Pacifist Megan Rice, a nun who spent two years in prison in her 80s for anti-nuclear activism, has died.
She was 91.
Her cause of death was congestive heart failure, said her order, the Society of the Holy Child Jesus. She died on Oct. 10 at Holy Child Center in Rosemont, Pennsylvania.
“Sister Megan lived her life with love full of action and zeal,” Carroll Juliano, American Province Leader for the order, told The Associated Press. “Her commitment to build a peaceful and just world was unwavering and selfless.”
It was July 2012 when Sister Rice, age 82 at the time, along with fellow peace activists Michael Walli, 66, and Greg Boertje-Obed, 59, broke into a weapons-grade facility known as the Fort Knox of Uranium to splash blood on the walls. The vial of human blood was a symbol of the cost of war, as were the spray-painted messages such as “The fruit of justice is peace,” said the three, who were acting as part of the Plowshares anti-nuclear organization.
While the trio called it a statement of protest and love, the facility was shut down for two weeks, and they were charged and convicted of seeking to endanger national security. However, in May 2015, a panel of the 6th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled in a 2-1 decision that they had not in fact injured national security when they cut through several fences and broke into the Y-12 National Security Complex in Oak Ridge, Tenn. Their convictions were overturned.
Meanwhile, Rice was famously crammed into a gymnasium-sized dorm unit with 111 women in 60 bunkbeds at the Metropolitan Detention Center in Brooklyn. The dorm cum mega-cell, squalid enough to make “Orange Is the New Black” facilities look opulent, was designed to hold male prisoners until trial, not to hold women after conviction.
Rice was born in 1930 in New York City to activist parents — her father was an obstetrician, and her mother held a Ph.D. from Columbia University. Rice went straight into the sisterhood at age 18, entering the Society of the Holy Child of Jesus to become a nun and taking her final vows in 1955, with the religious name Mother Frederick Mary. She earned degrees in biology from Villanova and Boston College, taught elementary school for more than 10 years, and then was assigned to work in Nigeria. She would spend 23 years in West Africa teaching and serving as a pastoral guide.
She was heavily influenced in her activism by her uncle, who spent four months in Nagasaki, Japan, after it and Hiroshima had been leveled by atomic bombs to hasten the end of World War II, bombings that Rice would later call the “greatest shame in history.”
Upon her return from Africa, she dove into anti-nuclear activism. Before the big break-in, she had four convictions under her belt for previous protest activities. Her goal in Tennessee was to protest manufacturing that “can only cause death,” AP said, citing a trial transcript. During her trial she said it felt worse to keep quiet than to break the law.
“I had to do it,” she said. “My guilt is that I waited 70 years to be able to speak what I knew in my conscience.”
With News Wire Services