Recently, opponents of deportations held a rally to commemorate the five-year anniversary of what they call an unjust immigration sweep of 389 people in a kosher meat-packing plant in Postville, Iowa.
Last July, three people breached security and entered a nuclear facility in Oak Ridge, Tenn., housing highly enriched uranium, where they spilled blood at the site before being arrested.
Last June, 14 women traveled by bus to selected states to denounce a House Republican budget they said hurt poor people.
These actions were not staged by members of the now-defunct Occupy movement, or single-issue activists but by Catholic nuns who are, increasingly, the new face of resistance. Whether against war or poverty, for the environment, immigration reforms or in opposition to the death penalty, a "Band of Sisters" is often in the vanguard. That activism is now spotlighted in a documentary of the same name.
At one level, it's a natural fit. Because nuns minister to people who are struggling, they see first-hand the effects of poverty, hunger, homelessness and degradation of the environment. They learn the back stories and institutional causes, and have responded to both with political protests and by opening schools, health centers and organic farms and providing 40,000 affordable housing units for women.
One group of nuns goes weekly to an immigrant detention center in Illinois, where they rally, pray, talk to families, accompany deportees to the airport and, after lobbying the state legislature, won permission to minister to them inside the facility.
"We do this peacefully and respectfully," says one sister. "But we never take no for an answer."
One group demonstrates — and sometimes gets arrested — outside the School of the Americas in Fort Benning, Ga., where the U.S. military trains Latin American military leaders, often to attack their own people. The nuns hold the school indirectly responsible for the killing of three U.S. nuns in El Salvador in 1980, on orders from the military command in that nation.
