| II | Spotting an unknown Benedictine prioress* on Victoria station would once have been a | |
| relatively easy matter. No longer. Even so distinguished a personage as Joan Chittister PhD | ||
| (Psychology, Media and Communications), president of the American Benedictine Prioresses, | ||
| delegate to the White House Religious Conference on Salt II, and outspoken voice of the American | ||
| 5 | Feminist, Peace, and Civil Rights movement, looks much like you or me. WeIl me, anyway. | |
| When I found her, a slightly crumpled figure in a red trouser suit, Sister laan seemed smaller | ||
| than her reputation. At 47 she has short, slightly frosted, curly hair, the clearest of pale blue | ||
| eyes, and enough human warmth to light peace candles all over the world. | ||
| This first day of her tour was to have been a quiet one. A personal pilgrimage to Canterbury | ||
| 10 | before a frenetic round of debate - on American aggression, Holy Disobedience, and every aspect | |
| of Christian pacifism. Now it was gone, eaten up by fog, delayed flights, and missed connections. | ||
| Tucked into every gap in her timetable were meetings and the only breathing space was the | ||
| 4.52 stopping train to Canterbury. Thus it came about that, as we jolted through the London | ||
| suburbs and out along the Kentish coast, she explained, to the bemused ears of the homebound | ||
| 15 | 15 commuters, her supra-national, supra-denominational mission, undertaken at the invitation of | |
| Catholics, Quakers, Unitarians, and all stages in between. | ||
| But first we established the background. 'An only child ... entered the Order at 16 ... now | ||
| Prioress of the Benedictine nuns of Eerie, Pennsylvania, and, in spite of what I have to say about | ||
| our policies, an ardent American.' She is not quite a pacifist . 'I'd love to be but I just don't have • | ||
| 20 | the virtue. Grab me in an alley,' she says wryly, 'and I'll swing first and talk about it afterwards.' | |
| 'I guess I'm here,' she said in answer to my question, 'because I am utterly convineed that the | ||
| nuclear issue is a global issue . We all got the same stake in the survival of the planet and we all | ||
| got to make our voices heard. And you in England, by putting those cruise missiles in the silos, | ||
| are in the process of introducing a whole new level to the nuclear question, one from which there | ||
| 25 | is no retreat.' | |
| She adds, 'You people have to take the responsibility.' And if your conscience tells you that | ||
| your democratically elected government is wrong - what then? 'Then you may have to follow | ||
| the path of Holy Disobedience.' | ||
| Having now come round to the belief that though there may still be lust Causes, there can no | ||
| 30 | longer be lust Wars, Joan has become an authority on Holy Disobedience. 'After World War II the | |
| philosopher Gertrude Stein said the most important thing for the Germans to learn was | ||
| disobedience. Then in the early seventies an American found that West German youth was | ||
| much less authoritarian than American youth. After that we got Milgram's studies which showed | ||
| that between 66 and 85 per cent of the people taking part in a laboratory experiment were | ||
| 35 | willing to administer electric shocks, to the point where the subject apparently died, simply | |
| because an authority figure in a white coat told them it was right.' e | ||
| Faced with the nuclear threat most of us feel too powerless even to contemplate the question. | ||
| Not so the Prioress. Thus, when the American bishops failed to take a stand against nuclear arms | ||
| in th eir pastoralletter, she pointed up their irrationality, chauvinism, and lack of moral | ||
| 40 | commitment: 'What is a woman to think,' she asked them, 'that when life is in the hands of a | |
| woman, to destroy it (by abortion) is always morally wrong; but when alllife on earth is in the | ||
| hands of men, then the matter can be theologised.' She doesn't take credit for it, but when the | ||
| second pastoralletter, War and Peace in a Nuclear Age, was published, the bishops had addressed | ||
| themselves to every issue raised in her critique. "They have said there is no justification for | ||
| 45 | submitting the human race to the risk of nuclear war. Not even communism. Communism is | |
| simply apolitical system - the Russians, too, are the creation of God.' |