Sr. Anne Montgomery, a member of the Religious of the Sacred Heart who died in 2012 after decades of anti-war activism, was well-known to many in Pax Christi for her faithful and consistent resistance to war and war-making.
After working as a teacher, by the end of the 1970s Anne had become a full time peace activist: She participated in the first Plowshares action against nuclear weapons — the Plowshares Eight in 1980 which hammered on warheads at a GE facility in King of Prussia, Pennsylvania — and proceeded to participate in seven more actions over the next 30 years. She was a member of Christian Peacemaker Teams (now known as Community Peacemaker Teams) and served in Iraq, the West Bank, and the Balkans. She was also a poet, and wrote many of her pieces in areas of tremendous conflict under dire circumstances.
Pax Christi USA Teacher of Peace (2016) Art Laffin and Carole Sargent have edited a recently published collection of Sr. Anne’s poetry, entitled Arise and Witness.
A few affirmations for the book:
Editor Art Laffin provides a portal for beholding Anne Mongomeryʼs extraordinary wisdom and faith. By interspersing her poetry with her compelling life story, he and Carole Sargent illuminate her rare and beautiful courage. The poems also reveal Anneʼs journey into tireless, ever-deepening Christian discipleship. Prepare to be radically challenged by this loving exploration of Anne Montgomeryʼs life and art. — Kathy Kelly, Pax Christi USA Teacher of Peace (1998), board president, World BEYOND War. She and Sr. Anne traveled together in Bosnia, Iraq, and occupied Palestine.
If you knew Anne Montgomery, read on! Youʼll find new depth and dimension here that will strengthen love for our dear Resister Sister. If you are picking up this book with interest and curiosity, please hold on tight! You will be moved to tears, moved to action, moved to embrace a life of Montgomerian seriousness… which is to say the work of safeguarding and showing up for the beauty, fragility and sanctity of Godʼs creation. — Frida Berrigan, author of It Runs in the Family: On being raised by radicals and growing into rebellious motherhood
Sr. Anne Montgomery walked with transforming peace to hard places– nuclear bunkers, Alderson Prison, Guantanamo, occupied Palestine, Baghdad streets under the bombs. She embodied courage and compassion. In these poems along her way, we are blessed by Anneʼs song of resurrection for us all. — Jim and Shelley Douglass, Pax Christi USA Teachers of Peace (1994), Mary’s House Catholic Worker, Birmingham, AL.
Claire Schaeffer-Duffy recently interviewed Art Laffin and Carole Sargent for National Catholic Reporter’s Global Sisters Report about Sr. Anne and “Arise and Witness.” Read excerpts of the article (published December 3, 2024) here:
Q&A with Carole Sargent and Art Laffin on the poetics of Sr. Anne Montgomery
A self-described “Navy brat,” Sr. Anne Montgomery was born in 1926, the second child and only daughter of a rear admiral who fought in World War II.
She joined the Religious of the Sacred Heart at a young age and for years taught poetry and literature at Catholic schools in New York. Time spent teaching inner-city youth of color educated her in the rapaciousness of U.S. militarism, its theft of domestic resources from the poor. By 1980, peace activism had become her full-time ministry.
A petite woman, Montgomery possessed ferocious courage. At age 83, she participated in the last of her eight Plowshares actions for nuclear disarmament, each one an attempt to embody the prophet Isaiah’s call to “beat swords into plowshares,” each one requiring an arrest, trial, and imprisonment or probation.
Determined to be with the people “who have the biggest guns pointed at them,” she joined numerous civilian peacekeeping initiatives, traveling to Iraq and the Balkans and later serving with Christian Peacemakers Team (now Community Peacemaker Teams) in the Israeli-occupied West Bank.
Laconic in demeanor, Montgomery articulated with searing precision what compelled her peace activism. The Scriptures, of course, but also a keen sense of the legal perversions that justify violence.
Plowshares actions are not an expression of “civil disobedience,” but “divine obedience,” she wrote. “The term ‘disobedience’ is not appropriate, because any law that does not protect life is no real law. In particular, both divine and international law tell us that weapons of mass destruction are a crime against humanity and it is the duty of the ordinary citizen to actively oppose them.”
Catholic Worker Art Laffin first met Montgomery in 1978 while he was fasting outside the United Nations for nuclear disarmament. The two would go on to participate in two Plowshares actions together and to co-edit a history of the Plowshares movement. Laffin said he knew his friend was a “great writer,” but he did not discover the range of her poetic capacity until after her death in 2012. At her funeral, members of Montgomery’s order handed him a manila folder of her poetry.
Arise and Witness: Poems by Anne Montgomery, RSCJ, About Faith, Prison, War Zones and Nonviolent Resistance, which Laffin edited in collaboration with editor and writer Carole Sargent, a Religious of the Sacred Heart associate, now brings those poems to light.
Also included are talks by Montgomery, a short biography of her remarkable life and reflections from those who knew her. Collectively, the texts reveal a woman who, in her activism and verse, relied on metaphor, paradox and symbol to articulate faith in the God of life amid a disbelieving world.