Priests against the empire

Prophets Without Honor: A Requiem for Moral Patriotism
By William Strabala and Michael Palecek
Algora Publishing, 2002
380 pages, US$23.95
Available at <http://Amazon.com>

Prophets Without Honor tells the story of a group of priests and the stalwart women who helped them form an international movement called Plowshares. These dissident priests are part of the rarely told "morally patriotic story of America", state authors William Strabala and Michael Palecek.

Darrell Rupiper, Larry Rosebaugh and Carl Kabat are Oblate missionary priests. Frank Cordaro is a diocesan priest from Des Moines. Roy Bourgeois is a Maryknoll priest. Charlie Liteky is an ex-Trinitarian priest.

Rosebaugh now lives with the poor in El Salvador. He was a member of the Milwaukee 14, a group that burned draft records in accord with the example set by the Berrigan brothers at Catonsville, Maryland in 1968.

Kabat has served more than 16 years in US federal and state prisons since 1980 as a result of his anti-military actions. Cordaro has served half a dozen federal prison terms for his anti-nuclear activities.

Bourgeois, from the deep south and a former military officer who served in Vietnam, recently made front-page news as leader of the massive protests at Fort Benning, Georgia, calling for the closing of the US military's School of the Americas — a "terrorist training camp". Bourgeois and Rosebaugh also served prison terms in the 1980s when they sneaked into Fort Benning, climbed a tree and played a tape outside the El Salvadoran soldiers' barracks of the last sermon given by slain archbishop Oscar Romero.

Liteky is a former chaplain who served in Vietnam. He received the Congressional Medal of Honor and later surrendered it in protest at the US war in Vietnam.

With the exception of Cordaro, all of these men began their clerical careers as missionaries in the Third World. They discovered that the trail of the poor leads through such countries directly back to the US. They also discovered that the America they grew up in never existed. They read history and learned about the USA's militarism, its attempts at global hegemony and they felt they must resist.

Few in America know about these priests, even though they have managed to make front-page news at different times. The Berrigan brothers are the prototype for Rupiper, Cordaro, Rosebaugh, Kabat and Bourgeois. Just this past year, 78 year-old Philip Berrigan was again jailed for damaging a US fighter plane used in the bombing of Yugoslavia.

Why is the book entitled Prophets Without Honor? The US fundamentalist preacher Billy Graham has a book entitled Prophet With Honor. Strabala and Palecek declare that Rupiper, Cordaro, Rosebaugh, Kabat and Bourgeois practice a very different type of Christianity to that which Graham and officialdom preach to the US people.

From Green Left Weekly, September 18, 2002.

Visit the Green Left Weekly home page.

From GLW issue 509