In some ways, breaking onto a nuclear submarine base was just the beginning of their witness. After their arrest, the Kings Bay Plowshares 7 faced another formidable challenge: the United States justice system. In this third and final episode, we hear the Plowshares activists explain why trial and sacrifice have always been essential to their…

When seven Catholics broke onto a naval submarine base to protest nuclear weapons, they did so on the 50th anniversary of the assassination of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. They then hung banners with King’s image and read quotes from his speeches. What does Martin Luther King Jr. have to do with nuclear weapons?…

Pope Francis announced this week that “the use of nuclear weapons is immoral, which is why it must be added to the Catechism of the Catholic Church.” Two years after the Vatican State signed the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons (currently ratified by 34 countries), he declared during an in-flight press briefing from Japan…

Why aren’t we exalting peace heroes and abolishing nuclear weapons? You’re liable to run into trouble if you try to suggest there is a greater threat to planetary survival than climate change. But there is. It’s called nuclear war. Granted — and thank goodness — climate change is finally all the rage now. Rage has…

On the night of Apr. 4, 2018, seven Catholics successfully broke onto Naval Submarine Base Kings Bay in St. Marys, Georgia — the east coast home to U.S. nuclear armed submarines — undetected by base security. The youngest member of the group was 55; the oldest, 78. Who are they? What drove them to choose…

Eight-year-old Martha Hennessy learned of the assassination of JFK standing in line at Perkinsville Elementary School. Fifty-seven years later, the Vermont native and grandmother of eight recalls: “That same year, 1963, we were still having duck-and-cover air raid drills because of the Cuban Missile Crisis and the perceived threat of nuclear annihilation. I was aware…

As reported in America, the “Kings Bay Plowshares 7” defendants, arrested for acts of civil disobedience intended to protest the nation’s continuing nuclear weapons program, were found guilty on Oct. 24 of four separate federal crimes. The activists are grandparents, parents and caregivers. Several of the Kings Bay Plowshares 7, including Dorothy Day’s granddaughter, Martha…

“When something difficult is attempted,” Daniel Berrigan said, “it is like trying to break a rock with an egg.” Berrigan, a Jesuit priest and social radical, who died in 2016, at the age of ninety-four, spent the last third of his life doing something difficult: trying, through protest, civil disobedience, and a steady stream of…