photo by Felice Cohen-Joppa
Sr. Ardeth Platte, O.P., Presente!
Ardeth in Washington, D.C. on September 26, participating in Cries from Every Corner to mark the U.N. International Day to Abolish Nuclear Weapons
Ardeth Platte, Dominican nun dedicated to no-nukes cause, dies at 84
(RNS) — Sister Ardeth Platte, a Dominican order nun who fought for nuclear disarmament and later served as an inspiration for a character on the popular Netflix show “Orange Is the New Black,” died in her sleep at the Dorothy Day Catholic Worker House in Washington, D.C., on Wednesday (Sept. 30).
Platte was born in Lansing, Michigan, and began her work for the Dominicans as a teacher. In the 1960s and ’70s, she served as principal and director of alternative education at the former St. Joseph’s Educational Center in Saginaw, Michigan. Her work as an educator impressed many in the community, and Platte was urged to run for the Saginaw City Council. She won, serving as councilwoman from 1973-1985.
from Susan Crane: Ardeth Platte, OP Presente! Our dear friend, resister, comrade, mentor went home to God last night. Ban Nuclear Weapons was her cry, whether at the Pentagon, on the streets in the U.S., or in Germany at the Büchel Air Base where 20 nuclear warheads are deployed. Here at Büchel, Sr. Ardeth is talking to the Commander of the base, and is handing him a copy of the U.N. Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons. Photo by Marion Küpker.
Sister Ardeth Platte OP Will Be Remembered as a Prophet of Peace
Ardeth (on crutches) was arrested on July 5, 2010 at the Y-12 nuclear weapons complex in TN. She spent two months in jail for that action. Pictured here with Sr. Jackie Hudson (RIP), Sr. Carol Gilbert, Bonnie Urfer and Jean Gump (RIP). Photo by Felice Cohen-Joppa.
Pax Christi USA gives thanks for the life and witness of Sr. Ardeth Platte: Rest in power!
…Pax Christi USA received word that Plowshares activist and nuclear disarmament advocate Sr. Ardeth Platte passed away in her sleep at the Dorothy Day Catholic Worker House in Washington, D.C.
Pax Christi USA’s statement on the passing of Sr. Ardeth Platte:
Today we mourn the passing of Ardeth Platte—a Dominican Sister, a loyal friend, a healer of historical wounds, a peace companion and a faithful follower of the Gospel. Ardeth was the Peace of Christ in our midst and “shocked the conscience” of many (including many religious congregations) by taking a bold stand against weapons of mass destruction which often landed her behind bars. She stood on the side of truth and justice and reminded each of us of our moral responsibility to advocate for the elimination of nuclear weapons. May we join with Ardeth in her sacred pilgrimage and continue her life’s work for a more just and nuclear free world through nonviolent action. May we also learn from her example to love, reverence and care for the oppressed and the oppressor with the utmost tenderness. Ardeth, you may not be physically present among us, but you will always dwell in our midst. Ardeth Platte, Presente!
October 2019, with Kathy Boylan and others who were delivering the global petition in support of the Kings Bay Plowshares to William Barr outside the Department of Justice. Photo by Paki Wieland.
from The Gazette
A Catholic Dominican nun well-known in Colorado for smearing her blood on Air Force fighter planes and nuclear missile silos in anti-war protests, and who inspired one of the characters in the Netflix series “Orange is the New Black,” has died.
Sister Ardeth Platte, 84, passed away in her sleep Tuesday night at her home, the Dorothy Day Catholic Worker House, in Washington, D.C., said Bill Sulzman, founder of Colorado Springs-based Citizens for Peace in Space.
“It was very sudden,” he said. “She was such a leader.”
Platte and two other nuns in the Dominican religious congregation, Sister Carol Gilbert and the late Sister Jackie Hudson, spent nearly half a century as peace activists, using civil disobedience to resist the buildup of nuclear weapons and call for disarmament.
“It’s a long career of activism that is admirable and inspiring,” Sulzman said. “I and the people of Colorado owe her a tremendous debt to the awareness she brought about the deployment of nuclear weapons in our state and our state’s role, and why we should pay attention to that.”
Platte’s presence in Colorado began with a demonstration at Peterson Air Force Base 20 years ago, when the trio of nuns made headlines after they were arrested for spraying their blood on a fighter plane. The charges were dropped.
They were arrested again in 2002 after cutting a chain-link fence to enter a nuclear missile site in northeastern Colorado, which at the time ranked as one of the top 10 nuclear powerhouses in the world because of the Intercontinental Ballistic Missiles that were buried underground.
The nuns prayed and poured their blood in the shape of a cross on a Minuteman III missile silo.
They served 41 months in a federal correctional facility in Danbury, Conn., at the same time as television personality Martha Stewart and Piper Kerman, who wrote “Orange is the New Black,” which became a Netflix series with Platte depicted as one of the characters.
“We did yoga together,” Platte said in March, when she was last in Colorado Springs, of her incarceration with the celebrities.
The nuns returned often to Colorado and Colorado Springs, with their appearances sponsored by Sulzman’s organization and the Pikes Peak Justice and Peace Commission.
Hudson died in 2011, and in recent years, Platte and Gilbert worked on garnering support for the United Nations’ Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons, which was passed in 2017 but must be ratified in order to ban everything from possession to transfer of nuclear weapons.
They traveled the nation to promote the treaty, including delivering a copy to Peterson Air Force Base in 2017. They also appeared at U.N. meetings multiple times. The treaty has yet to be ratified.
Platte and Gilbert talked to University of Colorado at Colorado Springs students and members of a local church when they were in here in March, before the cornavirus pandemic hit.
Platte wore a sweatshirt that said, “I’m Already Against the Next War,” as she and Gilbert spoke about the importance of nuclear disarmament. They also were featured at events in Denver, Boulder, Fort Collins and Canon City.
Their message had broadened to encompass climate change and fossil-fuel divestment in their drive to “save the planet for future generations.”
Sulzman said Platte’s unexpected death is “a reminder to keep working on nuclear disarmament” because the issue “has not gone away.”
Remembering Sister Ardeth Platte, a prophet of peace in a culture of aggression
In a 2004 letter from Danbury Prison, Ardeth Platte, O.P., wrote, “With hope we give our lives for a world without wars, weapons, and walls, regardless of the consequences.” The longtime peace activist who died last week at the age of 84 modeled and preached much of what Pope Francis proposes in his most recent encyclical, “Fratelli Tutti.”
She will be remembered as a prophet of peace in a culture of aggression.
Sister Platte would be overjoyed to see just war theory challenged and nuclear weapons condemned at the level of a papal encyclical, a moral vision she championed for over 40 years.
In “Fratelli Tutti,” Pope Francis writes: “We can no longer think of war as a solution…. [I]t is very difficult nowadays to invoke the rational criteria elaborated in earlier centuries to speak of the possibility of a ‘just war.’”
“International peace and stability,” the pope writes, “cannot be based on a false sense of security, on the threat of mutual destruction or total annihilation, or on simply maintaining a balance of power…. [T]he ultimate goal of the total elimination of nuclear weapons becomes both a challenge and a moral and humanitarian imperative.”
Sister Platte’s efforts to challenge nuclear weapons resonate with Francis’ call for “peacemakers, men and women prepared to work boldly and creatively to initiate processes of healing and renewed encounter.”
Sister Platte spent upward of six years in jails and prison as a result of her protests against nuclear weapons with the Plowshares Movement; she continued a correspondence with many of the women she met in jails and prisons all over the country. Her life inspired the character of Sister Ingalls on the popular Netflix show “Orange is the New Black.”
Her Dominican charism inspired her to walk “into the place of lies, saying the truth and knowing that the truth has its own power beyond whatever immediate reaction you might get,” said the Rev. Terrence Moran, who knew Sister Platte from her years at Jonah House in Baltimore, Md.
I remember reading about the anti-nuke nuns in high school. The drama and incongruencies of their witness impressed me: nuns in hazmat suits breaking chain linked fences, praying in nuclear weapon facilities, throwing blood on the Pentagon and smiling their way to prisons.
I first met Sister Platte when we were arrested with 70 other Catholics protesting the treatment of immigrant children. Staying with her at the Dorothy Day Catholic Worker Community in Washington reorientated my understanding of religious life and Christianity in general; I’d never encountered people who lived the Gospel with such intensity.
Her peace and justice advocacy took many forms over the years. She served on the City Council in Saginaw, Mich., for 12 years, taking on a variety of issues. “The first thing she did on City Council had to do with fair housing for gays and lesbians,” Sister Gilbert said.
She ran a school for dropouts in inner-city Saginaw and organized to rid Michigan of the hundreds of nuclear cruise missiles and squadrons of B-52s hosted by the state at two air bases, a multi-year process that ultimately succeeded. In 2017, she and Sister Gilbert represented the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons at the United Nations in efforts to draft a treaty to prohibit nuclear weapons.
I.C.A.N. won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2017 after drawing attention to the “catastrophic humanitarian consequences” of nuclear weapons and because of its involvement in pushing a nuclear ban treaty through the United Nations.
Like their founder, St. Dominic, the sisters spent the last three years engaged in itinerant preaching. They traversed the country, teaching folks about the treaty, delivering copies of it to military bases and politicians and advocating for its ratification. So far, 46 countries have ratified the U.N. treaty; only four more are needed for it to become binding.
Sister Platte was convinced the treaty would be ratified and nuclear weapons would eventually be abolished. “She did not have the slightest doubt that this was possible…. She had a relentless hopefulness,” said Father Moran.
Sister Platte was a figure who bridged two epochs. In many ways, she embodied what people either love or hate about Vatican II: a nun without a habit, a model of a poor church for the poor, a Christian active in the political sphere and a woman of intense conscience unwilling to compromise on the demands of the Gospel or cease assisting those on the margins.
Even in a T-shirt and jeans, though, she reflected the discipline and devotion of the pre-1965 church and convent life. Her years as a teacher shaped her profound curiosity in young people. She recalled the humiliations of Christ when she found herself in handcuffs; in a prison letter during Lent 2005, she wrote about friends counseling her not to take on too many penances.
Joergen Ostenson, Sister Platte’s godson, a senior at Fordham University, received a letter from her each year on the anniversary of his baptism. The last one arrived on the morning she died.
“She really understood the meaning of what baptism represents and what it meant to be a godmother,” Mr. Ostensen said. He recalls visiting her at Danbury Prison with his parents at the age of 5. “I remember seeing her in her prison uniform…and that we had ice cream with rainbow sprinkles.” The memory is so vivid because of that unlikely juxtaposition, he said.
“The greatest gift an older person can give a younger person is a consciousness of the world,” Mr. Ostensen said, “a radical consciousness that makes it so that we understand that when the U.S. government spends millions of dollars on nuclear bombs and billions on a military industrial complex and doesn’t provide for the poor, that they are doing something evil.”
Pope Francis proposes a similar consciousness in “Fratelli Tutti”: “With the money spent on weapons and other military expenditures, let us establish a global fund that can finally put an end to hunger and favour development in the most impoverished countries.”
Sister Platte’s religious life was the foundation of her work. She was a member of the Grand Rapids Dominican Sisters for 66 years. “She was confounded that young people were not running to religious life. She saw that there was so much freedom in this life,” said Sister Gilbert.
She used that freedom to offer her freedoms up, delivering herself into prisons, into poverty, and giving herself over to the intense and demanding task of cherishing and protecting the dignity of others.
Sister Platte boasts an impressive record of arrests, influential work on the Treaty to Ban Nuclear Weapons and connections to a Nobel Peace Prize and U.S. pop culture.
But these are not the first things people mention when they speak of her. They talk about her enormous capacity for love, an ability to hold in tandem the tenacity to speak truth to power and the tenderness to express love to people who might otherwise be perceived as an enemy.
In this, she models what Pope Francis exhorts in “Fratelli Tutti”: “[C]harity finds expression not only in close and intimate relationships but also in ‘macro-relationships: social, economic and political.’”
When I asked Sister Gilbert what she learned from Sister Platte over the years, she said with tears: “I learned to be a more loving person…. And she taught me not to ignore the works of justice.”
Sister Platte used to say that she refused to make an enemy of anyone. “The spiritual discipline it takes not to allow anybody to be your enemy is a breathtaking accomplishment for a human being,” said Father Moran.
Thinking about Sister Platte’s life in the last week, I recall words from the Rite for the Ordination to the Priesthood: “Conform your life to the mystery of the Lord’s cross.”
This was Ardeth Platte. What is conformation to the cross but the giving up of one’s life and freedoms to enter places of darkness and evil in nonviolent love?
Her friend Daniel Berrigan, S.J., wrote in his autobiography:
What does a truly human life look like, in such times as we are enduring? In answering, I approached and reached a point at once dazzling and darksome. The point being the political and social consequences of the cross of Jesus. It is a point of sacrifice. I know that in its pristine rigor and crude innocence—even in its imperialized grandeur, the cross, (which is to say, the crucified One) invites the living to the heart of reality, in an embrace as guileless and self-giving as it is indifferent of consequence.
These words could be said of Sister Platte, who was born on Good Friday in 1936. Her life is a reminder in times such as we are enduring of someone who accepted the consequences of living the Gospel.
“Here was a person,” Sister Gilbert said, “who gave her life in wanting a world that was just and peaceful for all.”
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from CounterPunchSister Ardeth Platte, a Dominican nun and antinuclear protester, died (“Ardeth Platte, Dominican Nun and Antinuclear Activist, Dies at 84,” New York Times, October 8, 2020) during the night or early morning of the first presidential debate. When Sister Ardeth broke into a nuclear missile facility in Colorado, she recited “Oh God, help us to be peacemakers in a hostile world.” The US government, the only government on Earth to use nuclear weapons against civilians, sentenced Sister Ardeth to a 41-month sentence (one of many jail sentences) in the same city in which the government sent the Berrigan brothers, Plowshares members, for “crimes” against mass murder by the US in Vietnam. They would later be jailed for so-called “crimes” against doomsday nuclear weapons.
Sister Ardeth was the inspiration for a Netflix series about women in prison “Orange Is the New Black,” but a good guess is that fame is something Sister Ardeth may have felt a little funny about. Glamorous characters and the magic of the screen is not what antinuclear protesters lives were and are about. Antinuclear protesters are often acquainted with or associated with Catholic Worker houses founded by Dorothy Day and have a community about which most protesters can’t even dream.
It is that spiritual connection that Daniel Berrigan observed was missing from the New Left, a connection that spans protest movements and keeps the flame of outrage and love alive in some. A spiritual sense need not be religious, but can be as simple as a connection to the natural environment.
What draws undaunted protesters to act in the face of the ultimate darkness? What leads protesters to keep on keeping on?
The romance of the selfless protester is often challenged by the brutality of prison. What amazes is not only how selfless acts of protest come again and again from those who take documents and the history of the rules of war, the Geneva Conventions and the Nuremberg principles seriously, but it’s how they change the dread of prison into work with the most disenfranchised among us. There’s not much Hollywood tinsel and glamour there, but it’s a calling. They fight the forces of Armageddon that act for greed and profit.
Nuclear proliferation has generally been a bipartisan affair. Modernization of nuclear weapons began in earnest under Obama and continued with Trump. The abrogation of nuclear weapons’ treaties, however, has accelerated under Trump. With the latter’s wildly changing personal behavior, it is not surprising that atomic scientists sound the alarm over a clear and present danger (Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, October 6, 2020).
Thomas Wolfe writes at the beginning of the novel Look Homeward Angel about his young love returning “…not into life, but into magic,” and I think it’s in the magic grounded in actual acts of selfless heroism where souls like Sister Ardeth live. There’s something of that magic that can equip a person with the valor to face a vicious, warring society and larger world and keep their faith focused on the good and the flame of protest alive within them as they are tormented by the brutality of prison and the obscenity of nuclear weapons and weapons of war.
There’s no better way to describe what keeps the great souls among us alive, and these words are not meant to be Sister Ardeth’s words or represent her feelings. But there is the glory of life within some of a failed species that informs the beauty of a summer sunrise, or blazing fire of a twilight alive in the worst of environments. There is the hope seen in the smile of children and the cricket chorus of summer nights that remains within the gulags that keeps hope alive.
Sr. Ardeth Platte’s memorial at the Dorothy Day Catholic Worker House, where she lived. (Photo: Art Laffin/Dorothy Day Catholic Worker)
from the New York Times
Sister Ardeth spent years behind bars for her beliefs and was the inspiration for a character on the Netflix hit “Orange Is the New Black.”
Sister Ardeth Platte, a Dominican nun and antinuclear activist who spent years behind bars for her beliefs, and who was the inspiration for a character on “Orange Is the New Black,” the Netflix series about life in a women’s prison, died on Sept. 30 at the Dorothy Day Catholic Worker House in Washington. She was 84.
Sister Carol Gilbert, her roommate and longtime collaborator, confirmed the death. The evening before, she said, Sister Ardeth had been listening to the presidential debate on NPR. When Sister Carol awoke the next morning, she discovered that Sister Ardeth had died overnight in her bed still wearing her earphones, with NPR still playing.
With the exception of arthritis, Sister Carol said, Sister Ardeth had no known health problems.
The two nuns drew national attention in the fall of 2002, when they were arrested, along with another Dominican nun, Jackie Hudson, for breaking into a nuclear missile site in Colorado. Clad in white hazmat suits emblazoned with the words “Disarmament Specialists,” they had used bolt cutters to snip the chain-link fence that ringed the missile field; made the sign of a cross on a silo lid using their own blood (drawn safely by doctors, following the practice of Plowshares, a Christian pacifist movement to which they belonged); unfurled a peace banner; and recited a prayer: “Oh God, help us to be peacemakers in a hostile world.”
Found guilty of sabotage, the three were fined and sentenced to prison the next spring. Sister Ardeth, who had the longest arrest record, drew the longest sentence: 41 months in the federal penitentiary in Danbury, Conn. There, she impressed inmates with her basketball skills — despite cataracts, she could shoot three-pointers with ease — and she practiced yoga with Piper Kerman, whose 2010 memoir, “Orange Is the New Black,” about her year in prison for money laundering and drug trafficking, was the basis for the Netflix series.
(Sister Carol served her time in a prison in West Virginia, where Martha Stewart — whom she called “a real trouper” — was a fellow inmate.)
Despite these celebrity collisions, jail time was no cakewalk. The nuns were strip searched, shackled and held in cells smeared with feces. Though incarceration was never their goal — as they told Eric Schlosser, who profiled the nuns and other Roman Catholic antinuclear activists for The New Yorker in 2015, an action without jail time was known as a “freebie” — they saw its extreme hardships as an opportunity to minister to the poor.
“We were still writing to the women we have been incarcerated with,” Sister Carol said. She estimated that she and Sister Ardeth had spent 15 years of their lives in more than 40 prisons and jails.
After her release from the Danbury facility in 2005, Sister Ardeth, then 69, told a reporter, “Whatever the judges and prosecutors and these systems do upon us is nothing compared to the suffering the government is causing across the world.”
“Conviction,” a documentary about the nuns, came out the next year.
In addition to being longtime participants in Plowshares, the nuns were members of the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons, which in 2017 won a Nobel Peace Prize for its work.
“Ardeth and Carol were partners in crime,” Mr. Schlosser said in a phone interview. “Renegades and lawbreakers and truly inspiring. They truly lived the gospel, and they did it with a wonderful sense of humor and exuberance and joy.”
Sister Ardeth, he added, “was fully alive, and part of that generation of women who grew up in a certain way and wanted to be bold and free and make a difference without being dependent on men.”
When she was 12, Ardeth was hospitalized with a life-threatening kidney infection and, she later told Sister Carol, had an out-of-body experience. “She said, ‘Oh, God, if you let me live, I’ll dedicate myself to you,’” Sister Carol recalled.
Though Ardeth was committed to joining a religious order, her father told her that she had to spend at least one year in college. She earned a degree in history from Aquinas College in Grand Rapids, Mich., a Dominican school, which determined the course of her life.
“What drew her is our charism, which is veritas, truth,” Sister Carol said. “She wanted to speak truth to power.”
Sister Ardeth was Sister Carol’s homeroom teacher and senior adviser in high school. They met again after Sister Carol had joined the order and been sent to Saginaw to work in a poor parish. Sister Ardeth was serving on the City Council there, working on social justice initiatives, including a successful ban on housing discrimination based on sexual orientation.
Like many Catholics, the nuns were compelled to activism by Vatican II, the early-1960s church council that encouraged its members to be more engaged with the world.
By the early 1980s, inspired by the Australian doctor and antinuclear activist Helen Caldicott, they turned their focus to the nuclear weapons and bombers located in bases in their home state. For more than a decade, through hundreds of protests, legal challenges and sheer doggedness, they were among those who were instrumental in Michigan’s decision to close its nuclear bases in 1995.
“Ardeth was very keen on the law,” Anabel Dwyer, a Michigan-based lawyer who worked for decades on the nuns’ behalf, said in a phone interview. “She stood for the Nuremberg principles, the universal prohibitions against war crimes. Her resistance was based on the fact that nuclear weapons unleash uncontrollable and indiscriminate heat, blast and radiation and thus violate intransgressible rules of law.
“Obviously it was a moral question for her as well,” Ms. Dwyer continued, “but when she was in court she wanted to argue in terms of the law itself. She had a real instinct for justice on a large scale, for democracy as an act.”
With Michigan squared away, Sister Carol and Sister Ardeth then moved to Jonah House in Baltimore, a community of religious and lay people devoted to nonviolence. Sister Ardeth was an enthusiastic participant in hundreds of actions, always clad in one of her antiwar T-shirts — and sometimes on crutches, as she was in 2010 for a protest at the Y-12 nuclear facility in Oakridge, Tenn. Despite a broken ankle, she had climbed over the fence that guarded the complex.
Nearly three years ago, Sister Carol and Sister Ardeth moved to the Dorothy Day House in Washington. They worked on the Poor People’s Campaign, a social justice movement, and joined protests organize d by Fire Drill Friday, the group started by Jane Fonda to raise awareness of climate change. All three were arrested on Dec. 21 last year, Ms. Fonda’s 82nd birthday, though only Ms. Fonda spent the night in jail.
“She became a friend, a staunch and fearless friend, who was there to welcome me when I got out of jail in D.C. following my own act of civil disobedience,” Ms. Fonda wrote in a Facebook post after Sister Ardeth’s death.
Sister Ardeth is survived by her brother, Richard.
“To think,” Sister Carol said, “the day she died, another country had ratified the nuclear disarmament treaty” — that would be Malaysia, the 46th country to do so, a number that does not include the United States. “I was going to wake her up and tell her.”
Ardeth Platte celebrating her eighty-second birthday. Courtesy of Coretta Marchant.
from Knox News
Ardeth Platte, antinuclear activist nun who famously protested Y-12, has died
by Kelli Krebs and Brittany Crocker
Ardeth Platte, the tenacious nun who brought her antiwar convictions to Oak Ridge, has died. She was 84.
Sister Carol Gilbert, her roommate and longtime collaborator, confirmed her Sept. 30 death to the New York Times Thursday.
Bearing crutches, the Baltimore nun was one of the first of about a dozen protesters that crossed what’s known as the “blue line” that marks the official entry point of the Y-12 National Security Complex in Oak Ridge during a 2010 protest. Platte, along with others, faced federal charges for the act.
“Nuclear weapons are the taproot of violence,” Platte said at her sentencing hearing, “and they must be abolished. So I refuse to be silent.”
A federal jury later found her guilty of trespassing on federal property, and she served a four-month sentence.
Ralph Hutchison, coordinator of the Oak Ridge Environmental Peace Alliance, described Platte as a woman of deep faith and conviction.
“Ardeth Platte was a force of God’s will, plain and simple,” said Ralph Hutchison, coordinator of the Environmental Peace Alliance. “She was deadly serious about the threat posed by nuclear weapons. She opposed them everywhere, including Oak Ridge, even when it meant going to prison.”
Hutchison last saw Platte in person in Germany at an international peace camp outside the Büchel Air Base, which houses nuclear arms.
“We participated in demonstrations there, and Ardeth and her partner joined in a blockade of the base. When asked what it would take to get them out of the road, Ardeth said, ‘We want to see the base commander. And 15 minutes later he arrived.”
According to Hutchison, Platte then presented the commander with with a copy of the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons, reading it out loud to him.
The day before she died, Hutchison said Ardeth was on the street corner in Washington, D.C., joining in demonstrations for the International Day of Nuclear Disarmament.
Platte, who also served as the inspiration behind a character on the Netflix series “Orange is the New Black,” had been arrested more than 40 times in her anti-nuclear activist career.
Platte was charged with trespassing in her Oak Ridge protest, but she wasn’t the first or the last nun arrested at Y-12.
On July 28, 2012, three pacifists — including an 82-year-old Catholic nun — protested in a far more serious way. They cut through fences, avoided detection and managed to reach the one of the plant’s highest-security areas. The trio spray-painted messages, hung banners and poured blood at the site where warhead parts are manufactured and the nation’s stockpile of bomb-grade uranium is stored.
from the ConversationCelebrating Sister Ardeth Platte, anti-nuclear activist and ‘peacemaker in a hostile world’
To Sister Ardeth Platte, who died on Sept. 30 at 84, antinuclear activism was a form of public worship.
Explaining to a federal judge in 2002 how she – alongside protest companions Sister Carol Gilbert and Sister Jackie Hudson – entered a Colorado nuclear base, tapped on a silo with a hammer and used their own blood to smear a cross on a 100-ton missile lid, Platte said: “Every movement of our body was a liturgy.”
It didn’t stop the court from sending her to prison for obstructing national defense and damaging government property. But Platte wasn’t traumatized by her 41-month sentence or any other she had served. By 2017 she and Gilbert estimated they had spent more than 15 years total behind bars and been arrested about 40 times, by their own tally.
“I was in long enough to see so many deaths, suicides. One woman guard went home from work, put a gun to her head and killed herself. Another man committed suicide by hanging right on the prison grounds,” Platte said in our unpublished 2017 interview. I came to know Platte and Gilbert while living with Sacred Heart sisters they knew at Anne Montgomery House in Washington, D.C.
At the Danbury Federal Correctional Institution in Connecticut, Platte used her sentence for ministry by being a chaplain for all faiths, advocating against the unfair sentencing of mostly poor women of color, and helping prisoners study. Her friendship with fellow inmate Piper Kerman inspired the character of Sister Jane Ingalls in Kerman’s book “Orange is the New Black,” later turned into a Netflix series.
Platte felt she had more in common with actor Beth Fowler, who plays Sister Ingalls in the series – and who once hoped to become a Dominican – than with the fictional character. “They put words in my mouth I would never say… I mean, even in the book where Piper says I tied myself to a flagpole. False! I went into a missile silo,” she smilingly told me in 2017, although she did recommend reading the book, which she found accurate about prison life.
Near-death transformation
A Michigan native with the broad accent to prove it, Ardeth Platte was born on Good Friday, April 10, 1936. Her mother left before she turned two and her father placed Platte and her brother with relatives while in the Navy in World War II.
She almost died at 12 of an intestinal infection, and under an oxygen tent pledged her life to God if she made it through. A high school valedictorian and star basketball player, she entered the religious order Dominican Sisters of Grand Rapids in 1954 after freshman year at Aquinas College, a Grand Rapids Catholic liberal arts school.
Drawn to helping impoverished residents in her adopted hometown of Saginaw, Michigan, she administered Upward Bound, a federally funded low-income college preparation program, one summer, and later became principal of St. Joseph’s High School. She walked with the poorest at Civil Rights marches and protested Vietnam.
Platte ran for Saginaw City Council at the urging of many disadvantaged residents. Her term from 1973-1985 included time as interim mayor. This allowed her to see firsthand how power structures enforced rather than alleviated poverty.
“It’s all based on death-dealing, not life-giving. I could see everything taking food from the mouths of the poorest… When I do an action regarding nuclear weapons, it relates to poverty, to contamination, to climate disaster, to all of it,” she said in 2017.
She was inducted into the Michigan Women’s Hall of Fame in 1999.
‘Swords into plowshares’
Platte’s anti-nuclear activism started in 1983. From 1990 to 1995 she and Gilbert moved next to Strategic Air Command bases at Oscoda and then K. I. Sawyer, holding mock war crimes tribunals. Their “Faith and Resistance” retreats shared ways to conduct successful nonviolent actions.
Although they encountered accusations of being anti-military, the sisters ministered to military people. “[Members of the military] cried and shared stories in our living space after the first Gulf War. We even inherited a dog from one going to South Korea,” said Gilbert. “Our love has grown for military personnel,” said Platte. “We do have a draft, it’s called an economic draft. They join because they need jobs.”
Michigan’s bases were decommissioned after the Cold War, and the sisters moved to Baltimore’s Jonah House in 1995. Named after the Old Testament biblical prophet who served time in the belly of a whale (aka the U.S. prison system), Jonah House teaches civil resistance, modeling how to conduct die-ins at the Pentagon, or what to do when arrested.
Some members of Jonah House also participated in Plowshares, a direct-action antinuclear movement named after the biblical passage in which prophets Isaiah and Micah state, “they shall beat their swords into plowshares, and their spears into pruning hooks; nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war any more.”
Platte and Gilbert joined ICAN, the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons, which won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2017. Platte’s final life’s work encouraged nuclear weapons states such as the U.S. – on course to spend US$1.2 trillion over the next three decades – to sign the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons.
‘Peacemaker in a hostile world’
After 23 years at Jonah House, Platte and Gilbert moved to the Dorothy Day Catholic Worker House in Washington. This “community of hospitality and resistance” also teaches direct action. There Platte gardened daily, sharing vegetables with neighbors while preaching peace.
They attended actor Jane Fonda’s Fire Drill Fridays – ecological protests in Washington, D.C. Fonda cited Platte as “a staunch and fearless friend.” They also remained in touch with Martha Stewart, whom Gilbert befriended at Alderson Federal Prison Camp.
On Sept. 29, Platte went to bed to listen to the news. Her headphones were still on when Gilbert tried to wake her the following morning to celebrate that Malaysia had ratified the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons. Platte had slipped away in her sleep.
Sister Ardeth Platte consistently lived the prayer all three activist sisters spoke in 2002 when surrounded by military police in Humvees at the Peterson Air Force Base, weapons aimed: “Oh God, help us to be peacemakers in a hostile world.”
Davis-Monthan AFB. Photo by Felice Cohen-Joppa.
from The Colorado Sun
Some devout Catholic girls grow up to be handmaids, others proud ex-cons
by Diane Carman
When Ardeth Platte was released in 2005 after more than two years in federal prison in Danbury, Conn., she made a confession. Smiling, her eyes crinkling, she admitted to me that the nice soft sheets on the beds on the outside felt truly wonderful.
The then-69-year-old Dominican nun was happy to be free, but wholly unrepentant. As Sen. Dianne Feinstein might say, the dogma lived loudly within her, and if going to prison periodically was the price of living her faith, so be it.
Platte and fellow Dominican Sisters Carol Gilbert and Jackie Hudson became local celebrities 18 years ago when they snipped a hole in a chain-link fence to gain access to the grounds in Weld County where a Minuteman III missile containing a 20-kiloton nuclear bomb was poised for war.
Once inside the restricted area, the women sang, prayed and painted crosses on the structures in their own blood, which had been tested in advance to ensure that it would not endanger anyone who might come in contact with it. They had brought it to the protest in small baby bottles.
As if it were a movie set, right on cue troops arrived at the scene, crashing through the fence in their military vehicles and arresting the three pacifists. The women were charged with two felonies: damaging federal property and obstructing the national defense.
“It was a holy act,” Platte said.
I covered the nuns’ trial in federal court in Denver in 2003, and if you think Amy Coney Barrett and her seven kids are the very embodiment of some kind of unassailable holy spirit, you shoulda been there.
The sisters never for a moment denied what happened. They simply insisted that it wasn’t a crime. In fact, citing the international precedent established at the Nuremberg Trials, they said they were there to stop a crime against humanity.
They were convicted on both counts. Platte’s sentence was 41 months in federal prison; Hudson got 30 months; and Gilbert got 33 months. They also were ordered to pay the federal government $3,080 in restitution for the property damage, most of which was caused by the military police busting the fence when they responded so urgently to reports of three diminutive women singing and praying next to a missile silo.
When the sentences were announced, the sisters smiled and said they would continue to pray for their prosecutors and ask God to bless all the judges who had sentenced them – and given their long history of being arrested for peaceful anti-nuke protests across the country, that was a considerable workload for the Almighty.
They viewed their sentences not so much as punishment but as an opportunity to serve the poor, who make up the vast majority of both inmates and guards in prisons. They organized the prisoners and taught them to care for each other and to build their psychological resilience through the long days of humiliation and discomfort.
When the nuns, who had all taken vows of poverty, refused to pay restitution to the government war machine, supporters worldwide instead raised more than $600,000 to feed the poor in their name.
The government declined to accept the alternative restitution. The women stood their ground.
Once they completed probation and were free to travel, the nuns returned to Colorado frequently to rally their supporters in the cause of world peace.
One time I asked them if they worried that the FBI might tap their phones. Oh, Gilbert told me, she was certain they were tapped.
“Our phones were tapped years ago when we were in Michigan,” she said. “We would like to think our spirits may someday impact some of the folks who are listening.”
The comment was meant to be both sincere and ironic, and I couldn’t keep from laughing.
I loved being in their company. A lapsed Catholic, I was more accustomed to the nuns from my childhood who broke yard sticks over the heads of naughty boys and spent too much of their time talking about what it would be like to spend eternity in hell.
The “sistas” as I often called them were brave and indomitable, loving, funny and generous beyond measure.
One of the last times I talked to Platte was in 2017. She and Gilbert were on a reunion tour in Colorado 15 years to the day after they got arrested in Weld County. Hudson had died of cancer in 2011, but the nuns were certain she was with them in spirit.
On that trip they stopped by the office of Colorado Springs Mayor John Suthers, who had prosecuted them in 2003 when he was U.S. Attorney. He declined to see them, so they left him a note saying their visit was “an act of love.”
The tour also turned into a glorious celebration.
Just days before their arrival in Colorado, the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons was awarded the 2017 Nobel Peace Prize. The sisters had spent weeks working with the group, lobbying world leaders at the United Nations to persuade them to sign on to the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons. (The United States refused, though 69 other countries signed.)
They visited the Minuteman site and solemnly left a copy of the treaty not far from the spot where they were arrested.
Platte, wearing a T-shirt that said, “I’m already against the next war,” told me the Trump administration had made their work more urgent. Nuclear anxiety was heightened, she said, especially on college campuses where the sisters were treated like rock stars.
Gilbert said they would never give up teaching, demonstrating, peacefully protesting for a world without nuclear weapons, no matter how many times they would be arrested.
“This is our vow,” she said.
Platte, who for decades had been vilified, prosecuted and punished, nodded in agreement.
“I refuse to have an enemy,” she said, smiling, and then, as always, she told me she loved me.
Ardeth Platte died in her sleep on Sept. 30 on nice soft sheets in the Dorothy Day Catholic Worker House in Washington, D.C. Gilbert said she was listening to the presidential debate on NPR when she went to bed. She was still wearing her headphones when her body was discovered the next morning. She was 84.
I’ll miss her. We all will.
Diane Carman is a Denver communications consultant.
from Voices, a blog from the BruderhofIs There Bacon in Heaven?
October 27, 2020
She was labeled a “terrorist” by the state of Maryland for fighting for the complete abolition of nuclear weapons. The methods that earned her this label? Nonviolent protests, Plowshares actions, speaking engagements, and living in community. None of these actions spread “terror” in any hearts, and in my experience she wouldn’t hurt a fly. I’m not sure what label I would give her, but Ardeth Platte, OP, was certainly one of the gentlest people I have known. On a whim I looked up some antonyms for terrorist and found: heroine, humanitarian, champion, brave woman, Good Samaritan, guardian angel, knight in shining armor, role model, woman of courage. But none of these describe her fully, either. She was a combination of courage, daring, faith, and knowledge; she also had a down-to-earth simplicity, a joy and love of life. She was what I would call a spiritual mother, lavishing love and care on young people like me who were trying to figure out where we belonged in life. I will always treasure the conversations I had with her, even though I only met her two or three times. After Ardeth’s recent death I asked my sister, Coretta, who knew Ardeth far better than I did, to share some reflections on her life:
Ardeth Platte was born on Good Friday, April 10, 1936, and joined the Grand Rapids Dominicans (a branch of the Order of Preachers) at the age of eighteen. From early days she seemed to care about social justice and to feel compelled toward enacting change. She founded Saginaw’s former St. Joseph’s Educational Center, served as the coordinator of Saginaw’s Home for Peace and Justice for more than a decade, and was a Saginaw City council member from 1973 to 1985. In 1983 the Reagan administration began stationing nuclear weapons in Michigan. Ardeth and other Sisters, notably Carol Gilbert, OP, were already heavily involved in social justice campaigns, and this action brought a focus to their work. From that point they worked to make their state nuke-free: holding mock nuclear war crimes tribunals, organizing statewide retreats, demonstrating at military bases, and occupying the offices of federal lawmakers. For five years they lived beside two Strategic Air Command Bases in Michigan, and eventually succeeded (through protest) in shutting down the last air force base in Michigan, thus ridding the state of nuclear weapons. They were ready to take on the next target.
From the Midwest, Ardeth and Sister Carol moved to Jonah House, an intentional community and hub of the peace movement in Baltimore, close enough to the capital to have their presence and resistance noticed. It was during my year-long stay at Jonah House (a gap year after completing high school) that I got to know Ardeth. She was unwavering in her quest for justice, but in between protests in Washington and planning the next move, life in community was filled with down-to-earth living. The house was spotless. If the garden needed weeding, the tomatoes preserving, or the beds making up, she was there for the task, putting in longer days than I did, although she was three times my age. During yard work she often took the more strenuous job of weed-whacking, letting me operate the riding mower. She could work the better part of a day in the hot sun and crave only San Pellegrino for refreshment. Or she’d be organizing the food pantry, or meeting the homeless who came to the door, always taking time to listen to their stories. She was also gracious, anticipating the needs of vegans, omnivores, or whoever entered the house. And there were many! But she was never so dogmatic as to become a vegetarian herself (it was too much to expect others to cater to her). I remember how precious her father’s memory was to her, and how she remembered his birthday every year with a breakfast of bacon, eggs, and hash browns.
During her years at Jonah House, Ardeth completed four Plowshares actions, each time aiming to expose how nuclear weapons threaten our world. The participants used household hammers and their own blood to represent “the messiness of war that we want to stop.”
In 2002 Ardeth took part in an action in Weld County, Colorado. She and two other nuns, Sisters Carol Gilbert and Jackie Hudson, dressed as weapons inspectors and entered a Minuteman III nuclear missile facility. The sisters walked through a field over underground silos harboring intercontinental ballistic missiles with nuclear warheads that could obliterate most everything and everyone within a four mile circle. Ardeth and her companions cut through two fences, hung a peace banner, and poured a cross of blood on the hundred-ton lid of missile silo N-8. All the while and during their arrest, they prayed “O God, help us to be peacemakers in a hostile world.” For this action Ardeth was found guilty of depredation of government property and sabotage, and was sentenced to forty-one months in prison plus three years’ probation. It was during this prison term that Ardeth earned the label of “terrorist” in Maryland, and, thanks to Piper Kerman’s book, was the inspiration for a character on the Netflix series “Orange is the New Black.”
But to me, she was more than this famous woman. In the twenty-some years I’ve known her, I don’t think she’s ever failed to send me a birthday card (always snail-mail, and always on time!), so when I had the opportunity to host her on her eighty-second birthday, I was thrilled. There was no doubt about the breakfast menu: bacon, eggs, and hash browns! At eighty-two, she was (if possible) even more focused on the abolition of nuclear weapons than she had been in the nineties; moving beyond risking prison time, she was taking an international approach. She and Carol had joined the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons (ICAN), a coalition started in Australia in 2007. This international group hammered out a Treaty for the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons, which was adopted by the United Nations in 2017, earning ICAN the Nobel Peace Prize that year. Ardeth said, “I think when we end nuclear weapons. . . we start doing what is basically, humanly necessary for all of the country and for the world again.”
She didn’t live to see that day. Carol was excited on the morning of September 30 to tell Ardeth that Malaysia had become the forty-sixth nation to ratify the treaty. Malaysia’s decision meant that just four additional ratifications were needed for the landmark disarmament treaty to be brought into force. But Ardeth never woke up on September 30 to hear this good news; she had died in her sleep during the night, at age eighty-four.
I did not know that her eighty-second birthday would be the last time I’d see her. I also did not know, when I served bacon and eggs to my family on September 29, that it would be Ardeth’s last day alive. But I do know that she was no terrorist. As her sisters so rightly state, She was “highly respected nationally and internationally for her grasp of the complexity of the military-industrial complex, her articulation of the injustices perpetrated on people who are poor, and her perseverance in the pursuit of justice and peace,” yet “she remained a humble, gentle, and generous soul who was loved and admired by all who knew her.”
And she was even more than that. Despite her unwavering commitment to abolishing nuclear weapons, she was an outgoing, humble woman who lived out her faith and belief with no care for personal consequence. And to me, she was very simply a good friend. I hope there is bacon in heaven.
from Pax Christi USA
In Thanksgiving: Remembering Sr. Ardeth Platte in this season of peace
Pax Christi UN Team, New York City
The night of September 29, 2020, Sr. Ardeth Platte – having spent the hot summer working daily in her garden at the Dorothy Day Catholic Worker House in Washington, D.C., supplying people in need with fresh produce; and having, just two days, earlier delivered a rigorous online presentation for a school of theology; and the previous day having stood on the street corner holding a sign calling for the end of nuclear weapons – curled up on her mattress on the floor of the tiny room she shared with her longtime co-activist, Sr. Carol Gilbert.
When Carol tried to rouse Ardeth a few hours later, eager to share news about the most recent ratification of the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons (“TPNW”), she was stunned to discover that Ardeth – who was still wearing the radio earphones she usually wore when retiring to bed, in order to keep up with global news – had quietly slipped away.
At the age of 84, Ardeth Platte had lived a life of selfless devotion to the cause of peace. Over the course of her 66 years as a member of the Dominican Sisters of Grand Rapids, Michigan, she had been a teacher, school principal, director of alternative education, member of the City Council, and Mayor pro tem of Saginaw Michigan. Sr. Ardeth had served the poor, and had advocated for local environmental issues. She worked for more than a decade as coordinator of the Home for Peace and Justice in Saginaw. Eventually, she and Sr. Carol turned their focus to issues of nuclear abolition, and joined the Catholic activist community of Jonah House, in Baltimore, Maryland.
While living at Jonah House, Ardeth participated in four “Plowshares” actions at various nuclear-weapons facilities, including Andrews Air Force base, seeking symbolically to transform “swords into plowshares,” pursuant to the admonition set forth in the biblical Book of Isaiah. Each of those four Plowshares actions drew its inspiration from one of the various aspects of creation threatened by nuclear weapons: water, air, space, and land.
Those actions also entailed spilling her own blood, symbolically representing that of the hundreds of thousands of people already killed by nuclear weapons.
In 2002, Sr. Ardeth, Sr. Carol, and Sr. Jackie Hudson, dressed as weapons inspectors, entered onto the Rocky Flats “Minuteman III” nuclear missile silo in Colorado. (This action became the focus of the documentary film “Conviction.”) The trio was arrested, convicted on felony charges, and jailed, with Ardeth being imprisoned for three years in Danbury, Connecticut (where she became the inspiration for a character in the book, later a Netflix show, “Orange is the New Black”).
Ardeth and Carol also took part in other anti-nuclear actions, including at the Y-2 nuclear weapons plant in Oak Ridge, Tennessee, for which they were also jailed. Over the course of her life, Ardeth spent more than six years incarcerated for actions opposing nuclear weapons.
When not in prison, Ardeth persisted in actively speaking, protesting, and agitating against nuclear weapons. Her tireless work led to articles about her in “The New York Times,” “The Washington Post,” “The New Yorker,” and numerous other publications.
In recent years, Sr. Ardeth was an active member of the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons (“ICAN”), spending weeks as an ardent campaigner at the United Nations in New York working to advance the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons (“TPNW”), which was approved in July of 2017. After ICAN was awarded the Nobel Prize for its work on the TPNW, Ardeth and Carol traversed the country, addressing student and community groups, displaying a replica of the Nobel Peace Prize medal, and explaining the significance of the TPNW. They also visited global military bases – from Colorado to Buchel, Germany –
hand-delivering to base commanders a copy of, and explaining the significance of, the TPNW.
Prior to the coronavirus pandemic, Ardeth had also participated regularly at protests at the Pentagon, and been arrested at “Fire Drill Friday” climate-change actions in Washington. She had also been arrested for participating in a peaceful protest at a Senate office building, calling for an end to the forced separation of refugee children from their parents. When the pandemic forced the cancellation of her travels, Ardeth turned to internet media sources, continuing to advocate fiercely for the social justice, and the global abolition of nuclear weapons.
At the time of her death, Ardeth was eagerly awaiting the crucial 50th ratification of the TPNW, triggering its provisions – which occurred, with the ratification by Honduras, just three short weeks later. A number of anti-nuclear advocates only half-jokingly attributed that ratification to Sr. Ardeth’s advocacy in higher places.
Ardeth Platte was indefatigable. Purpose-driven. Creative. Inspirational.
Above all, Ardeth was kind. She was interested less in proselytizing, than in having deep conversations – with listening being as important as speaking. She had at her disposal more facts and figures, and had more deeply plumbed the depths of the moral issues surrounding nuclear weapons, than had most of those with whom she engaged in conversation. And yet she did not dismiss those whose beliefs did not align with her own. Instead, she shared what she knew and believed, and invited others to do the same.
As she told “The Denver Post” in 2017, “I refuse to have an enemy. I simply won’t.”
While, at the age of 84 – having been subjected to multiple arrests and incarcerations over the course of her life – she suffered from a very painful and debilitating arthritis, she never complained. Instead, to deflect others’ concern when they observed her involuntary winces, she would simply crack a joke, her gentle eyes gleaming. Her smile, and her deep joy, were infectious.
In the end, Sr. Ardeth passed from this earth – which she had worked so assiduously to improve – in the same manner as she had lived: raising a ruckus. Because she died at home, the 911 call resulted in the responding police unit cordoning off the room where she died. As Sr. Carol later stated, only half in jest, “Even in death, Ardeth ha[d] to make a scene, making our bedroom a crime scene.” One can only imagine the deep chuckle, and crinkled-eye smile, which that observation elicited in heaven.
____________
Mary T. Yelenick is a member of the Pax Christi International delegation at the United Nations. She is also a member of the Pax Christi USA Anti-Racism Team (PCART).
November 2017, Sr. Carol Gilbert and Sr. Ardeth Platte at Fr. Jerry Zawada, OFM’s memorial service in Tucson, leading us in the chorus of Sacred Creation – “Sacred the land, sacred the water, sacred the sky, holy and true, sacred all life, sacred each other, all reflect God who is good.” Photo by Felice Cohen-Joppa.