entered a King of Prussia, PA, General Electric plant that made empty nuclear warhead casings** and beat them with hammers and poured their own blood over them. Then waited to be arrested.
Your future husband’s friend gets you into one day of the Plowshares 8 trial. You drive through a heavy snowstorm from New Brunswick to Norristown, PA, because you’re not going to miss it. Serendipity places you there for Dan’s testimony. You get chills and fall in love the way one does with a hero.
You dedicate yourself to supporting that action and participating in safer (little-to-no jail time) civil disobedience actions with that community in NYC. Getting fired from that business-school job frees you to become the staff person for the Plowshares 8 Support Committee (finally aligning income with activism). You get to cast “Catholic radicals in the courtroom” roles for the film* being made about the trial. You’re too shy to take one yourself, but your future husband and some activist friends remain young in those scenes. Eventually the 8 are sentenced, and the committee shuts down.
*In the King of Prussia is the dramatization of the trial and activities around it. This action inspired over 75 other actions focused on nuclear weapons, largely from the Catholic peace community.
These activists show you how to dedicate life to resistance.
You go back to the press and the peace center. You read about a man who froze to death in an abandoned building in your town, so you and the not-yet-husband drive around nailing “New Brunswick Homeless Shelter” signs on the front doors of other abandoned houses. He’s arrested for littering because that’s the only charge the police can think of. The two of you contemplate opening a Catholic Worker house in New Brunswick, but you’re both atheists; it seems impractical.
(Artist unknown)
**This is the closest sketch I could find of what the warhead casing looked like. Imagine it empty. I held one of these several months after the trial. Our War Resisters League group had a table at the Oktoberfest in New Brunswick and thought it would be fun to set up a “Whack the Warhead!” display. As I recall, a couple of the guys built a wooden structure from which to hang the “warhead.” For $1 people could use our rubber mallet to bang on the casing. I don’t remember how much money we made, but it was more than from our usual method of selling buttons and bumper stickers. How did we get our hands on that thing? One of the peace groups adjacent to the GE plant found it lying outside the building one day and figured it was there for the taking, like if you leave an old dresser on the curb. We did printing for that group, and they offered to lend it to us.
