Cover Story
SR. DARLENE NICGORSKI lived in Phoenix and was a member of the School Sisters of St. Francis when this interview appeared. She went to Guatemala in 1980 to help establish a preschool but was forced to flee six months later after her pastor was killed. —The Editors
We lack the Bible's inclusive sense, its total concept of who is our neighbor. Our neighbor isn't only those people who speak like us, act like us, and have the same values and economic status as we do. The Bible doesn't say that only when white, middle-class, United States citizens are involved in the process should people become involved. That's a shame, but that's reality, so we have to deal with that. But when they do become involved, they need to understand the full range of involvement and sacrifice. And that what we are doing is nothing compared to the trials of faith borne by the refugees.
Sojourners: What do you think the sanctuary trial is about?
Darlene Nicgorski: I don't see this case really dealing with the issues of sanctuary, because of the limitations of the court. I think this is not only an attempt to silence the truth about Central America and to stop the movement, I really think that the government will particularly try to take on what they consider mainline churches—the Catholic Church, the Presbyterian Church, and other Protestant churches. The Quakers have always been into this sort of stuff, so they're not the same kind of threat. But if the government can, they want to make an example and use this trial not only for its impact on sanctuary but also because the churches are beginning to gain momentum on other issues in which the churches feel themselves in conflict with the government, such as South Africa, the Pledge of Resistance, Witness for Peace, and the peace movement.
The churches' voice on sanctuary and Central America has probably been the clearest voice of any. I think the government has very clearly used this issue as an attempt to intimidate, divide, and separate the churches further for taking a stand that might be opposed to this administration. Doing that with mainline churches is the most effective way to divide administration opponents.
JIM CORBETT started bringing Central American refugees into his home in 1981, after discovering that U.S. immigration officials regularly detained and deported them. Corbett shared his experiences with John Fife, and in 1982 the "underground railroad" became the public sanctuary movement. A Quaker and a Harvard-educated philosopher, Corbett was forced into early retirement from ranching by severe arthritis. —The Editors
Sojourners: What are your feelings about the trial?
Jim Corbett: The trial is thoroughly rigged. I don't think they could find another judge in the Ninth Circuit who would be as firmly against us and determined to gain a conviction at any cost as is Judge Earl Carroll. But even if we do get convicted this time, juries down the line will find out the truth.
The strategy that the government has had to rely on involves keeping the jury from discovering what is going on. The government has had to abandon all those tape recordings that were made and use as its star witness a person who is reporting on conversations in English that he admitted he couldn't understand very well. The government has done all that because it could not afford to let the jury discover what is happening. And I think that a strategy based on suppressing the truth is a flawed strategy.
What we're in the process of doing now is establishing a new tier of legal order, one that was mandated at the Nuremberg trials [of Nazi officials] but which has never been systematically established on any kind of institutional foundation. The institution in this case is the church, and the mandate is that communities and individuals are responsible for the defense of human rights, above all when their own government is violating human rights. Justice Robert H. Jackson, the chief U.S. prosecutor when the Nuremberg tribunals opened in 1945, emphasized that it's essential to hold ordinary citizens responsible for compliance with human rights and international law when their own government is in violation of those rights. As he pointed out, the only way states have of enforcing international law against one another, when you come right down to it, is through warfare. So if we're going to have a peacemaking expansion of the legal order to include an international legal order, we're going to have to rely on ordinary citizens in communities to do that.
JOHN FIFE had been pastor of Tucson's Southside Presbyterian Church for 17 years when this article appeared. —The Editors
Sojourners: What kind of experience has the trial been for you, and how do you feel about it?
John Fife: The trial has lasted six months, four days a week, in that courtroom. It's been a very technical legal process, and those of us who are not attorneys don't have a solid understanding of what has gone on. I've dealt with it, these long six months, by trying to be involved, trying to learn about the practice of law, and trying to understand the fine points of what the attorneys are doing and what they're thinking strategically. That's the way I've dealt with it emotionally and in terms of boredom, day in and day out, just sitting in that courtroom.
The most difficult part about it for me was to realize at the beginning that there was absolutely nothing I could do. The attorneys were going to take the case, and we were going to sit there. It's difficult, when people are playing with your life, to just sit and watch all the maneuvering and strategizing that goes on in that arena, to realize that you're just a spectator and you don't have any control over your life during the many months it's going to take for this to play itself out. It's hard to accept that somebody else is really going to make a determination that's going to profoundly affect your life. I'm not one who needs to be in control, but I'd sure like to be a player.
The far-reaching tentacles of the U.S. surveillance network.
Archbishop Desmond Tutu in 1985. EYEPRESS via Reuters Connect
Sojourners interviewed Desmond Tutu, Nobel Peace Prize laureate and archbishop of the Anglican Church in Johannesburg, South Africa by phone on December 24, 1984.
At a women's meeting in Sojourners Community a few years ago, we were discussing the vulnerability that we feel as women in an inner-city Washington, D.C. neighborhood.
"It's easiest to be friendly to children, and also easy to be warm to women and older people. But when I see a young man coming toward me, I feel myself closing in. I'm never sure whether to smile or speak or look right past him. I usually just look at the ground."
This comment got us sharing with one another the encounters that had brought us face to face with our own fears and powerlessness, and which had left us with a lamentable posture of vigilance in a neighborhood that we call home.
Each of us had experienced verbal assaults on the street. Some of these were violent, others couched as invitations—and all were aimed at our integrity.
Some women spoke of places that still held fearful memories: a bus stop where an exhibitionist once approached, a bank of shrubbery from which a man shouting obscenities emerged, a corner on which an attempted rape was fought off. We shared experiences from other times and settings: an inappropriate examination by a male doctor in the D.C. jail after a peace witness arrest, sexual advances from a college professor, a rape in an apartment and another behind a house. And we added to our own experiences those of other women we knew.
Statistics indicate that violence against women is on the increase—across all class and color lines. It is not clear, however, whether the statistics reflect an actual increase in the number of incidents of violence or an increase in the reporting of such incidents. Some people think that the rise may even reflect the ongoing clarification of what constitutes an act of violence.
One example of this kind of clarification is a crime that is sometimes referred to as "soft rape." Clearly a misnomer, the term is used to describe a woman being coerced or forced into having sex with a man with whom she has a relationship. While this kind of male aggression has been considered normal and even expected in the past, women increasingly are reporting such experiences to rape crisis centers, and those occurrences are reflected appropriately in the statistics.
While sexual violence may in fact be increasing, it is also true that such violence is being brought to public attention as never before. Thanks to the women's movement, what was once considered "private violence" is becoming a matter of public knowledge and concern.
At the same time, psychological testing and research are revealing that what were once considered the psychotic thoughts and behavior of a handful of deeply disturbed men are the attitudes and actions of many men who are considered normal by all other criteria. In one study of thousands of men conducted by Neil Malamuth of the University of California at Los Angeles and Edward Donnerstein of the University of Wisconsin, only one-third of the men said there was no possibility that they would be violent toward women. Sixty-six percent were found to have what the researchers called a "conquest mentality" toward women that might result in violence.