Posted On: 5/4/2010
The Style Weekly mag.,
Divining
Bill and Sue Frankel-Streit are parents, Catholics, felons and
anarchists. It’s all part of their mission to serve God.
by Amy Biegelsen
BILL FRANKEL-STREIT and his wife, Sue, did not fight once during their
first year of marriage, largely because the state of
holding them in separate prisons.
Their imprisonment, and arguably their marriage, stem from the way
they celebrated New Year’s Eve 1991. That night Bill and Sue, along
with two others, broke into Griffiss Air Force Base in
They’d spent considerable time scoping the base in advance, but made
it on the grounds only twice before: once to attend a public air show
and again for an unauthorized, self-guided tour after hooking an
invitation to attend mass at the military chapel. So on New Year’s
Eve, after they cleared the barbed-wire fence and the perimeter road,
evaded circulating watch vehicles and cut through a chain-link
barrier, they were surprised to find an electric fence.
American military forces were 15 days away from beginning the air
strikes against
alert. “We thought it was just blasphemous,” says Bill, who was
ordained as a Roman Catholic priest in 1982.
Once they cut the fence, it was only a matter of time until someone
noticed. By some miracle, the current wasn’t running through the fence
at that exact moment and they cut the wire and passed into one of the
most heavily guarded sectors on the base.
“When you go with faith the waters part,” Bill says.
Their quarry loomed: a nuclear armed B-52 bomber. They raised the claw
hammers they brought along and began banging on the side of the plane.
When the guards came, they offered no resistance. The
Post-Standard, which ran more than 30 articles covering the action and
subsequent trial, reported that the base’s top security officers were
removed from their jobs after the incident.
That night, Bill and Sue joined a tradition of anti-war activists,
often Catholic, who have committed dozens of similar protests
worldwide since the 1980s, directly targeting the machines of war.
Called plowshares actions, they get their name from a familiar Bible
verse, Isaiah 2:4 — “and they shall beat their swords into plowshares,
and their spears into pruninghooks: nation shall not lift up sword
against nation, neither shall they learn war any more.”
“The plowshares action was like a sacrament for me,” Bill says. They
spent the first two months of the year in jail and were temporarily
released that spring. While out, they prepared their defense and got
married, a decision that further altered Bill’s already strained
relationship with the church hierarchy. They represented themselves in
court, lost and spent the next year in jail — which was part of the
point.
“I think he’s a model of what a married Catholic priest would be for
the church,” says Sister Anne Montgomery, a nun who participated in
the first plowshares action in 1980. She and seven others broke into
the General Electric Nuclear Missile Re-entry Division in King of
Prussia, Penn., and hammered on two of the warhead nosecones that were
manufactured there. “He manages to give himself totally to his family
and totally to disarmament work,” she says of Bill.
Twenty years and three children later, the couple remains committed to
nonviolent protest. Bill’s been incarcerated so many times that last
month he appeared in federal court in
but as an expert witness on the comparative conditions of different
prisons.
Hearing about Bill’s life of resistance likely was a novelty for the
judge and prosecutors that day, not to mention the defendant, who’d
been convicted of multiple homicides and appeared a little startled at
the beginning of his testimony.
echoing with accusations of radicalism (Socialism! Communism! Naked
fascism!). The Catholic Church was in the news, too, as fresh
revelations in the sexual-abuse scandal came to light. All the
rhetoric about religion and radical politics, however, probably
doesn’t conjure up the image of anyone like Bill Franklel-Streit — a
living, breathing Catholic anarchist.
BILL AND SUE live with their three teenage children on a sprawling
property in
taut and wiry. Sue has a mane of salt and pepper hair and a big gold
loop in her nose; Bill has a shaved head and walks with a limp because
of a lingering hip injury. They dote on their children, who are taller
and full-cheeked. Looking at them, you’d never guess their parents
were felons.
They all live in a little farmhouse with a low ceiling that gives the
place a cozy, conspiratorial feeling. There’s a composting toilet —
just toss in some sawdust when you’re done — and one that flushes in
case they’re ever putting up someone who is sick or elderly. As part
of their commitment to serving their community, helping those in need
and welcoming strangers, guests are constant.
They pick up odd jobs to pay the bills. Occasionally they’ll be
invited to speak at a church or a college. Bill’s campus talks often
draw an unlikely mix of “anarchists with piercings and tattoos all in
black, and clean-cut Christian kids,” he says. He tells them the Bible
is the original anarchist handbook and everybody freaks out.
They eat eggs from a mess of chickens they keep fenced off from a
bountiful vegetable garden. When they go to the store to spend some of
their $700 monthly budget of food stamps, they peek in the dumpster to
see if anything good got tossed out. The kids have Medicare. Despite
their opposition to the government, the Frankel-Streits figure if it
does exist, they might as well take advantage, and being part of those
programs means they live in solidarity with the poor.
Bill says their real insurance is “the community of people,” other
activists like them, who routinely send food and clothes, and a
handful of like-minded Catholics who occasionally tithe to them
instead of the church.
They home-school the children: Isaac, 17, Anna, 15 and Gaby, 12. The
girls are brainy and friendly and have learned to roll their eyes
every bit as well as their suburban counterparts. Isaac has a close
friend who lives over on the Twin Oaks commune, known for its homemade
tofu and hammocks. They commiserate together about “growing up in
community,” Bill says
The kids take music lessons and play team sports thanks to an annual
grant from the
money to the children of activists. The fund was started by the son of
Ethel and Julius Rosenberg, who were convicted with slipping atomic
secrets to the Soviets, and then executed in June 1953.
The children have absorbed a lot of the social aspects of their
parents’ lifestyle, but the religious content hasn’t taken as firm a
hold. Sitting at a long wooden table in the kitchen, Gaby acknowledges
that she doesn’t consider herself particularly Catholic. “We tried
church in exchange for a puppy,” she says.
“I’m probably going to have random people living in my house no matter
what I do,” Anna adds.
“I don’t care as long as they don’t drag me off to the White House at
6 in the morning,” Gaby says.
“Well, that’s the Pentagon,” Bill interjects. “The White House is
usually more like noon.”
In January, the family took a tour of the Capitol. When they reached
the Rotunda, Bill and some fellow protestors held a prayer vigil to
commemorate four
detainees had committed suicide, until a military whistleblower came
forward and said they likely were killed at a Central Intelligence
Agency secret site. The protesters were arrested and removed. Back
downstairs, a ticket taker, who didn’t realize the children had been
with them, apologized for the interruption and offered them free
tickets.
BILL FRANKEL-STREIT grew up in Hazleton, Penn., and recalls a fairly
straight-laced upbringing. “I grew up with a lot of deference for
authority,” he says. When he saw on television that Martin Luther King
Jr. was killed, he wondered why doctors were being shot.
As a kid he always looked up to one uncle in particular: a priest.
Streit says he was drawn to the clergy because of their status. He’s
since wondered if his uncle had been in the military whether he might
not have followed him down that path too.
Bill went directly from high school to seminary. It was 1972, shortly
after the Catholic Church had released the decrees of the Second
Vatican Council, an internal effort to modernize itself and “arguably
the most liberal time in the church,” he says, but
change everything. He was allowed to wear jeans to class, but he still
got the distinct impression that his teachers and fellow students
viewed lay people as second-class citizens rather than those they
served.
Despite the not-quite-perfect-fit, Bill was ordained in 1982. He
busied himself with homilies and weddings, but struck up a
correspondence with Philip and Daniel Berrigan, brothers and radical
priests.
The Berrigans are best known for their actions on May 17, 1968, when
they burned stolen draft cards with homemade napalm — among the
military’s weapons of choice during the Vietnam War. During the trial,
Dan Berrigan read a statement. “Our apologies, good friends,” he said,
“for the fracture of this good order, the burning of paper instead of
children.”
The Berrigans went to jail, but it vaulted them to national stature.
They appeared on the cover of Time magazine’s Jan. 25, 1971, issue and
Gregory Peck produced a film based on the trial. The Berrigans
remained such devoted protesters, Streit says, that guards at the
Pentagon referred to both of them as Father Berrigan.
Through their correspondence, Bill became convinced that a true
shepherd comforts the sick and dying, but also challenges people on
war and racism and the death penalty. He began protesting and was
arrested for the first time in 1985, much to the chagrin of the church
hierarchy. In 1988 he took a leave of absence.
Bill moved to Washington, D.C., and joined a group home that named
itself after Dorothy Day, an activist and journalist who began a
newspaper aimed at all the Catholic workers who streamed into in New
first issue was published May 1, 1933 — 77 years ago this week.
There was a strong history in Catholic social teaching of advocating
for social justice causes such as poverty, housing, wages and
especially nonviolence, says Susan Mountin, an adjunct assistant
professor of theology at
“Very early on in the movement they found that they believed that acts
of nonviolent civil disobedience were ways of calling attention to
social injustice,” Mountin says. An early example was for Catholic
Workers to refuse to go down into bomb shelters during the civil
defense drills of the 1950s, and instead pray in local parks.
(“Entertaining Angels,” a movie about Day’s life, was released in 1996
starring Moira Kelly and Martin Sheen, who has been active in social
justice issues and has been arrested during protests dozens of times.)
Such radicals technically are a lay movement in the church, doing work
rooted in the gospel, but not recipients of church funding like monks
and nuns. “They have continued to say we are Catholic,” Mountin says,
“and maybe even more Catholic.”
The big blue Dorothy Day House in
across the street from a rambling private park. Bill and about 30
others, activists and five formerly homeless families, lived and
worked there together. There are close to 200 more of these homes and
farms, known as hospitality houses, throughout the country.
One of Bill’s housemates was his future wife.
Sue lived on the
grew up in a Jewish, intellectual milieu,” she says, “so I didn’t
really think people read the Bible.” She grew up with more of a
post-Holocaust Jewish identity than one focused on religious and
spiritual aspects.
One summer during college, she worked selling books door to door, a
job that quickly became more of an anthropological experiment. She
noticed that she could depend on a drink or a bathroom in the homes of
the poorest families, while the richer ones would slam the door in her
face.
“It was kind of my own little comprehension of capitalism and how
wealth affects people’s level of hospitality,” she says. One of the
books she was hawking was a Bible dictionary, which she began reading
at night.
After college — and a year in
edited former Chrysler Chief Executive Lee Iacocca’s occasional
columns — she moved back to
newspaper in the
from her mom’s house into the city and struck up a friendship with
Mark, a homeless man who hung around her stop. One day she emerged
from the Metro and found Mark with icicles hanging off his eyelashes.
That was the final straw, she says. She wanted out of participating in
the mainstream culture.
She’d learned about the Dorothy Day House and started cooking a
community meal there once a week. Eventually she moved in. At first,
Bill and Sue were just very close friends. “I was a priest,” he says,
“so there was this whole to be or not to be thing.”
By the time they committed the Plowshares action in upstate
they had decided to get married knowing full well their honeymoon
likely would be courtesy of the federal government. Bill says he saw
the experience as a good thumbnail sketch of what a marriage should
be: “risking your life together in faith, hope and love.”
After the airplane hammering they spent a few months in prison. The
judge had offered to release them on their own personal recognizance,
but “we really wanted to be in prison,” Bill says. “This was Phil
[Berrigan’s] big thing. It heightens the witness.”
Shortly before the trial began, a judge in
The goal of the courtroom phase in a plowshares action is to try to
turn the proceedings around and put the B-52 on trial. One way to do
that is to try to get information about the weapon system in front of
the jury, to quantify for them how much damage it can do, how many
people it can kill. In return, the prosecution tries its best to limit
what can be discussed by filing motions with the judge.
During the trial, every time the couple tried to ask a question about
the B-52’s capacity, the prosecutors objected and eventually blocked
most of the information they attempted to introduce in court. At one
point the exchange became so heated that the judge sent the jury out
of the courtroom and threatened all of them with contempt.
According to the
to hear an hour’s worth of testimony offered by Ramsey Clark,
attorney general under Lyndon B. Johnson. He had toured
discussed the death and destruction that B-52 bombers had wrought on
the civilian population and infrastructure in
Bill and Sue lost and spent the next 10 months in jail. In one fell
swoop, Bill had become a married priest felon. (It’s a set of
descriptors he’s a little uncomfortable with, especially after it was
revealed that Rodney Lee Rodis, another
convicted last year for embezzling money from his church and had a
secret family in
married priest felon.) Since then, Bill has carved out a new practice
and expression of his faith.
“I do my preaching in court now,” he says. Instead of maps of the Holy
Land, he’s familiarized himself with the placement and terrain of
military bases, weapons systems and prisons. He still follows the
Catholic calendar, but with a slightly different set of emphases.
“Good Friday, for me, instead of going to a church service, I act,” he
says. “I go to the Pentagon and confront Caesar.” As part of his
observance, he gets help from a sympathetic doctor who draws his
blood. He stashes the sample in his freezer until it’s time. When Good
Friday approaches, Bill thaws it out and drains it into a baby bottle.
He takes it with him to the Pentagon where he literally spills his own
blood. Typically, this gets him arrested. “The blood is already
there,” he often says in court. “We’re just making it visible.”
For Bill, this is a “really truthful act” of laying down his life
essence in the name of Christ. After all, he says, Jesus died for our
sins, he didn’t kill for them.
In late December, while the rest of the country celebrates Christmas,
the Frankel-Streits and their extended family of activists gather to
observe the Feast of Holy Innocents. This commemorates the story in
the Gospel of Matthew of King Herod, who gets word that a child has
been born who eventually will seize his throne. Herod executes all of
commemorate the atomic bombs dropped on
Despite his estrangement from the formal Catholic hierarchy, Bill
still sees himself as working within the unique inheritance of the
early Catholic Church’s resistance to empires.
“The empire always has the death card and that’s why it’s total
blasphemy,” he says. “Presidents and pharaohs, they’re the
anti-Christ. They’re what has to be resisted. The whole Bible is about
resisting the principalities and powers, those who make war on God’s
children, the poor.” To that end, Christianity and anarchy become one
and the same. “Resistance is love,” he says. “It’s loving the victim
so much, and the oppressor, too. It’s like tough love. It’s like
living with an alcoholic.”
In his view, the “imperial religion” focuses on the individual instead
of the social gospel, which is how we have ended up with a popular
religious moment that “focuses more on sexual sin than on injustice.”
Frankel-Streit’s belief that all people are part of the body of Christ
stands at odds with the personal savior approach prevalent in many
churches today, the theological equivalent of union busting.
This is the calling Bill and Sue have been trying to answer since they
were released from prison in
They came back to Dorothy Day House in
1993 they moved to a Catholic Worker house in
Berrigan was living at the time.
“Doing Bible study with Phil always meant you were preparing for a
felony,” Bill says.
When they returned to
in the immediate neighborhood. After a kid who used to come by to play
was shot execution-style in front of the house, they left.
They moved to
while. After the 9/11 attacks, the landlord got itchier about having
radical tenants and evicted them. Bill and Sue happened to have coffee
with a young couple that had recently received a sizable inheritance
and offered to give them $100,000. It’s a startling coincidence, but
Bill says it’s typical of Catholic Workers to have such providential
run-ins.
They used the money to buy the house in Louisa and have been there
since. They call it Little Flower, which was the nickname of Therese
Lisieux, Dorothy Day’s favorite saint. She advocated the “little way”
of the cumulative power in little acts of love. After all, if the
massive destruction in
something as small as an atom, surely little acts of love could
counteract that evil.
Bill’s estrangement from the organized church has been embodied in the
person of Bishop Francis Xavier DiLorenzo. He’s the bishop of
Scranton Diocese, DiLorenzo was part of the church administration.
DiLorenzo’s predecessor was the Bishop-President of Pax Christi USA,
the national Catholic peace movement, and sympathetic to the work of
the Frankel-Streits. Under DiLorenzo, however, the budget has been cut
for social ministry activities. He’s refused to allow speakers from
Pax Christi to speak, much less people from the Catholic Worker, and
has closed the door on a source of funding for the Frankel-Streits.
That’s become a slightly trickier issue lately. A woman and her three
small children had been in need of hospitality and staying at Little
Flower before deciding to move to
Service workers have since intervened, in what the Frankel-Streits say
is an unnecessary incursion, and removed the children from their
mother’s care. The mother is back living at Little Flower, and Bill
and Sue are helping her fight to regain custody so they can all live
together. But their lifestyle and nontraditional funding streams are
under the microscope now more than ever.
Cooperating with the government agencies to become official foster
parents isn’t something the Frankel-Streits have been willing to do
before. It’s one small step among several they’re taking toward the
mainstream. Last year Bill got arrested, but didn’t serve any jail
time for the big three protest holidays. He participated as an expert
witness for the first time, rather than as a defendant. There’s even
some discussion about the youngest, Gaby, doing a year at a Quaker
school in
Is it possible that in the same season that the general public took
glancing notice of Catholics and radical politics, these radical
Catholics are taking steps toward the mainstream?
Bill has a slightly different take. He’s not downshifting to more
mainstream tactics. Instead, he says, he’s doing what he’s always
done: “I ask myself, ‘What does love require at this point?’”
---------------
Bill and Sue Frankel-Streit
The Little Flower CW,
Ph: 540-967-5574
E-Mail: littleflowercw AT wildmail.com
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