Pace e Bene staff member Fr. Louis Vitale, 77, began serving a six-month prison sentence on Monday, January 25 for nonviolent, prayerful protest calling for closure of the School of the Americas at Ft. Benning, Georgia.

Dear Louie,

So you are launched – you’re next pilgrimage.  Perhaps your greatest one yet. 

This six month stretch ahead of you, I begin to see, is a culmination of your last year: journeys to spiritual centers – Iran, Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Palestine and Israel and Egypt – whose spirituality is rooted in profound experiences of inconsolable woundedness and mysterious sacredness. 

It is as if your willingness to cross once again into the terrain of (in your case) voluntary restrain – the courts, the prison system – was a kind of sacramental response to those encounters.  And all the other ones: being on the road, meeting people hungry for an alternative to the suffocating trap of violence; alighting again in Las Vegas, where so much of your vocation of peace and justice got the traction it was looking; landing at Creech, another desert stop on the great highway of your life.

Below is a poem I wrote when you were put away at Nellis several years ago.  It hints at your first deportation to Las Vegas, and its echo years later (this time executed by the civil, rather than ecclesial, authorities).  No doubt stretching a point but one that seemed to be stretched on its own.

The Great Return

When you went too far the first time,
it was Las Vegas for you
back then, too.

In the LA of the Nineteen Sixties
your raft of compassionate shenanigans
also got you a ticket to the end of the road
for stepping up,
stepping out,
for high-stepping it
across the visible and invisible lines,
all those family and church
and USA tripwires.

There are majestic words
to describe that first time —
exile, banishment —
but the powers-that-be
didn’t expect
the desert
to be the valley of
abundance and grace and the mystery of life
popping up with power
in every arroyo and wash and
atomic proving ground. 
Exile became
pilgrimage and refuge and sanctuary,
holy place,
home.

Strangely, the scripts have settled predictably into
the well-grooved neural pathway.
Conspiring across the decades,
the judges take a page from
the dog-eared book:
“It’s perfect —
we’ll send him to the desert!”

And, again,
across the chasm,
the Great Desert God —
laughing not with bitterness but a guttural impish delight —
tosses the screenplay into the desert wind,
scattering the pages every which way,

and gently
invites you
to return
to the place of
your grand rebirth.

We invite you to write Fr. Louie at:

Louis Vitale #25803-048

USP Atlanta

U.S. Penitentiary

P.O. Box 150160

Atlanta, GA 30315