Sister Anne Montgomery RSCJ | |
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Personal life | |
Born | November 20, 1926 San Diego, California |
Died | August 27, 2012 85) | (aged
Nationality | American |
Religious life | |
Religion | Roman Catholic |
Sister Anne Montgomery RSCJ (20 November 1926 – 27 August 2012) was an American non-violent activist, educator, nun, and poet who was part of the Plowshares movement. [1] Aside from teaching, she worked with the poor, and advocated for peace via the Catholic Worker Movement. [2] She was a member of the original Plowshares Eight in the first Plowshares action in 1980. Anne Montgomery House in Washington, D.C., run by the Society of the Sacred Heart, is named for her.
Anne Montgomery was born on November 20, 1926, in San Diego California, the daughter of Alice Claire Montgomery and Alfred Eugene Montgomery. She had one sibling, an older brother who died on active duty when she was in the Sacred Heart novitiate (see Society of the Sacred Heart, below). [3] Her father Alfred Montgomery was a career Naval officer who rose to the rank of Vice Admiral, leading the largest battle in the Pacific against Japanese war ships during World War II. [4] The family moved a great deal during her childhood. She attended Eden Hall Academy of the Sacred Heart in Torresdale, Pennsylvania and Manhattanville College, graduating with a bachelor's and master's degree. She later earned a second master's degree from Columbia University. [1]
In 1948, when Montgomery was 22 years old, she entered the Society of the Sacred Heart (RSCJ) in Albany. She made her first vows in 1951 and her final vows in 1956 in Rome. During the period of her novitiate she received news of her brother's death in a military training exercise for jet fighter planes. [5]
She taught at the Convent of the Sacred Heart in New York City from 1959-1969 and at Street Academy of Albany in 1970. In 1975, she began educating children with learning disabilities. In the late 1970s, she returned to New York City to work with high school dropouts in East Harlem. [2]
In the late 1970s, Montgomery joined the Catholic Worker House in New York, which was part of the Catholic Worker Movement. [6] She was also a part of the Little Sisters of the Assumption in East Harlem. She became an advocate for peace, determined to disarm nuclear weapons using nonviolent tactics.
Civil disobedience is, traditionally, the breaking of a civil law to obey a higher law, sometimes with the hope of changing the unjust civil law. … But we should speak of such actions as divine obedience, rather than civil disobedience. The term ‘disobedience’ is not appropriate because any law that does not protect and enhance human life is no real law.
In 1980, Montgomery joined the Plowshares Eight, an anti-nuclear weapons and Christian pacifist movement co-founded by Philip Berrigan, Liz McAlister, Daniel Berrigan, and others. The movement included activists such as Susan Crane and often consisted of members calling for the abolition of nuclear weapons. Some members of the movement damaged nuclear weapons and military bases to directly disarm the facilities. Montgomery was among the first that were arrested for these acts, and served time in prison. She participated in several other Plowshares movement actions, including one in 2009, at the age of 83. [1] She was best known for insisting that her work was not civil disobedience, but divine obedience. [7]
In 1987 Montgomery co-edited a book with Art Laffin, Swords into Plowshares: Nonviolent Direct Action for Disarmament, about the Plowshares movement, and nonviolent direct action for disarmament, peace, and social justice. [8] In 2024 he co-edited a book of her poetry written in war zones and in prison (see the section below). [9]
In the late 1970s, Montgomery became a member of Pax Christi, a national Catholic peace movement. Throughout the 90s, she traveled with Community Peacemaker Teams (CPT, then known as Christian Peacemaker Teams) to places of conflict in Iraq, West Bank, Hebron, and the Balkans. [2] In January 1991, she protested against the US bombing Iraq. She supported the Gulf Peace Team Camp on the Iraq-Saudi border which was there to provide a nonviolent presence before and during the initial stages of the war, and in 2000 she fasted for a month to show her disapproval of US support for the UN sanctions against Iraq. In 2005, she participated in a 70-mile walk and a four-day fast and vigil with the organization witness against torture, which worked toward the closing of the Guantanamo Naval Base. [6]
In 2012 Montgomery won the Courage of Conscience Award from the Peace Abbey in Sherborn, Massachusetts one week before her death. She died on August 27, 2012, at the age of 85 at Oakwood in Sacred Heart, Atherton, California. [1]
A book of her poetry, ARISE AND WITNESS: Poems by Anne Montgomery, RSCJ, About Faith, Prison, War Zones and Nonviolent Resistance was published in September of 2024 by her former co-editor, Arthur Laffin, with Carole Sargent. [9] The editor of the poetry series at Scarith Press is Grace Cavalieri, poet laureate emerita of Maryland, and host of the Library of Congress series "The Poet and the Poem." [10] Cavalieri writes that "This posthumous collection of poems by activist Anne Montgomery illuminates the heart of a woman who gave her every moment in service to impede ugliness, and to do God’s work." [9] Every living member of the original Plowshares 8 and some members of the Kings Bay Plowshares 7 contributed to it, including (alphabetically) Jackie Allen-Douçot, Frida Berrigan, Jim Douglass and Shelley Douglass, Clare Grady, Dean Hammer, Kathy Kelly, and Steve Kelly SJ.
Philip Francis Berrigan was an American peace activist and Catholic priest with the Josephites. He engaged in nonviolent, civil disobedience in the cause of peace and nuclear disarmament and was often arrested.
Daniel Joseph Berrigan was an American Jesuit priest, anti-war activist, Christian pacifist, playwright, poet, and author.
The Plowshares movement is an anti-nuclear weapons and Christian pacifist movement that advocates active resistance to war. The group often practices a form of protest that involves the damaging of weapons and military property. The movement gained notoriety in the early 1980s when several members damaged nuclear warhead nose cones and were subsequently convicted. The name refers to the text of prophet Isaiah who said that swords shall be beaten into plowshares.
The Catonsville Nine were nine Catholic activists who burned draft files to protest the Vietnam War. On May 17, 1968, they took 378 draft files from the draft board office in Catonsville, Maryland, and burned them in the parking lot.
The Saint Patrick's Day Four are four American peace activists of Irish Catholic heritage who poured their own blood on the walls, posters, windows, and a US flag at a military recruiting center to protest the United States' impending invasion of Iraq. Peter De Mott, Daniel Burns, Teresa Grady, and Clare Grady each were members of the Ithaca Catholic Worker community, which teaches that Christians should practice non-violence and devote their lives to service of others. They each served between four and six months in federal prison for their action on Saint Patrick's Day, March 17, 2003, in Lansing, New York, near Ithaca where they reside.
John Dear is an American Catholic priest and peace activist. He has been arrested 85 times in acts of nonviolent civil disobedience against war, injustice, nuclear weapons.
Thomas P. Lewis was an artist and peace activist, primarily noted for his participation with the Baltimore Four and the Catonsville Nine.
Carl K. Kabat was an American priest of the Catholic religious order Missionary Oblates of Mary Immaculate, best known for his eccentric, nonviolent protests against nuclear weapons. He served more than 17 years total in prison over his lifetime.
Elizabeth McAlister is an American peace activist and former nun of the Religious of the Sacred Heart of Mary. She married Philip Berrigan and was excommunicated from the Catholic Church. McAlister served prison time for nonviolent acts of civil disobedience.
Molly Rush is a Catholic anti-war, civil and women's rights activist born in 1935. She co-founded the Thomas Merton Center in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, along with Larry Kessler in 1972, She was one of the Plowshares eight defendants. They faced trial after an anti-nuclear weapons symbolic action at a nuclear missile plant in King of Prussia, Pennsylvania.
William Jerome Bichsel, S.J., nicknamed "Bix", was a Jesuit priest in Tacoma, Washington, United States. He is notable for his actions as a non-violent protester, spending time in federal prison for actions to promote social justice and nuclear disarmament and was deeply engaged in the effort to close the School of the Americas. He died February 28, 2015, of heart disease in Tacoma, Washington.
Jacqueline Marie "Jackie" Hudson, was an American Dominican sister and anti-nuclear activist. She spent the first 29 years of her working career as a music teacher. After her retirement from education, she dedicated her life to anti-war activism, during the course of which her actions led her to be arrested several times. In 2011, after a decline in her health in prison, Hudson died from multiple myeloma at the age of 76.
Megan Gillespie Rice S.H.C.J. was an American nuclear disarmament activist, Catholic nun, and former missionary. She was notable for illegally entering the Y-12 National Security Complex in Oak Ridge, Tennessee, at the age of 82, with two fellow activists of the Transform Now Plowshares group. The action was a nuclear disarmament protest referred to as "the biggest security breach in the history of the nation's atomic complex."
Stellan Vinthagen is a professor of sociology, a scholar-activist, and the Inaugural Endowed Chair in the Study of Nonviolent Direct Action and Civil Resistance at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, where he directs the Resistance Studies Initiative. He is also Co-Leader of the Resistance Studies Group at University of Gothenburg and co-founder of the Resistance Studies Network, as well as Editor of the Journal of Resistance Studies, and a Council Member of War Resisters International (WRI), and academic advisor to the International Center on Nonviolent Conflict (ICNC). His research is focused on resistance, power, social movements, nonviolent action, conflict transformation and social change. He has since 1980 been an educator, organizer and activist in several countries, and has participated in more than 30 nonviolent civil disobedience actions, for which he has served in total more than one year in prison.
This is a bibliography of works by and about Daniel Joseph Berrigan, S.J., who was an American Jesuit priest, anti-war activist, poet, essayist, and university instructor. Berrigan was an award-winning and prolific author, who published more than 50 books during his life in 1957, he was awarded the Lamont Prize for his book of poems, Time Without Number.
The Kings Bay Plowshares are a group of seven Catholic peace activists who broke into the Kings Bay Naval Submarine Base and carried out a symbolic act of protest against nuclear weapons. The name of the action and the wider anti-nuclear Plowshares movement comes from the prophet Isaiah’s command to "beat swords into plowshares."
Stephen Michael Kelly is an American Jesuit priest and peace activist. He spent six years in prison for hammering on D-5 Trident missiles and other Plowshares movement actions. He has spent at least a decade behind bars, with six of those years in solitary confinement.
Martha Hennessy is an American Catholic peace activist and member of the Catholic Worker Movement co-founded by her grandmother, Dorothy Day.
Frida Berrigan is an American peace activist and author. She published the 2015 book, It Runs in the Family: On Being Raised by Radicals and Growing into Rebellious Motherhood, about her life in a family of prominent activists and her own philosophies of parenting. Raised in the Plowshares movement, she has been featured in documentaries and studies of the movement, including award-winning director Susan Hagedorn's 2021 The Berrigans: Devout and Dangerous. Frida Berrigan has documented and interpreted the movement's history and meaning from her first-hand perspective for a global audience.
Susan Crane is a peace activist, a member of the California Catholic Worker movement and a participant in the Plowshares movement. After decades of civil disobedience related to campaigns against nuclear war, she was sentenced to jail time in Germany in 2024.