ARTICLES

Arrested Again and Again

This Time, though, It's More Like Jay-Walking

By Christopher Zehnder

After serving three months at federal prison camp for peace activism, Father Louis Vitale was arrested again on March 14, according to the March 24 Catholic Voice, the organ of the diocese of Oakland. Vitale, a Franciscan, went to the prison camp at Nellis Air Force Base in December for protesting at Fort Benning, Georgia in 2001. Fort Benning is the site for the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation, once known as the School of the Americas, which, critics say, has trained and continues to train foreign military personnel in acts of repression. On March 14, Father Vitale, the pastor of St. Boniface church in San Francisco, joined Father Bill O'Donnell, priest at St. Joseph the Worker parish in Berkeley, and about 80 others, in stopping traffic in front of San Francisco's Pacific Stock Exchange. They called it a preview of what would happen on the first business day following the United States' opening of hostilities against Iraq. Both Vitale and O'Donnell were arrested. Three days later, Vitale was again arrested with a group of about 40 protestors for blocking the entrance to the British consulate in San Francisco.

"A man named Warren Langley, kind of led this [March 14 protest]," Father Vitale told me on April 3. Langley, said Vitale, is "a retired colonel who was the president of the Pacific Stock Exchange, who did his first-ever demonstration against the war on January 18 and wanted to do this at the stock exchange. So we were there trying to call attention to what was happening."

Why is a priest engaging in anti-war protests -- and being arrested? "I believe it is a way to raise consciousness," answered Vitale. "The Holy Father himself has been extremely strong -- probably stronger than almost anyone in the world -- in denouncing the [Iraq] war as unjust and immoral," Vitale said. "During the first Gulf War I did like a 40-day fast -- that's how I expressed it then -- and I wrote to all these different cardinals and bishops, and said, 'is anyone saying whether this war is just or unjust? We have criteria for that and we have moral theologians. What do I say to an 18-year-old kid who comes to me and asks whether he should go or not?' I got very little guidance. But the pope (and even Cardinal Ratzinger) has been very explicit. The pope even said the other day that he was appreciative of the worldwide peace movement."

Vitale referred the Pope John Paul's March 25 message to military chaplains. According to a Catholic News Service report, though the pontiff said that "thinking of the victims, the destruction and the sufferings provoked by armed conflicts always causes profound worries and great pain," he noted the worldwide peace protests as a sign of hope. By now, he said, "it should be clear to everyone" that "a large part of humanity" has rejected warfare, except in defense against an aggressor. "The vast contemporary movement for peace -- which the Second Vatican Council teaches is not just the 'simple absence of war' -- demonstrates this conviction of people on every continent and of every culture," he said.

The 71-year-old Vitale has for many years fasted, prayed, and spoken out against war. The priest had served in the military in the early '50s and said that, today, he is "appalled at the kind of thing we talked about then -- how big a circle of people you could wipe with nuclear weapons. The Church is very much against that. The U.S is talking about using nuclear weapons -- in a recent meeting with Tony Blair, President Bush has said that he's not ruling it out."

Vitale says he has a good deal of confidence in peaceful protest. "I have a doctor's degree in sociology from UCLA," said Vitale, "and have studied social movements, from Ghandi -- which was really based on Christian beatitudes -- to King and Cesar Chavez, whom I knew fairly well. I have seen people's movements in the Philippines and in the Soviet Union and in South Africa, where they brought about radical changes without bloodshed. I'm a strong a believer in something Martin Luther King called the 'theology of stepping off the curb,' as when he went to Selma and places like that. It's putting your body there in a non-violent way."

Vitale admits that civil disobedience is a debatable tactic. "I get in debates with friends and, certainly, with my family, about whether or not this is a good thing to do, but I'm convinced." One incident of the March 17 protest confirmed his conviction for him. "We had met before with the British consul general -- and he was actually a former UNSCOM inspector -- and tried to make our point; and yet, at the end of the interview he went his way and supported Blair's position, though he himself said they had succeded in getting rid of all the weapons," said Vitale. Vitale said the consul told him that the inspectors "were surprised that the Iraqis had such an array of such weapons, but that they [the inspectors] were successful in getting rid of them."

As for his arrests, Vitale said that "we have a court date. It's like a traffic ticket -- it's probably just an infraction, like if you were jay-walking. My understanding is that they will probably fine us, but are probably more likely, this being San Francisco, to drop the charges. It's before the district attorney at this time."

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