Sister Lelia Mattingly is currently serving a six-month prison term for civil disobedience after crossing the line at a protest.

Rita J. King

For decades, Maryknoll Sister Lelia Mattingly followed a bloody trail across Latin America. Her journey eventually took her across the protest line at a military base in Georgia, and now it will take her to prison in Connecticut.

The Catholic nun, who has spent the last several years at Maryknoll in Ossining, will begin her six-month stint at the Danbury federal prison this Tuesday, the penalty for a repeat charge of civil disobedience for crossing the line onto a military base during a protest.

In November 2004, Mattingly, 64, and 16,000 others participated in the “largest anti-war protest since Vietnam” at the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation (WHINSEC), formerly known as the School of the Americas (SOA) at the Fort Benning military base in Georgia.

Fifteen activists were arrested, including two minors and a blind man who, along with Mattingly, climbed over razor wire to access the military base after hiking through the woods.

Once on the base, Mattingly and her two partners created a makeshift cemetery with crosses painted with the names of two Maryknoll Sisters, another Catholic nun and a lay missioner who had been raped and murdered in 1980 in El Salvador by soldiers, months after the Archbishop Oscar Romero was murdered while saying mass. SOA graduates, Mattingly said, were responsible for these slayings.

After Mattingly and her two companions prayed over the crosses planted on the military base, they approached guards and were arrested soon after, led off in plastic cuffs to be processed and charged.

“They’re making it harder and harder to cross the line,” Mattingly said in reference to the atmosphere of heightened security after September 11, 2001.

The SOA protest was led by Maryknoll priest Father Roy Bourgeois, 66, and actor Martin Sheen, who plays the President of the United States on the Emmy award-winning television show The West Wing and is a peace activist who met Bourgeois while the priest was in jail in 1996 for trespassing during an SOA protest.

Civil disobedience has been a manner of protest since the signatures dried on the Constitution. The writer Henry David Thoreau failed to pay his poll-tax for six years to protest the manner in which the money was being spent, and for his crime was sentenced to a single night in prison, an experience that yielded one of his most famous essays, “Resistance to Civil Government.”

“What is the price…of an honest man and patriot today?” Thoreau wrote. “They hesitate, and they regret, and sometimes they petition, but they do nothing in earnest and with effect. They will wait, well-disposed, for others to remedy the evil…”

Sister “Lil” Mattingly is now among the two hundred political prisoners who believe they have shattered that paradigm in protesting SOA.

The School of the Americas

On September 21, 1996, SOA, as it was then known, made the front page of newspapers across the world, including a story in the Washington Post, “US Instructed Latins on Executions, Torture, Manuals Used 1982-91, Pentagon Reveals.”

The story, written by Dana Priest, explains that U.S. Army intelligence manuals used to train military officers at SOA “advocated executions, torture, blackmail and other forms of coercion against insurgents.”

Pentagon documents had been released a day before the news broke, detailing the bloody legacy of the school now known as WHINSEC. The manual, Priest wrote, “says that to recruit and control informants, counterintelligence agents could use ‘fear, payment of bounties for enemy dead, beatings, false imprisonment, executions and the use of truth serum,’ according to a secret Defense Department summary.”

Students of the SOA include some of Latin America’s most brutal dictators and violators of human rights, Bourgeois said, including Panamanian General Manuel Antonio Noriega, now serving a long prison term in Miami on drug charges, Roberto D'Aubuisson, the leader of El Salvador's death squads, 19 Salvadoran soldiers linked to the 1989 assassination of six Jesuit priests, a woman and her daughter, six Peruvian officers linked to killings of a professor and a group of students and others too numerous to detail.

WHINSEC was established by a defense authorization act signed by President Bill Clinton on October 30, 2000. WHINSEC spokesman Lee Rials said the primary difference between SOA and WHINSEC is that “Congress closed the doors on one and opened the doors on the other.” Bourgeois said the organization’s name change means little.

The institute, Rials said, is so transparent that they host an open house once a year, during the weekend of the annual protest. Like all schools run by the U.S. Department of Defense, he said, WHINSEC teaches “in accordance with the values and doctrines of human rights.”

Some of the worst offenders who went on to commit violence, like D'Aubuisson, Rials said, were simply on site to take a single communications class.

“People come here for a specific course and then return to their jobs,” Rials said. “Just because a person goes on do something horrific doesn’t mean they learned it at the SOA.”

The manuals that had been found at the SOA that appeared to condone torture methods were not course material, Rials said, but “supplemental reading” brought in by someone from another military organization.

“Those brochures were never a part of the curriculum,” Rials added.

WHINSEC’s stated mission is to, “Provide professional education and training to military, law enforcement, and civilians to support the democratic principles of the Western Hemisphere, help to ensure peace and stability throughout the hemisphere and promote democratic values, respect for human rights and knowledge and understanding of U.S. customs and traditions.”

Preserving “regional peace and prosperity through exercising collective self defense” is part of the stated goal.

Current graduates are mandated to take at least eight hours minimum of Human Rights training. WHINSEC refers to this program as “ambitious and effective.”

“It is an exciting educational experience for a new generation of armed forces members, committed to the rule of law and respect for international human rights rules and democratic values,” WHINSEC states. “The Democracy and Human Rights Program contributes significantly to a culture of respect for human rights, rule of law and democratic institutions and is part of the democratic future of the Western Hemisphere.”

Eight hundred to one thousand graduates per year are educated at WHINSEC.

“I’d like to see the twenty million taxpayers spend each year on WHINSEC go toward our own children,” Bourgeois said.

Bourgeois, who lives in a small apartment right at the gate of the Fort Benning military base, is a Vietnam veteran. During his year in Vietnam as a naval officer, the violence and death he witnessed led him to start thinking about “peacemaking,” he said.

Rials said Bourgeois is a “charming and charismatic guy,” but feels he’s wasting his energy in the wrong direction.

“He is misleading,” Rials said, “particularly those people who want to do good for the world. They are protesting a place that is not what they say it is. What good would it do if they succeeded in shutting it down? It just doesn’t seem to be a worthwhile cause.”

While in Vietnam, Bourgeois met a Maryknoll missioner who began to shape his perspective on the future. In 1972, he was ordained as a priest. In 1990, after six Jesuits were massacred in El Salvador, Bourgeois started researching human rights and United Nations reports.

“As word of the atrocities began to spread, people started to come to Fort Benning to protest,” Bourgeois said. “In 1990, there were ten of us here. The next year, we had one hundred. After that, there were five hundred, and then a thousand. This year we had sixteen thousand.”

Civil Disobedience

The first time Mattingly was arrested at an SOA protest was before September 11, 2001, and as a result she was banned and barred from participating in future protests at Fort Benning. At the time she was working a four-year stint at Maryknoll in Ossining as Coordinator of the Renewal Office, helping Maryknoll Sisters, many of whom are elderly, talk through their time in war zones or working with impoverished people in various capacities.

Around the same time her job was completed, Mattingly’s 89 year-old mother passed away. With both responsibilities drawn to a close, she said she was now free to get arrested at the SOA protest and surrender to a six-month prison sentence in return.

Mattingly said the SOA protest is a “beautiful, peaceful experience” that includes a solemn funeral procession, a rally, booths promoting various non-violent initiatives, performances, and speeches.

“It’s very creative and dramatic,” she said, smiling. “It’s a wonderful chance to reconnect with civil, religious and political issues. I’ve always treasured the non-violence. It’s a prayerful and peaceful experience that keeps me energized for the whole year.”

Maryknoll Sister Rosemary Huber, 70, also attended the protest last year.

“It’s an intergenerational experience,” she said. “You see a lot of white hair but also young people and families, children drawing on the streets with colored chalk.”

The protest begins on a Friday night, and on Saturday night after the rally, things got “very serious,” recalled Mattingly.

Mattingly and hundreds of others engaged in a process called “discernment” at a convention hall in Georgia on Saturday night. Ideas were shared and the group offered reflections about the actions Mattingly and others would take to get arrested.

“When we shared the decision to cross the line…these people were so beautiful, it gives me chills to talk about it,” she said. “Just being with them, God was saying, ‘you’re at home with these people.’”

All she wanted to do was “plant her crosses on the base,” painted with the names of slain Maryknoll Sisters Ita Ford and Maura Clark, another Catholic nun named Sister Dorothy Kazel and a Lay Missionary named Jean Donovan. Mattingly had been with them in El Salvador, she said, the year before they were killed: 1980.

Several strategies were hatched for those planning to cross over into the base at various points, but Mattingly said the plan for her small group changed at the last minute and when they finally made it over the razor wire they weren’t even sure if they were on the actual base. Fort Benning is a third the size of Rhode Island, Rials said, at 283 square miles.

As Mattingly passed through the halls of Maryknoll in Ossining last week, nuns offered hugs and said they were so sorry she was headed off to jail. Mattingly laughed and smiled.

“I look at it as an opportunity for another mission,” she said. “I’m looking forward to it.

The Sentencing of Sister Lil Mattingly

In a statement delivered at her trial in front of Judge G. Mallon Faircloth on January 25, 2005, Mattingly was able to speak for the victims of the brutal slayings, said protest organizer and founder of the School of the Americas Watch (SOAW), Bourgeois. He met Mattingly while both were serving in Bolivia.

“Many like Lil have seen the effects of the United States foreign policy in Latin America firsthand,” he said. “Prison is a humble way of expressing our love and solidarity with the people of Latin America. The 60,000 plus soldiers who have been trained at WHINSEC provide the muscle for the United States to exploit cheap labor and resources in Latin America.”

Mattingly’s trial statement “gave a voice to those whose voices have been taken away,” he said.

“She spoke truth to power,” he noted. “She spoke on behalf of those who can’t tell their own story. That’s the joy and power of someone like Lil. She feels a unique responsibility to bring the message home. Some people have never heard of this school, but Lil’s prison sentence will help educate them.”

“I believe that I followed my conscience and my sense of moral outrage by prayerfully and peacefully protesting,” Mattingly said at her trial. “I crossed the line because of what the school teaches, what many of its students have done, and what it represents in the madness of military rationale that ‘might makes right.’”

Mattingly joined the Maryknoll Sisters in 1960, obtained a nursing degree from Cornell University and then headed off for her first mission in Bolivia. In her statement, she explained that she was delayed because of a “bloody take-over” in August, 1971, and when she reached Bolivia was made aware that the leader of the military coup was General Hugo Banzer Suarez, who ruled during seven years of dictatorship.

“His military chased, grabbed, shot, killed, imprisoned and tortured thousands,” she said during her statement. On top of that, she said, he received millions in bank loans from the United States, which “grew into the billions and now enslaved the Bolivian people by an unpayable debt.”

Mattingly and Bourgeois said that Suarez’ picture hangs in the WHINSEC Hall of Fame.

In 1987 Mattingly was living in Nicaragua to accompany people during the “U.S trained, financed and illegal Contra War,” she said, when she saw people terrorized, ambushed and executed. Another of her Maryknoll Sisters was abducted.

“…Most U.S. persons become frightened and very easily convinced through misinformation about our ‘need’ to go to war, as is the case with Iraq…” Mattingly stated at her trial. In conclusion, she said, “…We can only bring about peace through love and justice in our world. This is what befits our good and noble people.”

Bourgeois said that for many like Mattingly, prison becomes a long spiritual retreat. He would know. He has served four years for his own acts of civil disobedience.

“Her deep love is what leads her to prison,” Bourgeois said.

A Global Community

Having dinner in the cafeteria with the Maryknoll Sisters is a lesson in world culture. Many of the Sisters have either just returned from a remote locale, or are planning to travel soon, or are spending time with missionaries from other parts of the world where poverty, disease and pestilence tends to dominates the culture.

Not content to form opinions of world events based on reports, Mattingly participated in a peace delegation to Iraq from December 8-21, 2002, prior to the commencement of the war.

“The people there were so weak and beautiful,” she said. “I left with sadness and a desperate feeling, but also with hope. I was hopeful that the American people wouldn’t allow this to happen. It turns out this was false hope, and we’ve since learned that the government had been planning to do this [invade Iraq] for a few years earlier.”

Mattingly said she believes there’s a “tendency in this administration and its supporters to take control as much as they can and build an empire.”

“Now it’s all arranged through the war on terror,” she said.

Maryknoll Sisters have first-hand knowledge of many world events that are “misreported in the media,” Mattingly said.

“Over here you read things that aren’t true,” she said. One example, she said, was the war in Afghanistan. “The oil pipeline was planned years ahead for Afghanistan, but the Taliban wouldn’t allow it so we got rid of the Taliban and made it seem like we did it to help the Afghan women. Warlords in Afghanistan are the new terrorists that replaced the Taliban.”

It’s “madness,” she said, that the American people are supporting this conflict. She believes that part of the problem is an American desire to maintain the lifestyle to which many have become accustomed, involving massive consumption of finite resources.

Mattingly and Huber both believe many mainstream Christians have narrowed the full scope of the sixth commandment “Thou Shalt Not Kill,” to protect only the unborn.

“I don’t believe anyone is for abortion,” Mattingly said. “Just being born is not enough. We have to provide for people after they’re born. This administration contradicts itself in that respect, by cutting back on many programs like education and childcare.”

The Bush Administration relied on campaign support from Christians who want to see “moral values” placed at the helm of national policy, but Huber and Mattingly said they spend their lives reflecting on the inclusiveness of Jesus Christ’s message of love and peace and feel that the opposite is being accomplished.

“It’s manipulation,” Huber said.

“I can’t justify it,” said Mattingly. “I have to denounce it.”

Huber said Jesus Christ must be taken as a totality.

“Contemplation is required to avoid diluting Jesus or take certain portions. When that principle is lost, a lot of suffering is caused in the world. The basic Christian tenet is that every person is made in the image and likeness of God. Everybody is. We can’t choose who is and who is not.”

“Religious bigotry comes from superiority,” said Mattingly. “That’s what’s happening in our nation. We think we’re the best, we’re number one. It’s dastardly. Many of us at Maryknoll have had the privilege of living with people in other cultures. These people are so beautiful and talented. And you wonder, why doesn’t everyone see this?”

Mattingly and Huber said it is easy to get weepy thinking of the injustices of the world. Still, Sister Lelia Mattingly is smiling from ear to ear as she braces for her six-month prison term.

originally published in the North County News

Rita J. King lives with her husband, musician and writer WB King, in New York.
She can be reached at dancingink@hotmail.com