Activist lectures about peace demonstrations, jail time and challenges for ND students
By MATT BUNDA
News Writer
While scenes of children playing with miniature M-16s, climbing around a military helicopter's machine guns and gawking at a B-52 bomber flashed across a screen, Father Frank Cordaro spoke to a small crowd in the Center for Social Concerns Wednesday.
Cordaro, invited to campus by Pax Christi, preached a doctrine of peace and recounted how civil disobedience during pacifist demonstrations landed him in jail for three of the last 20 years.
On May 17, 1998, Cordaro and four other activists attended an air show at Andrews Air Force Base near Washington, D.C., to deface and attempt to disarm a nuclear warhead.
Calling themselves "Gods of Metal Plowshares," the activists poured human blood on the plane in protest. The group also hammered the bomber's undercarriage, knocking the bomb bay area 30 times, Cordaro said as he showed a slide show of the protest, for which he served six months in jail last year.
The demonstration honored civil disobedience acts of the Catonsville Nine, a group headed by Catholic activists Daniel and Philip Berrigan, who burned military draft files with homemade napalm 30 years earlier.
Cordaro compared ancient worship of idols and hand-made tools to modern-day reverence of weapons of mass destruction.
"An air show is a carnival with lawn chairs and picnics and beer and sandwiches," Cordaro said. "School buses cart children to the show to pay adoration to these weapons."
According to Cordaro, one-half of those who attend air shows are children, who thus are "cultured in the culture of violence."
Cordaro explained the theology of the plowshares group with a quote from Isaiah: "Some day nations will beat their swords into plowshares, taking implements of destruction and using them to create and sow, and study war no more."
He said this prophetic passage is an imperative call for the end of violence. He also said the prophecy was fulfilled by Jesus.
"We want to put into practice what we were supposed to all along — beating our swords into plowshares," Cordaro said.
Cordaro called for the Catholic Church to promote and support pacifist and anti-violence theology more actively. A Theology of peace is pronounced by nearly every Catholic theologian writing today, Cordaro added.
He also called for a change in the atmosphere of the University itself. He said the Clark War Memorial, Notre Dame's active ROTC membership and government research and funding on campus are vehicles of a violence-obsessed culture.
All News Stories for Thursday, September 30, 1999
