Who's working for PEACE now?

Where have all the peaceniks gone? The Catholic peace movement in the U.S. may no longer make big headlines, but it is alive and well--continuing some of the old causes while attracting a new generation of peacemakers and pursuing new agendas.

Fittingly enough for a man whose primary gifts are poetry and prophecy, one of the pivotal moments in the boisterous 80th birthday party for Daniel Berrigan was a starkly simple line of poetry, raising a prophetic question.

The party began with an hour of Irish music from a group called Morning Star, while the guests gathered, munched on free ice cream bars from Ben and Jerry, sipped beer and wine donated by actors Liam Neeson and Natasha Richardson, and mingled with other peacemakers. It was a case of the usual suspects celebrating the usual suspect, a Jesuit priest who has elevated to near-sacramental dignity the act of gospel-induced crime.

On the evening of May 6, the birthday festivities unfolded in the basement of St. Paul the Apostle Church in New York City. The stage featured a blue banner, filled with doves and stars, and dominated by images of a sword morphing into a plowshare and of a hammer, the "weapon" of the nonviolent Plowshares movement. The banner announced: "Happy 80th Birthday, Dan."

As the party's warm-up hour closed, the introduction of Berrigan fell to his brother Philip's wife, Elizabeth McAlister, because Phil Berrigan, as usual, was in prison. "We're having a great party," she said, "but where is Father Daniel Berrigan?"

McAlister told a story from the birthday boy's desperado days of nonviolent protest against the Vietnam War. In 1968, the two brothers and friends had seized draft records and burned them with homemade napalm in Catonsville, a Baltimore suburb. The appeals of the Catonsville Nine had failed and he had gone underground. Surfacing briefly at a 1970 student rally at Cornell University, inside a bigger-than-life puppet, he disappeared into the night, eluding the FBI. Just as McAlister finished recalling that surreal moment, a huge puppet near the stage disgorged Berrigan.

For the next hour and a half, the party celebrated his life. The master of ceremonies was another Jesuit peace activist, Father John Dear, who has done prison time for nonviolent Plowshares actions against American weapons of mass destruction. The speakers included Bishop Thomas Gumbleton, auxiliary bishop of Detroit, who had flown to New York to pay tribute to "one of the most important influences in my life." One of Phil's children, Frida, read a letter from her father to her uncle, written in the Ohio prison where Phil was serving time for a Plowshares action.

In the middle of all this, the poet B. J. Ashanti, dressed in a colorful African robe, read a poem that he had written for Berrigan. The closing line: "Whose hand reaches for the baton?"

Whose hand reaches for the baton?

That, of course, is the $310 billion question. As the peace movement ages, and one of its most influential figures passes 80, who will provide the new leadership to challenge the morality of the U.S. government's decision to spend roughly $310 billion a year on the military while millions of children lack basic health care?

In the crucible of the Vietnam War, Berrigan was there--with the Trappist monk Thomas Merton, Dorothy Day, and others--shaping the modern Catholic peace movement. And he is still at it, a stubborn and hardy symbol of the holy persistence of peacemaking. Like him, the movement has not gone away. In fact, elements of it, such as Pax Christi USA, have become so well-established that they are more institution than movement.

"You could say the movement has matured in some ways and therefore its biggest challenge is not to become decrepit or routinized," says R. Scott Appleby, director of the Joan B. Kroc Institute for International Peace Studies at the University of Notre Dame, a growing resource for the movement.

"There's always that tension between the charismatic spirit of a movement and its routinization and bureaucracy," Appleby adds. "The movement from the '60s has now become institutionalized. There are peace studies institutes, there are peace studies curricula, there are centers for social concerns on campuses, there's Catholic Relief Services, there's Pax Christi--all this stuff. Pax Christi used to be kind of a radical thing to join, and it still is to some degree, but it has also found its niche in the broader social, cultural, political world. That's good."

So the movement has survived, but Ashanti's poem raises perhaps the most crucial question for its future: "Whose hand reaches for the baton?"

Though the predominance of gray and graying peacemakers is cause for concern, younger hands really do seem to be reaching for the baton. One of them is Maria Barker, 27, who attended Berrigan's party.

Her parents, John and Denise, met at a servicemen's club in New York at the end of 1966, when he was in the Navy. Later he became active in Veterans Against the War, married Denise, and went to college in Colorado. Maria grew up outside Baltimore, not far from Catonsville. When her parents split, she remained with her mother, who was active in peace and justice issues in the Arch-diocese of Baltimore. "I was sort of raised in church basements, being babysat during Bread for the World meetings," Barker says.

Now her primary focus is economic justice. At the Enterprise Foundation in Manhattan, she works to develop affordable housing. But she is also a member of Pax Christi. Barker doesn't share the worry, of older peacemakers about baton-passing. "There's a new generation of lefties coming along who have learned a lot from their parents' and their friends' history," she says.

Crossing the line

The most impressive corroboration for that view can be found every November at Fort Benning, Georgia, home of an institution once known as the U.S. Army School of the Americas, now murkily dubbed the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation. That cosmetic name change is the military's attempt to deflect a long campaign to close the school, a cause that has enlisted thousands of young people.

The campaign has its roots in the work of Father Roy Bourgeois, a Maryknoll priest who had served in the U.S. Navy in Vietnam, then went on mission among the poor of Latin America in the 1980s. He felt frustrated by not being able to communicate the suffering of Bolivian campesinos to the American middle class. Then he discovered the School of the Americas, which had trained thousands of soldiers for Latin American nations, where the military routinely protects the dominance of the prosperous few against the aspirations of the starving multitudes.

As Bourgeois and others studied the school's nearly 60,000 graduates, they found that its alumni were involved in hideous atrocities--many of them in El Salvador. They included the assassination of Archbishop Oscar Romero and the murder of four American churchwomen in 1980, the slaughter of 900 people in the village of El Mozote in 1981, and the murders of six Jesuit priests, their housekeeper, and her daughter at the University of Central America on Nov. 16, 1989. It was on the first anniversary of that event that Bourgeois led the first demonstration at the gates of Fort Benning.

Only a few people attended that 1990 protest, mostly older activists. But over the next decade, Bourgeois became a pied piper, founding an organization called School of the Americas Watch and speaking before countless young audiences to draw them into his drive to close the school. "This past November, 10,000 gathered," he says, "and half of them were high school and college students from all over the country."

His movement's growth can be traced to the blood of the Central American martyrs; to the charisma of Bourgeois, who tells the story of Latin American suffering and North American complicity with a quiet outrage in a rich Louisiana drawl; and to this reality: Most North Americans don't get to visit the scene of the crimes in Latin America, but Fort Benning is easy to reach.

"There's something about being able to put your feet someplace and your hands on an issue," Bourgeois says. "You've got to find a place where people can put their feet."

More and more, those are the feet of the young. Together with veteran peacemakers, young people have been risking arrest and imprisonment by crossing a line into Fort Benning, an open post that is closed to those who protest the school. For the young, crossing the line is profoundly meaningful. "I'm amazed at how many students tell me that they were moved to tears, how sacred that was to them," Bourgeois says.

At the event in 1999, the 10th anniversary of the murder of the six Jesuits, the vastly expanded numbers of young people--including many students from Jesuit universities--were a turning point.

"That was a real moment," says Dave Robinson, who was hired by Pax Christi USA in 1990, mostly to work with youth, and becomes its national coordinator this month. "You could see a new generation stepping up to the plate."

One member of that generation, Eric LeCompte, is a living link between the campaign led by Bourgeois and Pax Christi USA, the largest element in the Catholic peace movement. At 25, he is the outreach director for School of the Americas Watch. He is also an elected member of the Pax Christi USA national council, where young people are playing an increasing role.

"They realized they were a minority," LeCompte says. "Their voice wasn't being heard. So they had to organize. In a lot of ways, they had to win a place within Pax Christi, a place which I think now is respected, because of that struggle."

At the national council's meeting last summer in Virginia, LeCompte became one of three young people to sit on the council, the first time that has happened since Pax Christi USA began in 1972. That change started back in 1993 when Robinson made an offer to Pax Christi's regional leaders: The national staff would put together a retreat for young people, and the regions would each send one or two youths and agree to give them positions of responsibility afterward. That retreat--the foundational event for what became known as the youth forum--drew about 40 to Arlington, Virginia.

Since then, the youth forum has been a leaven in Pax Christi. Its retreats have begun developing a network. "People are able to make a lot of personal connections with other young people, and they stay in touch," says Shannon McManimon, 25, one of the council's three young-adult members.

All three have significant experience. Tricia Sullivan, 34, worked for Network, the national Catholic social justice lobbying group, served three years as the director of Pax Christi Metro DC, and is now the secretary of the board of Global Peace Services-USA, a movement to create a professional peace service. Last fall, LeCompte organized a pioneering cross-country bus tour that promoted Pax Christi's "Bread Not Stones" campaign to shift national budget priorities from military spending to human needs. And McManimon works in the Youth and Militarism Program at the American Friends Service Committee.

Other, more secular movements have drawn increasing numbers of young people to protests over such issues as the expansion of globalization, the excess power of the World Trade Organization, and corporate destruction of the environment. But Pax Christi offers a unique, holistic, Catholic perspective.

"The philosophy of nonviolence in a Catholic context can be used to look at all of the lifestyle choices that we're making: How do we live? Who do we live with? How do we pray? Where do I work? What kinds of jobs do I do?" Sullivan says. "I think a lot of young people are saying, `I don't want to be climbing the corporate ladder, but what else is there other than that?'" She is optimistic about Pax Christi's generational mix. "I think that there's a real openness to inviting different voices in, and not being worried that we'll lose something that's core."

Ain't gonna study war no more

Another reason for optimism is an improvement in textbooks and a growth of Catholic peace studies. Michael Hovey, the coordinator of peace and justice education at Iona College in New Rochelle, New York, worked several years ago on a textbook survey with Gordon Zahn of the Center on Conscience and War. They asked a number of Catholic dioceses what textbooks they were using, then checked what the texts said about conscientious objection and nonviolence. They found that the "just war" theory, cited to justify wars but seldom to avert them, is not the only thing Catholic school students learn.

"We felt there was significant evidence that most Catholic high school kids were at least being exposed to the fact that there was more to church teaching than `just war,'" Hovey says. "I'm frankly amazed how many kids show up here from Catholic high schools knowing about Gandhi and Martin Luther King. I have absolutely no trouble persuading people that conscientious objection and nonviolence fit within the gospel."

In 1998, Hovey says, Iona hosted a national symposium on peace and justice education. They sent letters to 235 Catholic colleges and universities, and about 200 people from 60 schools attended. Hovey says, "About 30 of them had programs, and 30 wanted to start them."

That education begins well before college. In New York, for example, the Intercommunity Center for Justice and Peace, a consortium of 43 religious orders, is taking the message to grade schools. "We're teaching kids how to do activism around such issues as child soldiers," says Sister Arlene Flaherty, the center's executive director. "We're trying to see how do we mentor the next generation of peace and justice makers."

As the new generation becomes active, it is not afraid to question the old. Take Therese Cullen. Her father, Michael Cullen, was born in Ireland, came to America as a seminarian, left the seminary, and founded Casa Maria House of Hospitality in Milwaukee. In 1968, he and 13 others burned draft fries, earning the name "The Milwaukee Fourteen."

In 1973, Cullen and his family were deported back to Ireland, where Therese was born in 1975--one of 12 children. She majored in peace studies and sociology at the University of St. Thomas in St. Paul, Minnesota, graduating in 1999. Now she works with the poor at Sacred Heart Parish in downtown Memphis, Tennessee.

Four years ago, she made something of a name for herself in Milwaukee--not by burning files, as her father had done three decades earlier, but by questioning publicly the way the peace movement was operating. This happened at a joint meeting of the Peace Studies Association and COPRED (Consortium on Peace Research, Education and Development), two peace groups that had been known to disagree.

"I said, `You know, I really learned a lot here this weekend, but it saddens me that we've got two wonderful groups here that because of egos can't get along, and it's too bad that ego has destroyed the peace movement in this country,'" Cullen recalls. The chastized peacemakers applauded.

Unfortunately, she detects similar struggles even in Pax Christi. "You've got a lot of politics going on within the movement," she says. "Ego gets in the way. And I'm not saying I'm without ego myself."

Nor does Cullen believe that the work of transition to a new generation has really been accomplished. "Within the peace movement today, there are still lots of people who were in the civil rights and peace movement in the '60s," she says. "The torch hasn't been passed on yet to us."

Peaced together

The emergence of a new generation of peacemakers is a crucial question, but it is not the only issue facing the movement that Berrigan helped to nurture.

"It seems to me that the movement as such is very complicated," Berrigan said in an interview a few days before his birthday party. In a brief litany, he lists the annual Pax Christi Way of the Cross on Good Friday in Manhattan, which ended with a civil disobedience at the aircraft carrier Intrepid and led to the arrest of Berrigan and others. He mentions activists in prison now, including his brother. "Up close, the movement is painfully thriving. It hits very close, obviously, when those you love are locked away."

Beyond the pain of incarceration, when Berrigan looks at the movement today, he sees reason for optimism. "I get the impression of a lot of vitality all across the country," he says. Those signs include thousands of college students using their spring breaks not for revelry but for service, which Berrigan believes will evolve into long-term commitment to "this amorphous animal called the peace movement."

The Catholic peace movement's roots go back to the pacifism of Dorothy Day during World War II and to elder statesmen such as Gordon Zahn, who refused military service and spent that war in one of about 150 Civilian Public Service camps for conscientious objectors. It grew exponentially during the Vietnam War, with Thomas Merton serving as its unofficial spiritual director from inside a monastic enclosure in Kentucky and the Berrigans and others taking vivid action in the streets.

At the start of the 1970s, Zahn, Eileen Egan, and others led in the creation of Pax Christi USA, a national section of the international Catholic peace movement that had grown in Europe after World War II.

Now, in a new millennium, Berrigan describes the movement as "amorphous," without form. Actually, it is closer to polymorphous, a creature that takes many forms.

It also focuses on many issues--from the traditional emphasis on war and peace and nuclear disarmament to more economic concerns, such as globalization, the proliferation of sweatshops, and Third World debt. It is trying to examine social injustice by learning to see through the lens of anti-racism. It examines the war and peace issues from the very different perspectives of just-war theory and total pacifism. And it does all this with a tremendous variety of people.

The Catholic peace movement is women such as Sisters Carol Gilbert and Ardeth Platte, who belong to the independent network of Plowshares activists and are willing to endure imprisonment for symbolically disarming weapons of mass destruction. The movement takes its name from Isaiah 2:4 (and Micah 4:3): "They shall beat their swords into plowshares." Along with Philip Berrigan (when he's not in prison), McAlister, and others, they live at Jonah House in Baltimore. Both women belong to a Dominican community in Grand Rapids, Michigan, which "missioned" them first to work for the closure of two Strategic Air Command bases in Michigan, then to Jonah House. "As Dominicans, part of our charism is veritas, which is truth, and we're also mendicant preachers," Gilbert says. "We believe this is the way men and women religious truly are called to preach the gospel today: with their lives."

The Catholic peace movement is also the string of Catholic Worker houses, filled with men and women living the gospel by embracing voluntary poverty and by protesting nonviolently. "Every Catholic Worker community that exists right now is doing great things for peace and nonviolence and promoting human rights at home and abroad," says Arthur Laffin, an imposingly tall, reassuringly soft-spoken member of the Dorothy Day Catholic Worker in Washington, D.C., who has been arrested many times. "I know of three or four communities that have begun since 1990, which is a great sign of the movement of the Holy Spirit at work."

The Catholic peace movement is the tenacious and knowledgeable membership of two vigilant organizations primarily staffed by women religious: Network in Washington and the Intercommunity Center for Justice and Peace in New York. Network monitors Congress and other branches of the U.S. government, lobbying tirelessly for justice and peace.

It is also M. J. Park and her husband, Jerry, working for peace on a small scale by running "peace camps" for 20 years, often at the site of gatherings such as last summer's Pax Christi USA national assembly. While the adults attended workshops and plenary sessions, their children spent hours with M. J. Park, learning about peace at a child's level. "My real wish now is that every school set up a peace room," she says.

The Catholic peace movement is Thomas Siemer, a former Navy pilot and designer of guided weapons for the American military, who learned to weep and later to drink when he saw what his weapons had done to a Vietnamese village. Faced with life-threatening cirrhosis, he promised to spend the rest of his life working for peace. So he campaigns relentlessly to persuade the bishops and the pope to condemn nuclear weapons unequivocally. Siemer has visited every American diocese and spoken more than 20 times with Pope John Paul II, who calls him "Thomas" and days, "You must be patient." All this leaves Siemer impatient, because the church fails to bring the dangers of nuclear war to the people in the pews. "You never hear anything about this from the altar or the pulpit --never, never, never, never, never. I've been to a thousand parishes in all of the dioceses in the United States. Only one time did I ever, ever hear a priest totally condemn nuclear war and our defense."

And, most obviously, the Catholic peace movement is Pax Christi USA--with more than 14,000 members the movement's largest and most widely organized segment. Of all the elements of the movement, Pax Christi has the most definite and quantifiable shape.

Peace begins in the movement

In 1996, sociologist Ron Pagnucco helped Pax Christi survey its members. One of the tools he used was his knowledge from an earlier study of peace organizations in 1988 and 1992. "Most of the groups have either been declining in membership or dying," says Pagnucco, now a member of the peace studies faculty at the College of Saint Benedict/Saint John's University in Minnesota and chair of the Pax Christi Peace Studies Committee. By contrast, Pax Christi has flourished.

Once people join Pax Christi, the study shows, they tend to stay. More than two thirds of current members who joined before 1995 have never let their membership lapse. In addition, Pax Christi members --72 percent of them laypeople and 28 percent sisters, priests, and brothers --are staunchly loyal to the Catholic Church. "This is not the left-wing alternative to the Catholic Church," Pagnucco says. "These are people who are really committed to the church and who are involved in the church. This is the church."

The survey showed that 98 percent of members said "nonviolence is something I believe in strongly and try to practice regularly," and 68 percent would consider themselves pacifists. It also verified statistically a reality that is obvious at Pax Christi meetings: the organization is markedly gray (average age 58) and ethnically homogeneous. An overwhelming 97 percent of members are white.

Knowing what it looks like statistically, Pax Christi is trying to change. In addition to seeking to attract more young people, it is working not only to develop a more ethnically diverse membership, but to become an antiracist organization.

"You can't call yourself a national Catholic anything if you're 97 percent white," says Tom Cordaro, chairman of the national council. "It's just absurd."

Theologically, the initiative goes to the core of Pax Christi's being. "If we claim the peace of Christ as our identity," says Robinson, "then we need to start looking more like the body of Christ." The initiative, called "Brothers and Sisters All," is not just about recruiting people of color to join, but about using their insights and concerns to change the way Pax Christi analyzes the world. Robinson calls it "the most prophetic thing that Pax Christi is committed to, probably since we started."

Pax Christi hired Crossroads Ministry, an interfaith agency that addresses the causes of racism through institutional transformation. The funding has come largely from a $600,000 donation by an anonymous benefactor--the largest single donation ever to Pax Christi. The motivation for the initiative is more complex.

Nancy Small, Pax Christi's national coordinator for the past five years, who is now leaving that post, says, "If you talk about the issues that Pax Christi works on, which have been largely military and peace and nonviolence, some people will tell you that that's not the issues of communities of color--that they're working on basic issues of education, of housing, of employment."

But the initiative is not about discarding traditional Pax Christi issues. "It really is about putting on new glasses," says Cathy Crayton, an African American member of the national council. "That's really the long-term goal of this initiative, that people will understand our traditional Pax Christi issues through the prism of antiracism."

In the short term, that goal is difficult, as Pax Christi's new antiracism team discovered during some heated moments in its meetings with Crossroads Ministry in Chicago. "The sparks were flying," Crayton remembers. One person left the team right after the February meeting. "This is really, really difficult stuff," she says.

One source of the friction is current reality. "It's tough to really look at it and deal with it within your own institution," Cordaro says. "Where is racism in Pax Christi and how is racism institutionalized within Pax Christi?" In addition, some members worry that focusing on domestic economic issues that affect people of color will weaken the focus on war and peace.

Peace connections

This work requires the movement to draw connections between racism and other nasty "isms" such as militarism and savage capitalism. In fact, for Pax Christi and for the peace movement as a whole, this is an era of making connections.

In one direction, Pax Christi is establishing links with groups it hadn't courted before. For example, the bus tour that LeCompte organized last fall used a bus borrowed from Business Leaders for Sensible Priorities, filled with huge inflatables that graphically showed the skewed priorities of the national budget.

"Strategically, it forged a new partnership between Pax Christi and two communities that we never worked with before: CEOs and ex-military leaders," Robinson explains.

Pax Christi has also been reaching out to other peace organizations, forming a new umbrella group, the National Coalition for Peace and Justice. It first came together during the Kosovo crisis, to seek alternatives to the NATO bombing and to build a way of responding in the future when America chooses military intervention.

This search for new connections is also internal. "There's this pastoral question: How do you hook this stuff, including the church's obligation on peacemaking, to the pastoral life of the church?" says David O'Brien, a professor of church history at the College of the Holy Cross in Worcester, Massachusetts. "We have to find a kind of Mertonesque way of hooking this into people's quest for God. I get so frustrated, because you keep having people fall back into the language that justice and peace is OK, but there are other things that are more important."

As to the priests, the great Jesuit preacher Father Walter Burghardt has been trying for years to get them to "preach the just word," to convey the Bible's overwhelming emphasis on justice and peace.

"I don't think it happens that often, to be honest," Small says. "My experience is they're good at preaching charity, but they're not good at making the connections to justice, by and large. I think there's pockets, and you give thanks for the pockets, but it can be hard to do that kind of outreach to the pastors."

To an extent, the nation's Catholic bishops helped make these connections by issuing the 1983 pastoral letter The Challenge of Peace: God's Promise and Our Response. Among its other teachings, it gave pacifism and conscientious objection a place at the table, along with just-war theory.

"This turn to nonviolence and even the possibility of pacifism was an important moment in their corporate identity," Appleby says. "Before the '80s, I think, there was still suspicion in the hierarchy about the peace movement, a lot of which has been eroded." Pope John Paul II has helped with a long series of statements on war and peace, making it easier for the bishops to focus on peacemaking.

In fact, more than 140 bishops are now members of Pax Christi USA, less than 40 short of a majority of the nation's Catholic bishops. (The number of parishes affiliated with Pax Christi has also grown, Small says, from fewer than 50 to more than 450 in recent years.) The bishop president of Pax Christi, Walter Sullivan of Richmond, would like to see even more bishop members. "There has certainly been a growing respect within the conference of the whole Pax Christi movement," Sullivan says.

In the 1983 peace pastoral, the bishops said that nuclear deterrence "may still be judged morally acceptable" as a transitional step toward disarmament. But disarmament has not happened. Now the Pax Christi bishops want the bishops' conference to scrap its conditional acceptance of deterrence.

"They need to come out and say: `Deterrence doesn't work. It is a sin,'" says John Dear, the Jesuit emcee of the Berrigan party, former executive director of the Fellowship of Reconciliation, and author of a new book, Living Peace: A Spirituality of Contemplation and Action (Doubleday). "We were wrong in the 1980s." The church, he says, should now unequivocally condemn nuclear deterrence, call for the complete abolition of nuclear weapons, and adopt the "complete way of nonviolence."

Berrigan himself looks at the bishops with his typical ironic serenity. "My experience over the years has been that whatever movement comes at the top is initiated at the bottom," he says. "They'll come along." It does not bother him that his friend Thomas Gumbleton remains an auxiliary bishop, a prophetic voice marginalized and unlikely ever to stand at the heart of the church's power. "That's good for him," Berrigan says. "All the vitality is at the edge. The center is pretty fat."

Taken as a whole, the movement may be polymorphous, but it is moving in the right direction.

"The faith that motivates us is the faith of the early Christian community that was devoted to nonviolence, and that's what they gave their lives for," Small says. "That's our vision, the gospel nonviolence. That's what empowers us."

For all its growth, the Catholic peace movement still has a terrifyingly demanding agenda.

"The real challenge before us is to teach the country that Jesus practiced nonviolence and we are called as his followers to practice nonviolence as well," Dear says. "We as Catholics don't worship a God of peace and nonviolence, by and large. We've given in to the culture's gods that would bless war and nuclear weapons and injustice. Once we begin to envision a God of peace, once we imagine God is truly nonviolent, we'll begin to worship a God of peace and nonviolence, and then in the process, we will become people of peace and nonviolence. Our hearts will be disarmed."

For links to Pax Christi USA, SOA Watch, and other Catholic peace groups and resources, visit www.uscatholic.org.

ROBERT F. KEELER is a Pulitzer Prize-winning writer for Newsday and the co-author (with Paul Moses) of the new book Days of Intense Emotion: Praying with Pope John Paul II in the Holy Land (Resurrection Press). He is also a member of Pax Christi Long Island.