Mark Colville is a founding member of the Amistad Catholic Worker community and house of hospitality in New Haven, Connecticut (amistadcw.wordpress.com), where he lives with his wife, Luz Catarineau, and a circle of friends who are dedicated to the daily practice of the Works of Mercy, prayer, nonviolence, environmental justice and promoting human rights and dignity for all people.  They have raised six children together at the Amistad house: Keeley, Soledad, Justin and Isaiah Colville, and Crystal and Mario Fernandez.

Mark’s family life is centered around a common table where Christ is welcomed in the person of the poor, and it is that experience, over the course of many years, that has instilled in him a deep reverence for all life, and impelled him to come to the Kings Bay Trident base with a plea for personal and collective disarmament:

“The Trident Submarine is an idolatrous blasphemy against God.  It’s mere existence refutes all of the basic tenets of faith that I have embraced as a Christian.  While our leaders frequently invoke Christianity as this nation’s heritage, they wantonly violate its most basic command, namely, that we are to place our ultimate security in God alone, not in a weapon or a nation.  Trident is an omnipresent threat to all life on the planet, and it has never been more urgent that the human community, and particularly the people of the United States, to confront exactly what that reality means:

“We stand poised to murder our own children, for no other reason than to preserve our nation’s dominance in the world.  This is the definition of idolatry.  This is the definition of insanity.

“The man whose life and legacy we celebrate today, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., issued us this warning in 1968: ‘The ultimate logic of racism is genocide.’  How terrifyingly ironic it is that, as we step onto the Kings Bay Naval Base on Dr. King’s birthday in 2018, trying desperately to shed light on the evil that dwells there, an elected president who just this week has definitively exposed himself as a racist, has also managed to brin this nation closer to initiating nuclear genocide than we have ever been in our history*.

“Brothers, sisters, we beg you, let us turn these swords into plowshares.”