[Excerpted] In interviews this week, Sister Rice discussed her
life — somewhat reluctantly at times — and kept emphasizing what she called “the
issue.”
“It’s the criminality of this 70-year industry,” she
said. “We spend more on nuclear arms than on the departments of education,
health, transportation, disaster relief and a number of other government
agencies that I can’t remember.”
The Nun Who Broke Into the Nuclear Sanctum. August 10, 2012 The New York Times http://www.nytimes.com/2012/08/11/science/behind-nuclear-breach-a-nuns-bold-fervor.html?_r=1&nl=todaysheadlines&emc=edit_th_20120811
Majia here: What else did she do?
[Excerpted] Sister Rice went to Catholic schools in Manhattan,
became a nun at 18 and received degrees in biology from Villanova and Boston
College, where her studies included class work at Harvard Medical School on how
to use radioactive tracers. From 1962 to 2004, with occasional breaks, she
served her order as a schoolteacher in Nigeria and Ghana.
“We slept in a classroom — no electricity, no water,”
she said of her early days in rural Africa.
...In 1998, she was arrested in a protest at the School of the Americas, an Army
school at Fort Benning, in Georgia. It taught generations of Latin American
soldiers to fight leftist insurgencies; some went on to commit human rights
abuses. The school has since been closed....
read the full article linked above
Sister Rice is a part of the Catholic left that have been activists since the early part of the 20th century. Dorothy Day, Thomas Merton, Daniel and Philip Berrigan, Kathy Kelly, Karl Meyer are some of the most famous figures. They were active in opposition to the Vietnam war, the Iraq war, and nuclear weapons, the existence of which of course is the reason we have nuclear power.
ReplyDeleteYou don't hear about them much in the media. They are classified together with the blow-dried, knuckledragging fundamentalists because of "religion". But most of them are far more liberal than I am.