It would be easy to write off Sister Mary Kay Flanigan of Chicago as just another political pot-stirrer, if you didn’t know anything about her history.
It would be easy to imagine the Franciscan nun singing protest songs or beating a drum outside of the School of the Americas this weekend, and see the protest as self-serving, if she hadn’t just finished serving a 6-month prison term for last fall’s demonstration.
It would be easy to dismiss her activism as a distortion of her religious calling, if she hadn’t spent 12 years of her life on the streets of Uptown, quietly serving the needy and the outcast.
But at age 66, the soft-spoken, grandmotherly nun has paid enough dues to be heard.
Born and raised in Marquette, Mich., on the Upper Peninsula, Flanigan taught at a school for the deaf for several years before coming to Chicago to undertake a career in social work.
On Shrove Tuesday, 1974, Flanigan–then still a laywoman–moved into an apartment with some Franciscan nuns who were her friends. Heeding the gospel exhortation that believers sell all that they own and follow Jesus, Flanigan gave away her furniture and most of her belongings to needy families she had worked with over the years.
She joined the Franciscans as a novitiate in 1977, training in Rochester, N.Y., and took her final vows as a nun in 1979. Returning to Chicago, she took a position with Chicago Uptown Ministry–a Lutheran-sponsored service mission that Flanigan calls “an ecumenical, seven-day-a-week church.” She spent 12 years there.
In the early 1990s, Flanigan decided to shift her focus to what she calls “working for systemic change.” She joined the Eighth Day Center for Justice, a human-rights organization in the Loop staffed by Catholic priests, nuns and laypeople.
That, in turn, led her to examine the School of the Americas, a U.S. military operation at Ft. Benning, Ga., that trains Latin American military officers. The School of the Americas had been accused of contributing to the worst excesses of Central American governments in the tumultuous 1980s–beatings, disappearances, slayings. Some blamed the school for training the Salvadoran death squad that killed six Jesuit priests, their housekeeper and her daughter in 1989.
Flanigan saw the School of the Americas not only as a direct source of evil, but also as a contributor to the economic misery and social upheaval that is a chronic plague in Latin America.
In 1996, she decided to join a group of religious protesters traveling to Ft. Benning to call for the closing of the School of the Americas. The group was planning to trespass on the base, and she knew there was a good chance they would be arrested.
“I had tremendous fear and anxiety. Is this the call, or is it not?” she wondered. “Then one day I just rounded the corner and there was tremendous peace.”
About 500 people showed up for the protest; Flanigan and 59 others crossed the property line and were issued letters banning them from the property for five years.
Flanigan spent much of the summer of 1997 in Chiapas, Mexico, where she says she saw “the handprints and footprints of the School of the Americas” throughout the civil war zone.
Two thousand people showed up at Ft. Benning to protest that fall. Flanigan was one of 601 to march about a half mile onto base property before they were met by military police. Those who had letters from the year before, about 30, were charged. Ultimately 18 were convicted of trespassing, each sentenced to 6 months in prison.
In September, Flanigan was released from Pekin, a federal, minimum-security prison. “For me, it was an experience of integrity,” she says of her time there.
It was also a draining and difficult time, and Flanigan is not sure she is ready to go back to prison this time. But she will fly down to Ft. Benning on Friday and take part in the protest Saturday and Sunday.
There is a strong, if faltering, argument that the United States and its allies need the School of the Americas, that nothing is as clear as it seems in the murky political violence of Latin America.
There is also legitimate and important debate about whether nuns, monks and clergy should be active in politics in the first place–whether such partisan, temporal affairs are a distraction from the higher commandments of God.
Sister Mary Kay Flanigan may be wrong. But with a lifetime of sacrifice and service behind her, having chosen prison over retirement to make her point, it becomes increasingly difficult to dismiss her and her cause out of hand.
Indeed, people seem to be paying more attention than ever. This weekend Flanigan will be joined at Ft. Benning by an estimated 5,000 to 10,000 protesters, including more than 250 from Chicago.
Others will mark the occasion from afar, including the DePaul Community Service Association, which will hold an outdoor candlelight vigil at the university’s Lincoln Park campus beginning at 5 p.m. Sunday.
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Email skloehn@tribune.com
