By Becky Adams
In November 2004, Maryknoll Sister Lelia Mattingly went walking through the woods; at her side she carried four wooden crosses painted white. Written on each cross was a name.
She was looking for the right place to do it.
Hoping she was there, the 63-year-old nun knelt down, said a few quiet prayers, and then tenderly planted each of the crosses into the earth.
She had found the right place.
Men in uniforms appeared and bound both hands behind her back with a plastic tie.
She had trespassed onto the federal property of Fort Benning in Columbus, Georgia; home to a U.S. military school that trains soldiers from Latin America.
The school’s name is Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation (WHINSEC), formerly known as the School of the Americas (SOA).
But to Sr. Mattingly and thousands of others who want it closed, it is known as the "School of Assassins." Protestors criticize the school for the list of human rights abuses associated with some of its graduates.
On the crosses she left as small monuments on the school’s property, were the names of four American church women who were brutally raped and murdered in El Salvador in 1980.
Three of the five found guilty for this crime were graduates of the school.
Graduates have also been cited in the assassination of Salvadoran Archbishop Oscar Romero and in the massacre of 900 civilians in the Salvadoran village of El Mozote.
According to SOA Watch, "For almost 60 years, the School of the Americas (SOA/WHINSEC) has trained over 60,000 Latin American soldiers in tactics that are used to wage war against their own people."
To mark the 25th anniversary since the murder of the church women, Sr. Mattingly participated in an act of civil disobedience that earned her six months in prison.
In any other county she might have gotten 48 hours of community service for this class B misdemeanor, but in Judge Faircloth’s courtroom the consequences were weightier.
This wasn’t the first time she’d crossed the line. In 2000 she had received a "Ban and Bar" letter, stating she was not allowed to step foot on the school’s property for five years.
But when she remembered people like Dottie, she couldn’t just sit back and do nothing.
A Higher Law
About a year before the deaths of the women in El Salvador, Sr. Mattingly went to visit a fellow sister, who was friends with Dorothy "Dottie" Kazel and Jean Donovan, two of the murdered women.
Kazel and Donovan met Sr. Mattingly at the airport; the very airport they would later disappear from with two Maryknoll Sisters Maura Clarke and Ita Ford, whom Sr. Mattingly also knew.
It was while riding a bus in Bolivia about a year later, that Sr. Mattingly casually flipped open a newspaper she had just grabbed from the stands. On the front page was a picture of the four women’s bodies being unearthed.
"I knew them! I know them!" she announced to the rest of the bus, horrified.
She’s become intimately acquainted with the injustice that occurs outside and inside American borders. She’s met the people, heard their stories and felt their terror.
Twenty years in Bolivia, six months in Nicaragua, and visits to El Salvador and Iraq have given shape to her view that U.S. foreign policy is degraded.
Her action at Fort Benning was a logical response to all she had learned and experienced, she said.
On Jan. 25, 2005, in her statement to the court while on trial, she explained her decision:
"Before taking the action in November, I spent years writing and calling members of Congress to vote to close the SOA/WHINSEC…marching, praying, and fasting so others would know what WHINSEC is and does, until I realized that very few were listening, and that I needed to do something more."
She pleaded not guilty, stipulating to the facts: she admits she trespassed, but doesn’t feel she broke any law, because she was following a "higher law." She likes to call it "divine obedience."
"To me it’s just a likely outcome of what the gospel teaches us," she said; "To love our brothers and sisters. And how can we love God if we don’t love our brothers and sisters? And how can we love our brothers and sisters if we don’t treat them right, if we don’t respect them as persons just like us?"
The Road to Sisterhood
She identifies with the underdog.
She grew up in Louisville, KY, as the second eldest child and only girl among four brothers. She inherited her scrimping and savings skills from her family, which went through some hard times.
She identified with the poor because she was part of the poor.
She cries softly as she speaks of her family. Getting weepy at times, as she calls it, is one of the after-effects of being in prison.
"Some of these tears, I think, still are probably part of my experience in prison and maybe not taking care of all of the pain that you see there, that you feel there," she said.
She felt lonely as a child. She recalls one day squeezing her doll tight and telling it, "You’re the only one who loves me." She missed having sisters. Now she has hundreds.
She became a nun at 19, not then such a young age to join the order. In her mind, she saw only three options at the time: get a job, get married, or become a sister.
When she first arrived in Bolivia in 1971, she was very critical of her other sisters and their possessions. It troubled her to see many in the religious order living much better than the poor around them.
"I realized that it was part of me. I really felt the need to live simply," she said.
St. Mattingly prefers life among the poor because their problems are real problems. The wealthy often complain about being overweight or trivial things such as a broken faucet.
"Just because your television doesn’t work- is that a real problem?" she said "Or is it somebody that doesn’t have enough to eat- wouldn’t that be a real problem?"
A Spirit of Nonviolence
Many of those living in Bolivia have real problems.
General Hugo Banzer Suarez terrorized many Bolivians during his dictatorship, she said. The millions he received as a loan from U.S. banks is the Bolivian debt, now in the billions, that cripples the people. They are slaves to it; being killed economically and sometimes militarily because of it, she said.
A picture of General Hugo Banzer Suarez used to adorn SOA/WHINSEC’s hall of fame.
Nevertheless, Sr. Mattingly was inspired by the spirit of nonviolent resistance that moved through the Bolivian people. They would often fill the streets, the young, the old, banging pots or holding signs demanding the rights they were entitled to.
"I got to believe in international pressure on certain injustices, the need for that," she said.
Shedding Light on the Truth
After spending six months in Nicaragua temporarily filling in for sisters who needed a vacation from violence, she traveled back to the U.S. to do mission education. She visited 11 states in the Midwest to speak about the realities of oppression and war she had come to know in Latin American countries.
She became increasingly frustrated by how little Americans knew, how much was kept hidden from them concerning their country’s foreign activities, she said.
In her court statement she expressed, "Part of my frustration when visiting and speaking in schools, parishes, and with groups, was in realizing how misled many of our people were about U.S. foreign policy. That frustration continues today, but even more so, as more persons are deprived of the truth."
After her tour of mission education she almost suffered a breakdown. She had lost hope. During the year-long sabbatical that followed, she was able to gain some perspective.
"To know that God was working in the darkness, in the lack of hope even, that’s when I really came to know myself," she said.
When she becomes impatient with the slow process of change, she reminds herself to look at the big picture. It’s like throwing rocks in a lake and seeing the ripples go out across its surface, she said; if we all keep throwing our rocks in, soon the whole lake will be full of ripples.
She is always quick to note her need of other people. One of her biggest encouragements is to know she is not the only one working for peace. Others who crossed the line at Fort Benning sacrificed more than she did, she said. She had a supportive community behind her and was free to go to prison. When she heard others share their reasons for crossing, Sr. Mattingly was moved to tears. They hadn’t seen or heard what she had in countries like Bolivia; yet, they were willing. Their determination gave her hope.
To her it was a very Christian response to injustice, she said.
"This whole thing, that movement, 'What would Jesus do? What would Jesus do?' How come we can’t really think about that?" she asked with sincerity.
"I mean everybody was wearing the bracelets for a while, you’d see it everywhere. We really need to revive that again, and say 'what would Jesus do?' It wouldn’t be bomb Iraq; it wouldn’t be torture prisoners; it wouldn’t be to contaminate the earth, so that generations from now there won’t be anything left," she said.
Free at Last
Not long after being released from prison on Sept.12, 2005, friends of Sr. Mattingly gathered together in Louisville, KY to eat homemade pizza and salsa. Most of them hadn’t seen her since before she’d gone to prison.
Conversation, spoken one minute in Spanish and the next in English, flowed among the friends like a laid back panel discussion on the effects of foreign policy in Latin America.
Many jibes were made concerning her time spent in prison.
"It’s the jail bird!" David Horvath announced as he pulled Sr. Mattingly into a big hug.
Horvath said Sr. Mattingly’s "got fire in her belly."
She maintained an unbelievable spirit throughout the whole ordeal, Horvath said. "The women she was with (in prison) were ready to canonize her."
They gathered around and listened aptly to her stories of prison life. It was a good experience overall, she said.
"Anybody else been in prison here?" she asked nonchalantly to the rest of the group. The question wasn’t strange, considering her company.
"I would encourage everybody to go to prison," she said with a tinkling laugh.
Jorge Aros, a friend of Sr. Mattingly, has also crossed the line, but before they began handing out such serious sentences, he said.
"It’s easy to be for or against something, but until you do the act, it’s just talk," Aros said.
"If you back up word with action it proves sincerity."
Sr. Mattingly’s prison was located in Danbury, CT, only an hour away from her home in Maryknoll, NY. It was a work camp that held about 200 women who had committed nonviolent crimes.
It’s certainly not fun, but you can have fun, she said.
She felt incredible support from many people all over the world. In her six months she received 1,100 letters. The hardest part of prison was meeting the women there, hearing their painful stories, and the ways in which they had been unfairly treated.
Sometimes she wishes she had several lifetimes to give to working for justice, she said.
She continues to believe in taking special action, not only so she can be heard, but more importantly so the voices of countless victims can be heard as well.
"I just think it’s so obvious in the gospel," she said. "Jesus says if your brother won’t listen to you, you go and get a group to talk to that person. Sometimes you have to use your body, because they won’t listen to your voice."
Sr. Mattingly has joined the admirable ranks of those who have followed their conscience and sense of moral outrage to stand up for the underdog, the oppressed. Sr. Mattingly has witnessed injustice that the majority of our population knows nothing about. She’s decided she can not go on with business as usual; as if nothing has happened.
She’s in it for the long haul.