Posted on 03/31/2006 9:39:34 PM PST by Coleus
He's an unlikely convict.
Robert Call, a 72-year-old retiree, is an avid gardener, devoted family man and regular churchgoer. But the Hasbrouck Heights resident will put his quiet life on hold when he begins serving a 90-day federal prison sentence next month for a crime that he describes as an act of patriotism. Call was arrested in November while taking part in a massive demonstration against a U.S. military academy -- the former School of the Americas at Fort Benning, Ga. -- that critics say trained some of the bloodiest dictators and military officers in Latin America.
Call was one of 37 protesters -- in a crowd estimated by organizers at 19,000 -- who crawled under a fence around the army base and were immediately arrested for trespassing on government property. "I knew exactly what I was doing," Call said. "I wanted to send the message that this school is unworthy of the United States of America." Call, a former Roman Catholic priest who is married and has grown children, is a quiet, intense man who shuns the spotlight.
Nevertheless, his willingness to go to prison for his beliefs has caught the attention of North Jersey Catholics, who've long seen the issue of violence and economic exploitation in Latin America as a central focus of Catholic social justice teaching. The Fort Benning demonstrations draw many students from Catholic schools nationwide, including St. Peter's College in Jersey City. Call has recently spoken to church groups in Hackensack, Pompton Lakes and Hasbrouck Heights. He also met with a Catholic peace group, Pax Christi, and is planning to speak at Montclair State University.
"This is a moral issue," said Jacquelyn Schramm, director of the social justice ministry at St. Mary Roman Catholic Church in Pompton Lakes. "We are training people on American soil to go back to their own countries and kill organizers and ordinary church people who are struggling for human rights and economic justice." Two North Jersey lawmakers, Reps. Bill Pascrell Jr., D-Paterson, and Steve Rothman, D-Fair Lawn, are among 127 co-sponsors of a bill that would temporarily shut down the school and investigate its operations.
"The United States must be clear that we do not support torture," Rothman said in a statement. "It is immoral." But a spokesman for the academy -- now called the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation -- denied there's a connection between the school's educational program and the acts perpetrated by some of its alumni. "There's no cause and effect," Lee Rials said. "It bothers me that people feel they have to go to jail over this."
Picnic, then prison
Call plans to mark the start of his imprisonment April 11 in typically idiosyncratic style: He'll eat a picnic lunch with friends and family just outside the gates of the minimum-security Federal Correctional Institution at Fort Dix. He'll then report for his sentence, joining a prison population that includes the former mayor of Providence, R.I., who was convicted in a racketeering conspiracy. Call expects an unpleasant sojourn. Because the judge didn't arrange for pre-sentencing interviews, Call said, he may be initially placed in solitary confinement. He could later be assigned to a work camp that houses inmates who present a low security risk.
A fellow New Jersey protester described his 2002 sentence at the Burlington County prison as a humiliating and degrading experience. Tom Mahedy said he had to hold his pants up during the initial days because he was supplied with an ill-fitting khaki uniform. "It was part of breaking you down," said Mahedy, of Wall Township in Monmouth County. "Your dignity is taken away." A prison official didn't return several telephone messages last week, and a spokeswoman for the federal Bureau of Prisons declined to respond to Mahedy's comments.
Call, for his part, said he isn't worried. A playwright and amateur actor, he plans to keep his mind busy by writing and by teaching himself Italian. He says he's being treated for glaucoma but otherwise is in good health. "My attitude is I want to do whatever work I'm assigned as well as I possibly can," Call said. "I want to respect the guards, who have a difficult job." His wife, Theresa, said: "We really have to just trust that people are basically good and no harm will come to him."
Civil rights activist
And while Call had not been arrested before, he hardly is a stranger to political activism. He was among several Jersey City priests who moved out of their rectories in the 1960s and into a tenement apartment to show their solidarity with the city's underclass.
In 1965, he joined with the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. and other civil rights activists in the epochal march from Selma to Montgomery -- which helped fuel support for the Voting Rights Act. Call left the priesthood in 1969, but never lost his passion for social justice. He became active in the movement against the School of the Americas after a trip to Guatemala.
Like the civil rights movement, it's a campaign that has struck a chord among religious communities. The movement was started by the Rev. Roy Bourgeois, a Maryknoll priest, after the 1989 murders of six Jesuit priests in El Salvador. Nineteen soldiers who participated in that massacre had been trained at the academy, said Christy Pardew, a spokeswoman for the School of the Americas Watch, the group that organizes the annual protests.
Critics say the military academy's alumni include notorious human rights abusers like the late Maj. Robert D'Aubuisson, widely believed to be a key organizer of El Salvador's notorious death squads. Rials, the school's spokesman, acknowledged D'Aubuisson was a student but said he took a standard course in communications.
"I don't know how learning how to operate military radios and telephones has anything to do with committing murder and running death squads," Rials said. "There is no doubt he was a thoroughly disgusting person, but that has nothing to with his attendance at the SOA."
Critics beg to differ.
"This was a combat training school," Pardew said. "And it created a culture that allowed students to return to their countries and participate in combat operations against their own people." Call attended two previous demonstrations at Fort Benning before deciding the issue was worth getting arrested over.
"We know from the civil rights movement that good things can happen if you're willing to help people understand what the situation is," he said. "The Voting Rights Act would not have come about if people in the country had not realized that it's just wrong to keep people from voting."
For a second, I thought it was Berrigan again.
Could have been a Berrigan boy; did he marry a nun?
I was in anti-war jail, in D.C. with one of the Berrigan brothers once. It was about 5 or 10 days after Kerry threw his medals over the fence, I was there too.
I'd take these Pax Christi types much more seriously if they spent as much time in this country protesting the murder of millions of unborn children; many millions more of our own have died than have been murdered in their own countries by nasty Latin American dictators.
I suspect that these people are more concerned that the vast majority of the trainees at Benning have killed quite a few hardcore murderous commies over the years.
Are you still one of those that believe in suicide?
I've always enjoyed being where the action is.
I hope you have re-hab-il-a-ta-ted your self...from Alices Restaraunt courtroom scene...;-)
I thought the purpose of the Catholic church was to save souls? I guess liberation theology changes everything.
Even then I was curious, but always conservative.
I just didn't understand liberalism yet, I assumed at the time they must know something I wasn't seeing.
Within a few months I had won a deferment from the draft, so then I enlisted, evidently
.... I'm going to stop typing and put on
Alice's Restaurant right now.
Well...ya quote Kipling on yr home page so you've got the general gist of things.
I agree!
I simply relegate these "martyr wannabes" to the bottom of my "I really care" list.
The Pax Christi people in my church are anti Wal Mart!
Oh yes, Pax Christi hasn't been active in any Anti Abortion activities!
Pax Christi is just a bunch on 'Holier than Thou Phonies"
He ate his orders from the Vatican before he was arrested.
One hopes that your sanity has returned since affiliating with Ketchupboy and the antiwar crowd.
I have an uncle who fits this mold (although he divorced the alcoholic ex-nun he had married). He ran with the Berrigans in the 60s-70s then hooked up with the Black Panthers in Newark. He's an utter asshole and my brother and I have let him know it more than once. btw...two of his brothers were FBI Agents.
SuziQ: At least Fr. Daniel Berrigan, S.J., was arrested and jailed at Buffalo, New York, for participating in an abortion mill sit-in and then distributed an op-ed to the nation's newspapers communicating why antiwar activists cannot claim pro-life motives if they are willing to tolerate abortion. Granted, he has done a lot more antiwar stuff than pro-life activity but at least he did one Rescue. When the police found out that Daniel Berrigan was one of their pro-life prisoners they released all the pro-life arrestees rather than deal with Berrigan's experienced tactics of inflicting misery on the authorities.
SuziQ: Please find Bill Cotter in Boston (former Rescue leader in Massachusetss). He can be found through Massachusetts Citizens for Life whether he is directly affiliated with them or not. Help Bill in any way you can and urge others to do so. He is a warrior and one of the finest and savviest pro-life state leaders in the country.
Thanks for the ping Coleus.
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