The War Resisters League just turned 100. Here's a history of its Catholic ties.

When I learned of Montgomery's participation in two WRL Peace Awards as part of the Plowshares Disarmament Community (honored in 1986) and Christian Peacemaker Teams (in 2002), I wondered just how many Catholics this nonreligious group had engaged over its century. The award's Catholic honorees include Dorothy Day (1963), co-recipient Diane Nash Bevel (1964), Ammon Hennacy (1969), Daniel Berrigan (1974) and Kathy Kelly (2010). 

Montgomery was one of many sisters drawn to the War Resisters League's radical pacifist stance, including Dominican Srs. Ardeth Platte and Carol Gilbert, and Holy Child Jesus Sr. Megan Rice.

Lay Catholic participation

When Catholic journalist and activist Eileen Egan wrote about the War Resisters League's 50th anniversary in the September 1973 Catholic Worker, she believed its co-editor Hennacy forged the first alliance with the league in 1955 over shared resistance to civil defense drills that remain iconic.

However, my research showed that the relationship began a full quarter-century earlier, beginning in the 1930s with Catholic Worker co-founder Day, who remained a lifelong supporter.

In the 1950s, the War Resisters League's secular identity puzzled some mainstream faithful, who didn't expect fellow Catholics on its picket lines. In 1956, a Catholic heckler at a protest demanded that Hennacy recite a Hail Mary to "prove" he was Catholic, not communist. Hennacy instead asked him to drop by the local parish and ask the priests, who could vouch for him.

That street challenger may have thought he was sticking up for a more conservative Catholicism, but in fact some members of the Catholic Worker and other Catholic groups connected to the War Resisters League have also been pro-life activists. This upends assumptions that all radical peace activists think alike, or that they consistently align with liberal secular positions.

Mary Rider, who is married to Kings Bay Plowshares activist and former War Resisters League staffer Patrick O'Neill, said fellow league workers and a feature in WIN, the league's quarterly magazine, accepted her pro-life views even when the majority were pro-choice.

As Robert Ellsberg said, "They could respect conscience."

Ellsberg had been drawn to the league through his interest in the work of draft resister Randy Kehler. At a War Resisters' International meeting in 1969, Kehler had famously inspired Ellsberg's father, Daniel, to leak the Pentagon Papers, and Robert Ellsberg grew up "revering" him.

Joanne Sheehan, O'Neill and Frida Berrigan all lamented the loss of the "Peace Pentagon" at 339 Lafayette Street in Manhattan, New York. The War Resisters League shared the building, which was sold in 2015, with the Catholic Peace Fellowship and other pacifist groups, some Catholic. 

Berrigan noted its geographical position between the Maryhouse Catholic Worker and St. Joseph's House. She said the league "served as a third space ... before technology totally permeated the Catholic Worker. Workers would come to WRL to check their email, to use a computer. It was the stopping-off point on the way home from a demonstration."

Many other lay Catholics have been active over the decades. Everyone interviewed mentioned Kings Bay Plowshares protester Carmen Trotta, who worked for the War Resisters League in the aftermath of 9/11.

Catholicism was a complex topic for an Italian-American stalwart of the organization, Ralph DiGia, whom War Resisters League leader David McReynolds eulogized as "a second generation Italian anarchist." 

DiGia's atheist-anarchist father forbade his Catholic mother to take the children to church, and DiGia grew up dismissing religion as antithetical to social conscience. But then he met sisters, laity, seminarians and priests whom he respected politically out on the picket lines.

Although DiGia remained secular, while in Danbury prison as a war objector he attended Catholic Mass, as well as Jewish and Protestant services, to understand religious approaches to peace.

Priests in the league

Sheehan, the former chair of War Resisters' International, saw more priests in Catholic Peace Fellowship than in the War Resisters League, though they worked closely together. In 1965, the league distributed a declaration that was what NCR called "the first complete public disavowal of the [Vietnam] war by a Catholic priest." Daniel and Philip Berrigan, then both in the priesthood, signed the declaration nearly three years before joining the Catonsville Nine.

The War Resisters League entered the mid-20th-century debate over whether Catholics could be conscientious objectors. The military refused to acknowledge atheists and the unchurched as conscientious objectors until 1965, when the Supreme Court ruled for the nonreligious in United States v. Seeger. 

However, many Catholics mistakenly believed the church also disapproved, especially after Pope Pius XII's 1956 criticism of conscientious objectors in light of just war, and notwithstanding the Second Vatican Council's later 1965 approval (Gaudium et Spes). Ellsberg said that Catholic Worker associate editor Tom Cornell grew up thinking Catholics could not even apply for such status. 

In November 1965, McReynolds published a letter to the editor in NCR offering the War Resisters League's help for readers — presumably Catholic — who wanted to apply for conscientious objector status.

In August 1969, some Catholic league members celebrated a Mass for Peace on the Pentagon concourse led by Fr. Harry Bury, director of the University of Minnesota's Newman Center. Two worshipers marched to the office of Secretary of Defense Melvin Laird to put their draft cards on his desk. After briefly jailing them, the government dropped the case.

In 1971, various religious groups and Detroit Auxiliary Bishop Thomas Gumbleton teamed with the War Resisters League for the Pax Romana annual convention. From 2003 to 2006, Jesuit Fr. G. Simon Harak served as the league's national anti-militarism coordinator while living with other Jesuit activists, including Daniel Berrigan.

Engagement on nuclear weapons

In 1979, Pax Christi teamed with the War Resisters League, Catholic Workers, Sojourners and the Fellowship of Reconciliation to oppose the second Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty (SALT II). Ellsberg argued in the Catholic Worker that the first "limitation" treaty doubled the nation's armaments. The second was little improvement if they would increase by another 30%.

In June 1982, Cardinal Agostino Casaroli, then papal secretary of state, gave a message to the U.N. General Assembly's Special Session on Disarmament. To commemorate this session,the War Resisters League unveiled a temporary sculpture by William King in Dag Hammarskjold Plaza saying, "STOP WWIII." 

It remained for six months before going to a college campus. Observers hoped Pope John Paul II would go beyond deterrence and speak wholly against nuclear weapons, but that was not yet forthcoming.

In 2010, the league initiated a protest and die-in at rush hour inside New York's Grand Central Station lobby during the U.N. Special Session on Disarmament. They were joined by Frida Berrigan, Art Laffin of D.C.'s Dorothy Day Catholic Worker, Platte and Gilbert, St. Joseph Sr. Liz Profreidt, the Catholic Peace Fellowship, former seminarian and league activist Bill Ofenloch, Brian Terrell, Martha Hennessy (one of Dorothy Day's granddaughters), Veterans for Peace and Think Outside the Bomb. 

In November 2023, the War Resisters League joined Catholic Workers, the Atlantic Life Community and Nukewatch at the U.S. Mission to the United Nations, demanding the U.S. sign the U.N. Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons.

At the Peace History Society conference in October, Sheehan and others from the War Resisters League brought a stunning eight-panel exhibit featuring its history in photographs and a timeline. It travels, so you may be able to arrange for the display to come to your university or library by writing to wrl100history@warresisters.org.