Last December, the Vatican released a statement that broke from decades of Church teaching on nuclear weapons. The distinction between having them and using them seems to have vanished. ‘Now is the time to affirm not only the immorality of nuclear weapons, but the immorality of their possession, thereby clearing the road to abolition,’ the Vatican said. And Dorothy Day, once mocked and reviled, is now being promoted for sainthood by Cardinal Timothy M. Dolan, the conservative Archbishop of New York.

a prophet and a saint

The Department of Justice doesn’t seem proud of having imprisoned the Plowshares activists who broke into Y-12. Nobody at the Justice Department or the US Attorney’s Office in Knoxville would discuss the case with me. Nor would the two prosecutors who handled the case.

Sister Megan Rice is currently imprisoned at the Metropolitan Detention Center in Brooklyn. My request to visit her was denied by Kimberly Ask-Carlson, the prison’s warden. When I appealed the decision, my request was denied again. Asked for an explanation, Warden Ask-Carlson wrote me a letter that said, ‘I have decided to deny your request due to safety and security concerns.’ When I inquired whose safety and security might be jeopardized by my visit, a prison spokesman declined to answer. Sister Megan is eighty-five, one of the oldest women in the federal prison system, and she has a heart condition. During roughly the same period in which the Justice Department refused to let me meet with her for security reasons, the NNSA allowed me to visit three high-security nuclear-weapons sites.

I corresponded with Sister Megan for months, and she was eventually allowed to speak to me on the phone for an hour. We talked about her upbringing in Manhattan, her parents, and their commitment to racial equality in the 1930s. She told me about her years in Africa and her introduction to the peace movement. We discussed what happened at Y-12. But the subject that Sister Megan now seems the most passionate about is the suffering of her fellow inmates. She is confined in a dormitory, not a cell. It has about sixty bunk beds, separated from one another by a few feet, without any partitions. There is no privacy, and the room can get ‘shrieking’ loud. Many of the women seem to have been incarcerated for drug offences. She thinks that most of them have been the victims of abuse. Instead of complaining or focusing on her own case, she has encouraged inmates to write to me about theirs. At the end of a conversation that felt too brief, Sister Megan said, ‘Bless you, brother. And thanks.’