Fw: "Be part of the repair": Women of the Catholic Worker Movement on Social Justice Today
Joseph B Juhasz
Professor Emeritus of Architecture and Environmental Design
College of Architecture and Planning
University of Colorado
Sent: Thursday, March 12, 2026 4:35
To: Joseph B Juhasz <Joseph...@colorado.edu>
Subject: "Be part of the repair": Women of the Catholic Worker Movement on Social Justice Today
Thanks for supporting Roundtable with your paid subscription! "Be part of the repair": Women of the Catholic Worker Movement on Social Justice TodayTwo Catholic Workers spoke on an International Women' Day Webinar sponsored by the Dorothy Day Guild. Clare Grady shared her discovery of the "spiritual realignment" of nuclear abolition activism
“Women have always been part of the Jesus movement,” said Michelle Sherman, director of Pax Christi USA. Sherman was one of the panelists at the Dorothy Day Guild’s International Women’s Day panel on Sunday, March 8. Moderated by Magdalena Muñoz Pizzulic, the Research Fellow for the Dorothy Day Guild and a member of the St. Peter Claver Catholic Worker community in South Bend, the panel discussed the witnesses of “the women who stayed”: Catholic women working for justice all over the world. Sherman shared a quote from the April 2021 statement “A Feminist Vision of Genuine Security,” by the International Women’s Network Against Militarism:
More than 200 participants logged in to listen to Sherman, Sr. Helen Prejean, a death penalty abolition advocate and two Catholic Workers share their stories of living as women in a patriarchal world and working for peace, justice, and equality—often inspired by their fellow women. Sr. Prejean spoke about her prolific ministry on death row, dramatized in the 1995 film “Dead Man Walking.” Sr. Prejean spoke out against the conditions of women in prisons and on death row, and told the story of a woman whom she had been corresponding with on death row for nearly two decades. She spoke out against the “designer death penalty,” where the death penalty is legal in some cases. She said that the Universal Declaration of Human Rights states unequivocally in Article 3 that “simply by being a person we have an inalienable right to life.” The State, Sr. Prejean said, had no right to chip away at that innate dignity, and that we could not let fellow humans get cordoned off into disposable persons by the state: “We can never give [the state] that power,” she said. Clare Grady, of the Ithaca Catholic Worker and a Plowshares peace activist, talked about organizing with Native women in Upstate New York on mining, environment and the nuclear weapons. “On the western door of Haudenosaunee territory is the Seneca people, and I’m grateful to know two Seneca women, Agnes Williams and Maria Mabie, who have been working to clean up West Valley, the nuclear storage place that was put in by our federal government back in the 60s,” Grady said. The West Valley nuclear site was leaking radioactivity into the surrounding waterways, leading to high rates of cancer among the Seneca people there. In response, the Seneca Nation began an annual earth walk, and began an Indigenous Women’s Initiative. “We’re all affected by radioactivity, but Indigenous people are on the front line of that,” Grady said. Grady talked about her nuclear activism, but how, for her, the word activist does not resonate as much as the word “organizer.” She described her first Plowshares action at Griffiths Airforce Base in 1983 as “a chiropractic alignment” on a spiritual level. “My relationships to the weapon, the wicked systems that they enforce, and my creator,” changed. “My heart knew that this would be, like, the end of creation as we knew it,” she said. Sitting in trial with her sister and brother, she shared her realization that “the role of the courts was to defend, protect the weapons.” She was labeled part of a “terrorist organization” for her participation in the action. Her second Plowshares action came 35 years later, at Kings Bay Naval Base in St. Mary’s Georgia. One of those Trident subsmarines with their nuclear payload could kill millions, billions of people, she said. “I understood it differently as a woman in my 60s that these weapons are not just deadly if they’re used, if they’re launched, but I really appreciated Daniel Ellsberg image of how these weapons are used every day, just like a cocked gun,” Grady said. “If you hold a gun to someone’s head, even if you never pull the trigger, you are using that gun. That’s how those weapons are used, and that’s what we can see right now. It’s… we are the number one bully on the planet. We are the number one gangster, is how I call it”.” Grady described her actions as “manifestations,” sacramental acts of faith that echoed her own transformed understanding of nuclear weapons and the world. “All the women I’ve ever been in prison and jails with are living the legacy of the big crimes of genocide, enslavement, and capitalism. So… That is an internal spiritual adjustment. No one becomes my project then. I’m not here to just help you get like I’m in prison for one thing, to learn and to experience what it’s like to be treated less than human.” So, these kind of things in this day and age, you know, just this word solidarity is very significant. It’s like, I’m… my body and my heart and my soul and my children and my… it’s just a little bit closer if… because I live in this white skin and so much privilege. that I don’t have to have had that experience, or that live in this geography right now. But that’s what nuclear… non-violent symbolic disarmament, uh, has meant for me. And, um… Thank you. And so it brings me into community and different… I would say better relationship with my sisters that are in prison. And then when I come out, that’s part of what the organizing that I do today. Thank you. Brenna Cussen Anglada of St. Isidore Catholic Worker Farm in Cuba City, Wisconsin, spoke about her solidarity witness in Palestine last fall for five weeks with the International Solidarity Movement through Meta Peace Team. Her first time in Palestine was over 20 years before with a group of other Catholic Workers. She had returned several times over the subsequent five years, but she had not been back to Palestine since 2009. Nevertheless, part of her inspiration to living in the Catholic Worker farm was the Palestinian farmers she met in the early 2000s. “I saw communities, families, men, women, children, who so identified with the land that they loved—they were the land, the land was them,” she said in the Zoom panel. “The land was someone they were willing to defend: they were the land, the land was them,” she added, she was inspired by their commitment to resisting displacement and loss of land “at great cost to themselves,” she said. “I had never experienced a love for place like that,” Cussen Anglada said. She shared how Palestinians are resisting the occupation through sumud, or steadfastness. She shared the story of one Palestinian woman living in Hebron, Al-Kahlil, in Arabic, meaning city of friendship. There’s Israeli settlement right in the heart of Hebron. The Palestinians who live inside this restricted area are forced to walk through military checkpoints just to get to school, work or grocery shopping. “They’re not allowed to drive cars in their own neighborhood, even though it’s their own neighborhood,” Cussen Anglada said, because of the militarized border, soldiers with machine guns, and checkpoints around and above their homes. She met an artist and a resistor to the occupation, living in her house in the middle of the checkpoints with her husband and their three children. Fifteen years ago, her husband was killed when Israeli soldiers fired so many tear gas canisterrs in the home that he died. “Since then, she’s received many threats, death threats, she’s received offers of large sums of money to leave,” Cussen Anglada said. “Israelis want to make it so awful for us here that we choose to leave. They want to make our lives so difficult for us that we choose to leave,” Cussen Anglada said that Paletinians told them.
Women like this one in Hebron brave administrative detention, where Israel’s government can hold a Palestinian in jail for six months without charge. In prison, they are at extreme risk of physical and sexual abuse, the United Nations, Israeli human rights organization BTSELEM, and the Committee to Protect Journalists have reported. “She’s not going to demonstrations or going out there and making her voice loudly heard, but she is not leaving,” Cussen Anglada said. Cussen Anglada described their participation in solidarity witnesses at Palestinian olive harvests. She described the violence of the Israeli military against unarmed observers. “There were 60 of us solidarity activists,” she said. “We’re just there to harvest our olives in solidarity with Palestinians and the soldiers tried to stop us using tear gas and sound bombs,” Cussen Anglada recalled. “Then we were ambushed by several dozen masked settlers who just opened live fire with automatic weapons on all 150 of us who were out there, Palestinians and solidarity activists alike.” She told the tragic story of Muhammed, a 9-year-old boy shot point-blank by Israeli snipers as he was playing soccer. They met his mother, living in a village near Hebron. Despite this horrendous injustice and the mother’s grief, Cussen Anglada said, she also felt Muhammed mothers’ steadfastness, sumud, her desire to share her son’s story, to share her grief. Cussen Anglada recommended learning more about Palestine and what you can do at the Palestinian-led International Solidarity Movement. Several voices in the chat also recommended Christians for a Free Palestine. But in the United States, Cussen Anglada lifted up the example of women who are working on land justice and trying to repair the catastrophic human and environmental devastation of 500 years of genocide and destruction colonizers in the United States inflicted on Native Americans. Cussen Anglada highlighted the work of religious sisters who have emphasized their identity as the church to repair the sins caused by the church. Even though the Vatican officially repudiated the Doctrine of Discovery—which supported the colonization of the Americas—in 2023, “that doesn’t undo the damage that’s been wrought for 500 years,” Cussen Anglada said. Religious communities like the Sisters of St. Joseph in Brentwood, New York, who partner with the women of the Shinnecock Nation to clean up their water and the Franciscan Sisters of Perpetual Adoration in La Crosse, Wisconsin, who returned land to the Lac du Flambeau Band of Lake Superior Chippewa Indians in northern Wisconsin are examples of religious women putting the verbal rejection of the Doctrine of Discovery into action. As women in the Catholic Church, Cussen Anglada said that “we could leave […] or we could stay and say that we need to be part of the repair that happens.”
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