Life
Born in 1947 in Traverse City, Michigan, Gilbert was the elder of two children. [1] She was raised in a middle class setting. At the age of 18, in 1965, she joined the Dominican Sisters of Grand Rapids. [2] [3] Starting in 1969, Gilbert taught Junior High School students at various schools around Michigan. This lasted until 1977 when she started to teach at the Alternative Learning Center in Saginaw, Michigan. [1] After 10 years of teaching, in 1979, she devoted her career to plowshare activism.
In 1998, Gilbert and four other protesters entered Andrews Air Force Base during the annual Department of Defense Open House and air show. The group banged on a B-52 with hammers and poured their own blood on it. For this, Gilbert spent 6 months in federal prison. [3] In 2000, Gilbert and two other members of her congregation, Sisters Jackie Hudson, O.P., and Ardeth Platte, O.P., illegally entered Peterson Air Force Base and sprinkled blood on a fighter plane. [4] The group was arrested and held in a federal prison until the charges were dropped.
In 2002, the same group of Sisters entered a Minuteman III missile silo in Colorado. [5] Clad in white jump suits emblazoned with "Citizen Weapon Inspection Team," the group drew a cross in their own blood, banged on the silo, and prayed. The Sisters were arrested and left on the ground for three hours. [6] Their protest spilled over into their pre-trial hearing. Clad in full religious habit, the Sisters answered the judge with a nod. [7] At their trial, the presiding judge, Robert E. Blackburn, granted an in limine motion to the prosecutor. This prevented the Sisters from arguing that their actions were legal under international law and the Nuremberg defense. They were sentenced to between 30 and 41 months in prison. Due to their activism, in 2005 and 2006 Gilbert and Platte were labeled as terrorists by the State of Maryland. [8] [9]
The Order of Preachers, commonly known as the Dominican Order, is a Catholic mendicant order of pontifical right that was founded in France by a Castilian priest named Dominic de Guzmán. It was approved by Pope Honorius III via the papal bull Religiosam vitam on 22 December 1216. Members of the order, who are referred to as Dominicans, generally display the letters OP after their names, standing for Ordinis Praedicatorum, meaning 'of the Order of Preachers'. Membership in the order includes friars, nuns, active sisters, and lay or secular Dominicans. More recently, there have been a growing number of associates of the religious sisters who are unrelated to the tertiaries.
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.
Karen Davis was an American animal rights advocate, and president of United Poultry Concerns, a non-profit organization founded in 1990 to address the treatment of domestic fowl—including chickens, turkeys, and ducks—in factory farming. Davis also maintained a sanctuary.
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 Adrian Dominican Sisters is a Catholic religious institute of Dominican sisters in the United States. Their motherhouse is in Adrian, Michigan.
Thomas P. Lewis was an artist and peace activist, primarily noted for his participation with the Baltimore Four and the Catonsville Nine.
Elizabeth McAlister, also known as Liz 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.
Zoia Markovna Horn, born in Ukraine, became in 1972 the first United States librarian to be jailed for refusing to share information as a matter of conscience. Horn, an outspoken member of the American Library Association's Intellectual Freedom Committee, worked at Bucknell University in Lewisburg, Pennsylvania, in the early 1970s. Horn was jailed for nearly three weeks for contempt of court after refusing to testify for the prosecution in the 1972 conspiracy trial of the "Harrisburg Seven" anti-war activists.
The Congregation of the Dominican Sisters of St. Catherine of Siena is a Dominican congregation of religious sisters under the patronage of St. Catherine of Siena. It was founded by Father Juan de Sto. Domingo, OP and Mother Francisca del Espiritu Santo de Fuentes in 1696 for Spanish women only.
The Cornell Catholic Community is the Catholic organization and parish at Cornell University, which provides worship services and community for the university's Catholic students. Its current director is Father Daniel McCullin.
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."
Sister Theresa Kugel, OP, was a convert from Orthodox Judaism to the Russian Catholic Church, a Byzantine Rite Dominican nun in the community founded by Mother Catherine Abrikosova, and a Gulag survivor. Her birth name was Minna Rahmielovna Kugel.
Ardeth Platte, O.P., was an American Dominican religious sister and anti-nuclear activist. She was inducted into the Michigan Women's Hall of Fame in 1999.
The Dominican Congregation of Our Lady of the Sacred Heart, better known as the Dominican Sisters of Grand Rapids, is a religious congregation of sisters of the Dominican Third Order established in 1877, with their motherhouse located in Grand Rapids, Michigan. They were founded to provide education to the children of the Catholic populations of Michigan and other regions of the American Midwest. As of 2017, they have 209 sisters in the congregation.
Heather Ann Thompson is an American historian, author, activist, professor, and speaker from Detroit, Michigan. Thompson won the 2017 Pulitzer Prize for History, the 2016 Bancroft Prize, and other awards for her work Blood in the Water: The Attica Prison Uprising of 1971 and Its Legacy.
David Mack Eberhardt, is an American peace activist and poet. He is best known for his participation, with Philip Berrigan and two others, in the antiwar action known as the Baltimore Four, an immediate precursor to the Catonsville Nine.
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.
