Seventy-one people who oppose deployment of Trident II missiles were arrested Saturday, May 6, during a peaceful demonstration at Kings Bay Naval Submarine Base at St. Marys, Ga.

The arrests took place after a Liturgy celebrated on a tree-shaded grassy area, the property of the city of St. Marys, about 100 yards outside the main gate of the base.

Bishop Raymond W. Lessard, of Savannah, was celebrant. Bishop Thomas J. Gumbleton, auxiliary bishop of Detroit, Bishop Walter F. Sullivan of Richmond, Va., and Abbot Patrick Shelton, OSB, of St. Leo’s Abbey, Fla., were concelebrants.

Twenty-three people were arrested by Navy security guards as they crossed, either individually or in pairs, a police barricade set up some distance outside the gate. Groups from the Dorothy Day Catholic Worker House in Washington, D.C., and New Orleans Pax Christi were arrested. None resisted arrest.

Forty-eight people were arrested by Camden County sheriff’s deputies after they knelt in groups of 10 or 12, hands joined and praying aloud, in the road leading to the base.

Three people from the national office of Pax Christi in Erie, Pa., were among those arrested by Camden County deputies. They are Tom Cordaro, organizer of the national action; Mary Lou Kownacki, OSB, national coordinator, and Ann McCarthy, OSB.

The 23 men and women arrested by Navy security guards were released after being charged with trespassing on federal property. Those arrested by Camden County deputies were issued warning citations for obstructing traffic. Ages of those taken into custody in both groups ranged from young people to senior citizens.

A few priests, monks and several sisters were among the estimated 300 people present for the national witness. It was sponsored by Pax Christi USA to launch a year of dialogue on the morality of nuclear deterrence six years after the U.S. Catholic bishops issued their pastoral letter: The Challenge of Peace, God’s Promise and Our Response.

In his homily, Bishop Gumbleton, president of Pax Christi USA, compared the “massive evil” of the Trident submarine base with the attitude of the Church during the Holocaust. “If the Church in the 21^st century is going to help stem the tide of barbarism it will first of all have to deal with its own greatest institutional sin, indifference,” he said.

“…I love this country, I love the people of the United States, so it is with deep sorrow I say that here we have the presence of massive evil, the Trident submarine base, part of the system of guided weaponry by which, in a short time, we will have 24 missiles, each missile will have eight warheads that have 25 times the destructive capability of the Hiroshima bomb, 3,840 warheads altogether, enough to destroy the Soviet Union many, many times over.”

“We have personnel on these submarines committed, with clear intention, to use the weapons that will incinerate, vaporize, tens of millions of people.”

“There are those who would say ‘But this isn’t evil, we’re keeping the peace.’ But how can we say that in the light of the Scriptures that we just heard? Jesus prayed at the Last Supper not just for His disciples but for all, whether they knew him or did not know him, whether they agree with him or not…”

“How can we be one with the people of the Soviet Union if we target their cities like this? …It directly contradicts the teachings of Jesus who tells us not to hold guns at the heads of other people. Love them, pray for them, be unarmed, be like Stephen who so clearly is like Jesus.”

The message of Scripture, the bishop continued, clearly contradicts a policy of developing first strike weapons which the Trident submarine represents. It clearly contradicts the policy of deterrence, he said, where “we spend so many of our resources to build up a system like this when we know hundreds of millions of people starving in our world could use these resources to build up human life.”

“John Paul II has called this to our attention so dramatically when he said, ‘We all know well that those areas of misery and hunger in our world could have been made fertile if those vast arsenals of death and destruction were converted into investments for food at the service of life.’”

“…Where are the voices of our Church saying to people: You may not fire such weapons. They are immoral, they destroy indiscriminately. They do not hold the peace that Jesus tells us to bring. Where are the voices, where are people like ourselves standing up to say, in massive numbers, how long before we recognize the evil of which we are a part?”

“When do we stop paying for these weapons? When do we stop building them in our factories and researching them in our laboratories. When will we see the contradiction and say no?

“Come Lord Jesus, make us your instruments of peace,” he concluded.

Several parishes in the archdiocese were represented among the members of Pax Christi and others sharing their opposition to nuclear weapons, including the Cathedral of Christ the King and the Shrine of the Immaculate Conception, Atlanta; Transfiguration and Holy Family, Marietta; St. Jude’s, Sandy Springs; St. Thomas More, Decatur. Other Atlanta groups represented were the Community and Laity Hospitality, Decatur; Café 458, Atlanta; Clergy and Laity Concerned and the Atlanta Friends Meeting.

Pax Christi members also came from Michigan, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, New York and several southern states to worship and witness together on a sunny Saturday afternoon. As they did so they were under constant surveillance of blue uniformed security on the base and local police along the roadside.