SOA Watch founder connects faith, foreign policy

Maryknoll Father Roy Bourgeois grew up in small-town Lutcher, La., and studied geology in college, expecting to make his fortune in the oil fields of Venezuela. But he was sidetracked by four years in Vietnam, where he met a military chaplain who recommended that he check out the Maryknoll Missionaries. When he returned, he entered the Maryknoll seminary, and, after being ordained in 1972, was assigned to work in Bolivia. After five years, he had to leave the country after speaking out against Bolivian dictator Hugo Banzer.

He began speaking out against the School of the Americas after the 1980 assassination of Archbishop Oscar Romero and the killing of four American churchwomen, including two Maryknoll sisters, in El Salvador. Bourgeois founded School of the Americas Watch, and its annual mid-November vigil, in 1990, following the Nov. 16, 1989, massacre of six Jesuits, along with their housekeeper and her teenage daughter, also in El Salvador.

Graduates of the School of the Americas, located on the grounds of Fort Benning, Ga., were implicated in all three incidents. The school, renamed the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation, provides training to Latin American military and security personnel, and military documents show that students learned assassination and torture techniques there for at least a decade. Spokespeople for the institute insist that it does not now teach torture.

The annual vigil last year drew 19,000 people, organizers estimate. Of those, 37 were arrested for trespassing on the military base, and 33 were sentenced to time in federal correctional institutions.

Bourgeois, 68, recently spoke at Dominican University in River Forest and sat down with Catholic New World staff writer Michelle Martin.

The Catholic New World: At the first vigil in 1990 did you think you would still be holding vigils and protesting 16 years later?

Maryknoll Father Roy Bourgeois: When we started, we had 12 people. We didn’t have a five-year plan. We didn’t have a one-year plan. We weren’t very clear about what we planned to do. We just knew we had to do something because of our knowledge of what was going on in El Salvador.

TCNW: Were you surprised by the response you got?

MFRB: What we discovered was that Latin America was not way out there. It was in our backyard and it wasn’t a complicated issue. This issue was about suffering and death. The martyrs were well-known. Many Catholics and church people especially had heard about Archbishop Romero, the churchwomen, the Jesuits. A lot of people made the connection between their deaths and the soldiers trained at this school.

The other issue that they connected was that it was our tax money being used to run the school. It was being done in our name. It became this teachable moment, this door to Latin America—for a lot of students. It was an introduction to U.S. foreign policy 101, it was an introduction to activism, to peace and justice issues.

TCNW: When did you start to connect peace and justice to faith?

MFRB: It was after Vietnam. It was in the seminary. … I would say 95 percent of my little town were Catholics. It was the New Orleans area. I grew up in a family that was very traditional Catholic—it was Sunday, you put on nice clothes, you went to church. We never heard about that sin of racism that was so big. I went to a public school, and our public school was segregated. Our little Catholic church was segregated. ... It wasn’t until those years in the seminary that I questioned it.

They were very tough years at first, with the antiwar movement. For example, (antiwar activist) Dan Berrigan, when he came my first year in the seminary to give an antiwar talk, I went to the rector and said I really don’t think you should let this traitor be giving a talk in our seminary. I wasn’t thinking. I was still very much of a hawk. Justice wasn’t an integral part of my faith. The rector just told me I didn’t have to go to the lecture. It was optional. So I tried to boycott it. I went around talked to my classmates and said they shouldn’t go. Of course they all went. He was a hero, a war protester, well known.

TCNW: When did you start protesting?

MFRB: It took me three years to go on my first protest, three years after coming back from Vietnam. My very first demonstration was with other Vietnam vets, seminarians and other professors from the seminary, and it was in front of the White House. I got arrested for the first time—my very first time I was in protest.

It was a sacred moment, it was sort of discovering my voice, discovering something that was very important, which was to start discerning rather than just rely on what others told me—what to look for in my own experience, in the context of my faith, to discover truth from my own experience, not just clichés.

I remember saying, I’m going to Vietnam because if we don’t fight them there, we’re going to have to fight them here.

TCNW: Sounds familiar.

MFRB: I heard this just yesterday at (President) Bush’s press conference. Every time he talks he says this, and I hear young soldiers for Fort Benning saying this. But that’s where I was, how I was taking the clichés from our leaders and using those little sound bites. I didn’t even question it.

And it was the same thing as in Iraq; we were going to be the liberators—the same words as Iraq. We were going to be liberators—not invaders, not occupiers, liberators.

It didn’t take me long to realize they weren’t coming up to us and giving us kisses and flowers. I remember just the beginning of thinking how would I feel—back the we had 500,000 troops in Vietnam—how would I feel if our country was being overrun, taken over by a foreign country. That’s something we don’t think so much about. …

We’re just creating more and more enemies. They don’t see us as we see ourselves.

I think it’s sinking in more and more with the American people.

TCNW: Have you seen public opinion change?

MFRB: When I first came back from Iraq, with the Voices in the Wilderness delegation I went on just before the invasion, I got an invitation to speak at this big Franciscan parish in upstate New York, at all the Masses—like seven Masses. There was probably 85 percent approval of going to war. President Bush had really exploited the fear very skillfully. He’s still trying to draw on that fear, but it’s not working anymore. People get tired of it. You can only use 9/11 so many times.

The fear was at its highest then. I have never as a priest for 32 years ever gotten that kind of resistance. I was using the quote from Pope John Paul II, who said the war was a moral crime, which I thought was so appropriate—it was kind of a secret, not too many Catholics were hearing it.

I was saying, “We’re Catholics , we are people of God, we are coming to the house of God, to listen to the word of God. We have to follow the way of non-violence,” mentioning that I was in the military, that I was in Vietnam, hoping that might help.

People were saying, “This sounds like an antiwar talk.” I said, “Yes it is. We are in church. This is a Mass. We’ve come to worship, and we’ve got to talk about peace, not about war.”

That was the hardest I’ve ever seen people. In the back of church, there were some people who didn’t want to shake your hand. I wanted to ask these Franciscans what they were doing there. The closest they came to addressing the issue was, “Let us pray for peace.” That was the closest they came to peacemaking. I think it takes a little more. More is expected.

Today, I would give that same talk, and there would be little resistance. It has turned.

TCNW: Are people more aware of what’s going on, or just tired of hearing about it?

MFRB: It’s a combination of a number of factors. A lot of the ignorance has been kind of broken down. But there’s something about our culture—fast foods and everything else. We want it now. We don’t have a whole lot of patience. When we go to war, we want to wrap it up in a couple of months. People really supported it for a year or maybe two, max. But now we’ve been there for a few years and it’s getting old. With the generals talking about how we’re going to need 120,000 troops until 2010, people are saying wait a minute, this is not the way it was supposed to be. That is such a part of our culture, the quick fix.

TCNW: SOA Watch has been around 16 years. The vigil is getting bigger every year. Why aren’t people tired of that?

MFRB: I think what’s happening, we’re always reaching new audiences. Case in point: there are 28 Jesuit universities in the U.S., and lots of Jesuit high schools. We started the movement with plenty of gray hairs, older folks who had come back from Latin America and seen the military brutality first hand. But now it’s spreading and college students are turning up.

The way it works is that a small group will come down from the university, and something happens there. They talk about this in terms of how spiritual it is. There’s a simplicity in the white crosses with red, the names of the victims, the procession, especially, the Jesuit Mass that goes on for about two hours on Saturday. Last year they had about 3,000 Jesuits there—they call it the Ignatian teach-in. It all comes together.

It’s a very positive experience. We are looking for hope, and we find hope when people come together for peace. They come back to their university with this excitement. And then more students come. That’s the way it’s been working.

For more information on the School of the Americas Watch, visit www.soaw.org.

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