Said Sister Megan Never (1930)
When Henry David Thoreau, jailed for nonpayment of taxes as a protest against slavery, received a visit from Ralph Waldo Emerson, the latter asked, “David, what are you doing in there?” Thoreau replied, “Ralph, what are you doing out there?” A contemporary Thoreau is an octogenarian nun, her place of activism not Walden Pond, but Oak Ridge, Tennessee.
Megan Gillespie Rice, the woman born to be the poster child of protest, was the youngest of three girls raised in Manhattan, a block away from Barnard College. Her father, Dr. Frederick Rice, was a professor of obstetrics and routinely treated indigent women at Bellevue Hospital. Her mother, Madeleine Newman Hooke Rice, held a doctorate from Columbia University and taught history at Hunter College. Megan said her mother was strongly in favor of interracial marriage―a radical view in her era―and told her daughters, “I just can’t wait until everybody in the world is tan!”
Megan was fifteen when the headlines read, “A-Bomb Dropped on Hiroshima.” Her uncle was in Nagasaki and witnessed its devastation. Rice said she had been aware since age nine of a government program so secretive that the European scientist who lived next door could not talk about his work, even to his spouse. Discussions about politics, the war, and its resultant refugee crisis of the 1940s were frequent at the dinner table. Her parents were staunch supporters of Dorothy Day and her Catholic Worker Movement and championed her throughout the Great Depression. Megan attended religious schools, and at age eighteen, she found her calling as a nun in the Order of the Catholic Society of the Holy Child Jesus. She earned a bachelor’s degree at Fordham and a master’s in biology at Boston College. In 1962, upon graduation, she traded New York for Nigeria. Sister Megan helped build the school where she later taught, slept in a classroom while it was under construction, and lived in a rural village without electricity or running water. And there she remained for thirty years.
In the late 1980s, Megan returned to the States when malaria and typhoid fever impeded her work; remembering her uncle’s graphic images of the destruction wrought by the nuclear bomb, ever the ’60s hippie, she and other peace activists knelt in the Nevada test site to block a government truck. The police took her―along with her eighty-four-year-old mother―into custody. It would be the first of forty to fifty times she would find herself behind bars. Had the Sister worn a habit, she would have exchanged it for striped garb. In 1998, she took another ride in a paddy wagon when she protested at the Army’s School of the Americas in Fort Benning, Georgia. Her anger stemmed from her belief that it taught generations of Latin American soldiers to fight leftist insurgencies, and many graduates participated in human rights abuses in their home countries. Sister Rice, who served six months in federal prison, said of her stay, “It was a great eye-opener. When you’ve had a prison experience, it minimizes your needs very much.” And, regarding Sister Megan, to borrow the phrase from Al Jolson, “You ain’t seen nothing yet, folks.”
In the 1960s, Sally Field was the flying nun; in 2012, Megan Rice became the nuclear nun. Armed with flashlights, bolt cutters, and blood held in baby bottles, the eighty-two-year-old Sister and two accomplices―a carpenter and a Vietnam War veteran, members of the Transform Now Plowshares Movement―made their way to the Y-12 National Security Complex, a nuclear weapons plant referred to as the Fort Knox of Uranium, in Oak Ridge, Tennessee. The route, undertaken in the cover of night, was daunting for a woman in her eighties who had a mild heart condition. Their plan involved walking through a wooded area for two hours, crawling underneath four fences, and eluding guards authorized to use lethal force. Sister Megan never wavered, as she felt the Holy Spirit was their guide. Upon arrival, they cut the last of the barbed wire and draped a banner on it with a drawing of a nuclear weapon and the words, “Never Again.” Afterward, they proceeded to splatter human blood on the $548-million facility, encircled by enormous towers, and spray-painted anti-war slogans. One of these was a passage from the Book of Isaiah, “They will beat their swords into plowshares, and their spears into pruning hooks; nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war anymore.” Against the concrete fortification, they laid bibles and white roses, the latter an allusion to the White Rose, a German student group that had opposed Hitler, a move that led to their beheadings. As an added touch, they affixed yellow crime-scene tape to the building of mass destruction. Around 4:30 in the morning, a patrol car appeared as they were singing a modified version of a Gospel song, “This little light of mine, let it shine all around Y-12.” Kirk Garland, a guard, gazed in astonishment at the intruders, locked himself in his SUV and called for backup. The Three Musketeers of nuclear disarmament stood beside his car door, said God had sent them, offered him some bread, and read a statement. It began, “Today, through our nonviolent Action, We, Transform Now Plowshares, indict the US Government nuclear modernization program.” Garland warned them not to make any sudden movements or remove anything from their backpacks. The two men ignored him and reached into their bags, pulled out candles, lit them, and offered him one. When Sergeant Chad Riggs arrived, he drew his gun, ordered the three suspects to the ground, and handcuffed them. The Plowshares’ action at Y-12 attracted international attention. The fact that three people, who were not trained Israeli commandos―let alone an octogenarian nun with a heart condition―could get up close and personal to the nation’s stockpile of weapons left the government with considerable mud on its face.
The protestors offered an indictment accusing the United States of crimes against humanity and compared the morality of cutting the barbed wire at Y-12 to that of cutting those at Auschwitz. Federal prosecutors fired back with an indictment of their own. They charged Sister Rice and her two co-conspirators with trespassing on government property (a misdemeanor), as well as its destruction (a felony), that carried penalties of up to thirty years in prison and fines of up to $600,000. The Plowshares pleaded not guilty. They argued a nuclear plant was a threat to the planet, and the cost of maintaining the deadly enterprise would be better spent addressing socioeconomic woes. In her defense, Sister Megan stated that nuclear weapons, not the protest against them, posed the real threat to America’s national security. Rice asked the judge for permission to let a short song be sung “to lighten the atmosphere,” and he concurred. She turned to the gallery, overflowing with supporters, and together they raised their voices, “Sacred the land, sacred the water, sacred the sky, holy and true.” The fact Rice was a silver-haired nun in her eighties played to the court of public opinion much more than had she been a twenty-something anti-nuke crusader; eleven thousand people signed a petition calling for her release. The prosecution argued that advanced age and religious affiliation should not be a mitigating factor. The jury found them guilty after little more than two hours, and Sister Megan’s sentence entailed three years in the Metropolitan Detention Center in Brooklyn. Judge Thapar stated, “I know you want a life sentence and I just can’t accommodate that request. Not only am I confident that you will live long past any sentence I give you, but I am sure that you will continue to use that brilliant mind you have. I only hope you’ll use it to effectuate change in Washington rather than crimes in Tennessee.” The defense team decided against an appeal, as the trio proclaimed they were guilty as charged and were proud of their actions.
The nun said she bonded with her fellow inmates, many of them drug addicts, victims of an economic system that invested in weapons rather than people. She railed against the horrible conditions where 100 women coexisted in one single, large bunk-bed filled room. The communal cell was the site of almost all daily activities, taking meals, exercising, and sleeping. There was never a moment of privacy, and the noise was “shrieking loud.” To corroborate her account, the New York Daily News described the cramped living conditions as “a hellhole.”
Lawyers, working pro bono, fought the charges, and two years later an appellate court ruled that the government had overreached in charging them with sabotage and the 85-year-old was set free. True to form, Sister Megan reacted to her release in a unique fashion, saying, “I felt it was an absolute grace to be there, among those people who are brave, suffering victims of the state. I was really sad when I had to leave.” The government ordered the saboteurs to pay restitution, but since Rice had taken a vow of poverty decades ago, she had neither the intention nor the means.
Josh Harkinson, a journalist for Mother Jones, asked how she felt to be free; her response, “Not that much different, because none of us is free. And it looks like we are going to go on being unfree for as long as there’s a nuclear weapon waiting.” When questioned on Democracy Now! about her life as a nun in prison, Rice gave a response worthy of Sister Jane Ingalls, a character based on her, from Orange is the New Black. “They are the ones who are the wisest in this country,” she said of her fellow inmates. “They know what is really happening. They are the fallout of nuclear weapons production.”
The leftist rabble-rouser joyfully reconnected with family and friends and took time to visit St. Patrick’s Cathedral. Still spry, despite her advanced age and her incarceration, she made her way on her own through the crowded streets of Manhattan. Her first purchase: peanut butter frozen yogurt topped with hot fudge. Afterwards, she was back to business, and in her case, this entailed conferring with her superiors about her future―one in which she planned to continue her anti-nuclear activism. Asked if she was worried that further protests would land her once again behind bars, she replied, “It would be an honor. Good Lord, what would be better than to die in prison for the anti-nuclear cause?” She added that her faith was inextricably interwoven with her cause. “Our faith is the God of life. These weapons represent the very destruction of life.” Despite all her hardships―a remote African village, numerous lock-down facilities―the 85-year-old said her life has been one of privilege, and she was grateful. No doubt she was referring to privilege, not in reference to a life of wealth or of leisure, but one in which she was the handmaiden of Jesus.
In an interview for the British newspaper the Guardian, she showed up wearing donated clothes: blue jeans and a denim shirt. When the journalist told her that jeans-on-jeans was a very fashionable look for the season, the compliment took her by surprise. After a moment, she responded, “Ah. You are saying that I am in fashion,” and gifted him with a smile. “I care about the way I look,” said Sister Megan never.