Abetted by Quaker Clearness: Praying with the Church for Peace and Nuclear Abolition

 
 

Front Left Ben of Ben & Jerry's Icecream arrested at Lockheed Martin, King of Prussia, PA Good Friday, April 2026 (Courtesy Paul Sheldon)

Paul Sheldon is a Quaker pacifist, war-tax resister, member of faculty at Villanova as Psychology Professor, who in addition to fifty years of research in the field studying tactile perception, speaks about having what Quakers call "clearness." It takes time and the trusted company of a "Clearness Committee" to come to a specific intention, as he has done six times, including taking on a "leaning" to perform civil disobedience and having a sense of rightness in doing so. Over his many years of peace activism he has placed the role of fact-guy, discussing the development of missile technology in relation to treaty obligations, but in addition to the in and out of multiple-re-entry vehicle guided warheads, he can put it all bluntly and symbolically. In as much as he wants to deliver a message to workers that might free their minds, he recognizes that the action is a kind of liturgical dance. In the end it just gives him a right feeling.

 
“Joy is what was meant to be. / The mystery of impossibility happening.” the poet J. Drew Lanham writes.

Many nuclear abolitionists put it this way: it's going to happen. At some point, they'll be gone and we'll wonder what on earth we were thinking looking back at the fact we had an omnicidal weapon. I pray that my presence matters in the sense that I connect with the community, and in some way, build that community. Bob Smith, co-founder of Brandywine, tells me over the phone he's old. But when I see his hand shaking--his Parkinson's Disease-- so much he can't hold an umbrella to protect himself from the sun, I wonder if I should offer to apply the sun lotion for him.  Part of the reason only six people showed up for the action, was a contrast in persuasion with the Coalition minded folks taking aim at the "Golden Dome" built by Lockheed Martin. It's a community of faith, and it's rooted in a tradition. But Smith's e-mail was hacked a few years ago and he's not been able to rebuild the list. Even after Fr. Rick Sieber's memorial mass, when his niece by marriage looked up on-line she saw only a rally at 2pm with speakers as posted by David Gibson, and she later regretted the confusion. It's a contrast of styles to work with large-unwieldly interests of mass-mobilizations. Paul Sheldon prefers smaller actions too. He once hunkered down as a crowd pressed past beyond rails, repeating a mantra "I am here where I am." It felt right.

 "We're dying" Smith said, on the verge of tears, and I know it. I can feel the loss with him. The car was already packed, decades of experience there, the thick stack of leaflets prepared just in case, sound system too. Piles of posters, a bag with Thoreau's meditations at Walden Pond and his famous essay on Civil Disobedience, a tripod to hold a massive metal bell. He has lost his friends and comrades but not a way of life. I'm amazed to learn he got in on the work for peace and justice with the civil rights movement and was a dedicated live-in voting rights organizer in one of the poorest areas in the region. He has seen the backwards cascade of movements he has been on the front lines of his whole adult life. I want my presence as a show of continuity to Massachusetts' recent success in the Senate, it was the news that cheered him up on the phone, that our delegation to Washington was mandated to call for the U.S. to sign the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons. Activists are dying, and/or aging, but should know no fear. We got this. 

“Death would have no great terrors for you if you had a quiet conscience, would it?” Thomas à Kempis

Sadly, most of the faithful who compose the living Church, because we are too often complicit in sins of warmaking, may not know the peace of a quiet conscience. But our Church Magisterium is but a matter often considered as the be all, the limit--and it is the job of theologians to push the limit. Having a historical horizon it helps to look at the Catholic Church within the context of resistance.

One of the thickest files amidst the Oral Histories of WWII Conscientious Objectors in the Swarthmore College Peace Collection was a file labeled Erna P. Harris. She was a flute player, a letter writing store owner for 19 years, and an ardent pacifist investigated by the FBI. Her father was a committed Ghandian and she encountered naysaying, anti-Black whites with her mother's wisdom, "Consider the source!" She could look past the individual and see the larger source of their hate, refusing to give in to evil. She met Quakers in college at Wichita State, which she attended 1932-1936. Finding a home as a Black Quaker, because of their anti-slavery work, she moved to Los Angeles and worked as a member of War Resisters League, and Fellowship of Reconciliation, She visited and raised support for the Conscientious Objectors in California. Forty years later, when she was 100 years old, she was interviewed by Craig Simpson, a National staff member of War Resisters League who co-edited with Deena Hurwtiz the interviews for the WRL 1984 calendar "Against the Tide: Pacifist Resistance in the Second World War."

Simpson: Did you ever see any Chicanos, Mexican Americans?

Harris: There were a few and I never knew them really and mostly what happened to them was it was hard for them to get classified because many of them were really Catholics and the Catholic Church, at that time, had not settled on any policy. There was the just war theory and all these stupid theories that varied diocese to diocese actually it was really terrible. They are still struggling with that and they are finally getting around to the fact that isn’t a just war. If you have nuclear weapons. I’m not sure what they say well. “We have thrown them all in the ocean (to poison the oceans) and we just have standard weapons.” I’m not sure what they’ll say. They may have talked themselves into a box so that they say there is no such thing as a just war. Those guys had a hard time because they had no ministerial support which you needed.”

Pope John Paul II visited Hiroshima in 1981. Pope Francis visited in 2018, declaring social teaching from the pulpit: the possession of nuclear weapons a sin. He promulgated a Year of Nonviolence. Pope Leo XVI seems to advance the peace agenda most directly in his recent visit to Africa. Many pray for an encyclical, the highest authoritative document, as impactful and timely as Magnifica Humanitas to not let AI have the Bomb. 

In the present day, while the U.S. Bishops have not voiced strong opposition to nuclear weapons, a dedicated pair of Archbishops, Etienne of Seattle, and John Wester of Santa Fe, New Mexico, are in partnership with the Archbishops of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Members of Pax Christi New England for the Abolition of Nuclear Weapons such as Charles Washburn of Worcester who met with them in a delegation to Japan to observe the 80th anniversary of the US bombing were encouraged by their strong position. 

 Japan Catholic Bishops declared last year, “We must not forget the existence of victims related to nuclear testing and uranium mining, the “Global Hibakusha” (hibakusha= atomic victims) who force us to take a broader view of atomic survivors. Therefore, the development, testing, production, possession and use of nuclear weapons are ethically impermissible. The concept of nuclear deterrence is not only an ineffective means of resolving conflicts, but it also plunges the world into a ‘security dilemma’ that in reality pushes the world toward the brink of nuclear war. We cannot tolerate this kind of thinking.”

Thanks to Washburn's preparation and advocacy to support priests preparation for a homily to observe Nagasaki Day, I had sent to Fr. Rick at the Paulist Center the suggested prayers of the faithful, the links to Archbishop Wester's pastoral Living in the Light of Christ's Peace and other materials. He thanked me when he saw me the week before. But on the Sunday, before the Mass, he said, "I'm sorry, I didn't see a fit. But who knows, the Spirit may move and I'll find a way."

Fr. Rick improvised an additional prayer of the faithful, somberly, that someone that morning had reminded him it was Nagasaki Day, let us pray that such horror never happen again. 

"You'll get an envelope in the mail," Sheldon said, showing me a stack of IRS envelopes, unopened. It's slightly confusing. He's a war tax resister but he also refuses to pay the fine. It could be $400 or $500, he said. I plan to contest it, asking if he might be able to drum up support, maybe come to court. He apologizes explaining, he has a warrant out and showing up in court might be seen as thumbing his nose at them. 

As Dr. King wrote, “Whenever the early Christians entered a town the power structure got disturbed and immediately sought to convict them for being ‘disturbers of the peace’.... …Maybe I must turn my faith to the inner spiritual Church, the church within the Church, as the true ecclesia and the hope of the world. [But some noble souls from the ranks of organized religion have broken loose from the paralyzing chains of conformity and joined us as active partners…. Their witness has been the spiritual salt that has preserved the true meaning of the Gospel in these troubled times.”

 

Fr. Pat Sieber, OFM arrested at Lockheed Martin, King of Prussia Good Friday, 2026 (Courtesy Paul Sheldon)

 

Sources:

Thomas à Kempis, The Imitation of Christ. Trans. Ronald Knox. San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2005. 63.

Pope Paul VI, Visit to the United Nations: Speech to the United Nations Organization (October 4, 1965)

Japan Catholic Bishops’ Declaration on the Abolition of Nuclear Weapons 2025 <hhttps://www.cbcj.catholic.jp/2025/06/20/32800/>.

J. Drew Lanham, Joy is the Justice We Give Ourselves. Spartanburg, SC: Hub City Press, 2024.

Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Letter from Birmingham Jail (16 April 1963)

Erna P. Harris. 1 March 1983.  Oral History by Craig Simpson. Peace Collection. Swarthmore College.