By Gretchen Keiser

Slender, with brown curly hair and horn-rimmed glasses, Patrick O’Neill looks more like a law student than a prison inmate.

Seated in a spartan conference room, with a guard conspicuously posted outside the door, O’Neill, 29, talks rapid-fire, his voice betraying an edge of a New York accent that still lingers. The bluntness of New York conversation remains intact as he hammers away at any sentimental ideas that might attach themselves to him as a peace activist.

In Advent, while all the world waits, whether it knows it or not, for the Prince of Peace, Patrick O’Neill waits with more restlessness than most.

For the last 14 months he has been jailed in the minimum-security section of the Atlanta Federal Penitentiary serving part of a three-year term. This is one clearly defined part of a life that has already included stays in other federal and state and county jails, and that he expects he will continue to be that way. By action, he is linked to more prominent names, like those of Father Daniel Berrigan, his brother Philip Berrigan, Elizabeth McAlister Berrigan and others who taken part in “Plowshare” actions.

Referring to the Scriptures of Isaiah 2:4 and Micah 4:3 where weapons of war are beaten into plowshares and other instruments of peace and cultivation, those involved in Plowshares action have demonstrated symbolically against nuclear war. The demonstrations, which have included beating with hammers upon nuclear missile components and equipment, have led to prison terms for those involved. O’Neill, and seven other people, including a nun, were convicted and sentenced to three-year prison terms after entering a Martin Marietta plant in Orlando, Florida illegally on Easter morning, 1984 and hammering upon equipment related to Pershing II missiles.

“The actions we took may be viewed as outlandish or outrageous,” he said. “Extraordinary actions are sometimes necessary when facing extraordinary evils.” “I consider myself a patriot,” he continued. “I’m not un-American. I’m not a Communist. I’m not an apologist for the Soviet Union.”

But, he said, “if we’re creating weapons that can destroy” the earth and it inhabitants, “it’s appropriate to beat them into plowshares.”

A native of New York who grew up in the boroughs of the Bronx and Queens, Patrick O’Neill and his brother, Timothy, who is a New York policeman, are the sons of a New York construction worker and his wife. O’Neill said his father was killed in a construction accident, widowing his mother at the age of 23.

Shunning guile, O’Neill says that he grew up “a street-wise, New York City juvenile delinquent” who finished high school in three years in an accelerated program and wanted to enter a service program like VISTA but thought he would not be accepted. Instead, after working in the New York political campaign of Joe Mulholland in the mid-1970s, he asked for his advice about where he could serve. The decision led to Mulholland’s brother, Father Charles Mulholland, a priest working in a poor parish in Greenville, N.C.

In North Carolina, O’Neill worked with youth in the parish and became more and more deeply involved in conferences and actions of the peace movement, world hunger and protests against U.S. action in Central America. He first took part in a peace demonstration in 1977 when, along with others from around the country, including Philip Berrigan. He demonstrated on the Feast of the Holy Innocents at the Pentagon in Washington, D.C.

At the time, O’Neill recalled, he did not take part in acts of civil disobedience, such as passively sitting in at government offices and risking arrest for trespassing or other charges. “I was very thoughtful about civil disobedience,” he said. “I felt uncomfortable for awhile. I didn’t know enough.”

He believes his perspective then was more “secular,” concerned with what was practical and effective. Gradually, he says, he began to look at peace activism from a spiritual perspective. In fact, says O’Neill; “it was almost essential for survival as an activist to embrace a spiritual perspective.”

Looked at spiritually, actions do not necessarily have to be effective at stopping war, but at planting seeds in the minds and hearts of people, O’Neill reflected.

In the Plowshares action, “we did symbolic disarmament. We wanted to make sure people didn’t perceive us as terrorists or vandals.”

The action at the Orlando plant generated out of meetings of a “community” that began in January 1984. The group met a number of different times in locations in New York, New Jersey, Baltimore, Washington and Florida planning the attempt to enter the plant of the principal contractor for the Pershing II missiles, O’Neill said.

The meetings, at which the group discussed what would be done and how, resulted in their conviction on one of several charges they later faced -- that of conspiracy. O’Neill said those meeting knew they were taking great risks. Breaking into a guarded, defense related plant “is serious. You might be in prison for 20 years and you might get killed.” The eight involved included two women and one non-American, a Swede named Per Herngren. Their last meeting was a “five or six day retreat” that lasted through Holy Week. At about

4 a.m. on Easter Sunday, the group cut a hole in the fence around the plant, hammered upon the equipment and then sat down, praying and singing. O’Neill said nearly an hour passed before security and then police and plant officials arrived. Bail was originally set at $100,000 each, but was lowered to personal recognizance when it was determined who they were. Part of the Plowshares action, O’Neill said, is to stay at the site, not to resist arrest and to bear the legal consequences of their action.

The action of hammering on missile-related equipment was not intended to destroy the missile literally, O’Neill said, adding that that would presume a readiness on the part of all people to disarm -- a readiness that does not now exist.

“The transition is a spiritual one; we need to disarm our hearts, reject complicity in the arms race,” he said. “You can’t beat a sword into a plowshare literally until you know it will stay a plowshare.”

They were convicted on conspiracy, burglary, destruction of government property and criminal mischief and sentenced to three years in prison. Having served four months elsewhere, O’Neill was sent to the Atlanta Federal Penitentiary in September 1984. He is likely to be eligible for a half-way home during the end of his sentence, but will remain on probation for five years.

O’Neill says, “There has been no glory to being a convict.”

“It has been lonely, it has been stressful, it has been painful,” he said. On the other hand, he rejects any attempt to spotlight his sacrifices or those of other Plowshares activists who are jailed. O’Neill who has hundreds of people corresponding with him in jail says, “The worst thing I ever hear is ‘I have so much admiration for you. I can never do what you did.’”

“I hope I was called to do it,” he said, emphasizing that he looks upon the action as arising out of a need to be “faithful to God as a peacemaker.”

During the interview, he related an experience that had taken place in jail as another inmate looked through a science magazine, which had a photograph of a painfully emaciated and starving man in Africa. The same man had a tiny transistor radio, which sent out high quality sound and music from an extraordinarily small device. For the brilliance of minds to solve the problem of technology, but not to solve the problem of human starvation can only show misplaced priorities, O’Neill said, priorities, which must be redirected.

Similarly, he said, it is necessary to risk reputation and jail to change the priorities of war and peace. If peace efforts are to succeed, he said, “We have to be willing to make the sacrifices and take the risks people are willing to take for war.”