News Release Archive - Religion

Amy Coney Barrett is expected to be voted in as a member of the Supreme Court today.

Al Jazeera reports: “Treaty banning nuclear weapons to enter into force,” which states: “Fifty countries have ratified an international treaty to ban nuclear weapons, the United Nations has announced, allowing the ‘historic’ text to enter into force in 90 days.

“Honduras became the 50th country to ratify the landmark Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons (TPNW), the UN said on Saturday, in a move hailed by anti-nuclear activists but strongly opposed by the United States” and the other nuclear powers.

“UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres commended the 50 states and saluted ‘the instrumental work’ of civil society in facilitating negotiations and pushing for ratification. …

“The UN chief said the treaty’s entry into force on January 22, 2021, crowns a worldwide movement ‘to draw attention to the catastrophic humanitarian consequences of any use of nuclear weapons’ and ‘is a tribute to the survivors of nuclear explosions and tests, many of whom advocated for this treaty.’ …

“The International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons (ICAN), the 2017 Nobel Peace Prize-winning coalition whose work helped spearhead the nuclear ban treaty, called the development a ‘historic milestone.'”

PATRICK O’NEILL, via Bill Ofenloch, billcpf@aol.com;
Mary Anne Grady Flores, gradyflores08@gmail.com

O’Neill was just sentenced to 14 months in prison for peacefully protesting nuclear weapons. He and the other Kings Bay Plowshares 7 entered a massive Trident nuclear submarine base in Georgia in 2018 and were convicted of trespassing and other crimes. See background on their case and statements by supporters, including Archbishop Desmond Tutu at KingsBayPlowshares7.org and @kingsbayplow7.

    At his recent sentencing hearing, O’Neill said: “While this court disregards the international laws signed by our nation and upheld by our constitution (Article 6, section 2, the Supremacy Clause) which our courts are to uphold above all domestic laws, I, under obligation to these laws and God’s laws, have attempted to uphold these laws and abide by them in our actions at Kings Bay.

    “In fact, our government has violated many vital laws regarding nuclear weapons, the Nuclear Proliferation Treaty clearly, among many others. But there is also good news. The Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons any day now WILL Be International Law. As of this week, 47 nations have ratified the treaty. Only three more nations are needed for global ratification that will mean there is NO doubt that we will have this new International Law on the books in the very near future.

“That’s why you, Judge Wood, in perhaps the only time you expressed your personal opinion during the trial, said Trident is probably not unlawful. The United States’ refusal to recognize international law does not make international law irrelevant.” The court refused to hear expert testimony by Prof. Francis Boyle on the illegality of nuclear weapons and by Daniel Ellsberg regarding the necessity defense.

    O’Neill also noted at his sentencing hearing that a court magistrate conceded that their actions were “prophetic, sacramental” and sought “symbolic denuclearization” — but yet, the judge ensured that the “jury never heard any evidence about the Religious Freedom Restoration Act.” That is, an Act that is touted by Barrett, Attorney General William Barr, Vice President Mike Pence and others was rendered moot in the Plowshares case because of an alleged “compelling interest” of the government regarding its military assets, e.g. the base where nuclear weapons were neither confirmed nor denied by government witnesses on the stand.

Also, see: “Religious Left Catholics on Judge Barrett.”

The New York Times reports in “Ardeth Platte, Dominican Nun and Antinuclear Activist, Dies at 84” that “Sister Ardeth spent years behind bars for her beliefs and was the inspiration for a character on the Netflix hit ‘Orange Is the New Black.'”

On Thursday and Friday, sentencing will take place for Fr. Steven Kelly, a Jesuit priest, and his co-defendant Patrick O’Neill, who co-founded a Catholic Worker house in Garner, North Carolina. Kelly has been in jail for the last two and a half years. They are part of the Kings Bay Plowshares 7, Catholic Worker activists who entered the largest U.S. nuclear weapons facility in Georgia on April 4, 2018, exactly 50 years after Martin Luther King’s assasination. See KingsBayPlowshares7.org for background and @kingsbayplow7 for up-to-date information, including how to listen to the sentencing.

Plowshares activists follow the biblical edict to “beat swords into plowshares.” (See O’Neill’s oral arguments on the Religious Freedom Restoration Act, an act championed by William Barr and Mike Pence — and mentioned by Ted Cruz during Barrett’s hearings — but prohibited by the court in this case.)

PAUL MAGNO, pmagno56@gmail.com
Magno is with Jonah House, an activist spiritual community in Baltimore, where many of the 100 Plowshares actions originated. It was founded by the late Philip Barrigan and Liz McAlister (see below) where Sister Ardeth lived for many years. He is currently in Brunswick, Georgia where the sentencing for Fr. Kelly and O’Neill will take place.

He said today: “It is a shame that Amy Coney Barrett didn’t pursue college or law school locally in her native New Orleans. If she had, she might have met and been mentored by a great lawyer, Bill Quigley, who is also a Catholic driven by his faith. He understands that social justice needs to be an intrinsic component of law in order to make justice a widely available resource for poor and marginalized constituencies in U.S society.

“Quigley has trained and mentored a host of advocacy-focused attorneys over the years from his place as professor at Loyola University in New Orleans, defended peace activists as part of the SOA Watch legal collective for over 30 years and the faith-based disarmament activists of the Plowshares movement. Notably he won an appeal for the three Transform Now Plowshares activists convicted in Tennessee after gaining entry to the Oak Ridge nuclear weapons complex in July of 2012. Their sabotage conviction was overturned and they were released from prison after serving two years apiece of much longer sentences imposed after their trial in Knoxville in the Spring of 2013. This week two other clients of his will face sentencing in Brunswick Georgia for their Kings Bay Plowshares incursion onto a Trident submarine base in April of 2018.”

Instead, said Magno, Barrett “has advanced professionally under the aegis of the Federalist Society and the influence of figures such as the late Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia. With her opening remarks, ‘courts are not designed to solve every problem or right every wrong in our public life,’ she embraces the notion of judicial indifference to social injustice and a judiciary that makes a virtue of that helplessness.

“A saying of medieval Catholic philosopher Thomas Aquinas is worth remembering. He said: ‘Law, when it ceases to be justice, ceases even to be law.'”

Liz Mcalister, who is also one of the Kings Bay Plowshares 7, and was represented by Quigley, said: “This isn’t the first time that Steve Kelly faces the court of law — not the court of justice. I don’t think he even keeps count of how many times he’s stood before courts, or how long he has spent in jails and prisons. He enters all those spaces with grace and peace, knowing that the work that he can do there is welcome and needed and a gift to all of us. I trust that he will put any additional time in prison to good use, and that it will be a time of deep prayer, oriented toward transforming our world into a more just and peaceful place. We are grateful for his witness and I am called to a deeper commitment to the work for peace and justice by my brother Steve Kelly.”

Trump has stated that he will announce his nominee to the Supreme Court on Saturday.

BETTY CLERMONT, bettyclermont@gmail.com
Clermont is author of The Neo-Catholics: Implementing Christian Nationalism in America. She writes at The Open Tabernacle blog.

She said today: “Leonard Leo selects Trump’s judicial nominees. In addition to his role at the Federalist Society, Leo is a board member of Opus Dei’s Catholic Information Center. Attorney General Bill Barr and White House Counsel Pat Cipollone have also been board members. See recent piece from The Washington Monthly: “What Drives Leonard Leo’s Campaign to Remake the Courts?” Barr just received an award from the National Catholic Prayer Breakfast; Leo is also president of the board of that group.

“Indeed, at the top, Opus Dei ‘is an efficient machine run to achieve world power,’ investigative reporter Penny Lernoux wrote in her book People of God: The Struggle for World Catholicism.

“As Lernoux’s remark indicates, there is a struggle inside Catholicism and Opus Dei and groups it founded like the innocent-sounding Catholic Information Center are not at all representative of Catholics, rather it uses the garb of faith for political power for a narrow elite. The people Leo chooses are selected for their proven adherence to right-wing ideology of power at any cost. Whomever Leo gets Trump to nominate and Mitch McConnell’s Senate is set to approve, it will lead to further decay of our national wellbeing.”

Martin A. Lee, a specialist on far-right movements has written: “Opus Dei has emerged internationally as one of the most powerful and politically committed of the Catholic lay groups. Detractors have likened the organization to a ‘saintly Mafia,’ for its members control a large number of banks and financial institutions. … In the latter stages of the Franco regime, ten out of 19 cabinet officers belonged to or were closely allied with Opus Dei.”

“Opus Dei uses the Catholic Church for its own ends which are money and power …. Its members form a transnational elite. They seek to colonize the summits of power. They work with stealth — ‘holy discretion’ — and practice ‘divine deception,’” Robert Hutchison stated in the introduction to his book, Their Kingdom Come: Inside the Secret World of Opus Dei.

See pieces by Clermont: “Opus Dei’s Influence on the U.S. Judiciary,” “Opus Dei’s William Barr, the Trump Whisperer” and “Opus Dei’s Influence is Felt in All of Washington’s Corridors of Power.”