Fr. Louie Vitale is completing his third week of a six month jail sentence in Georgia for nonviolent resistance at the School of the Americas.  This is his third lengthy sentence over the past several years.  When one hears about such a decision, one might ask: ”What difference does spending time in jail make?”

The question of the utility of jail time (flowing from nonviolent civil disobedience) is a ticklish one.  When, for example, a handful of people (incliding Fr. Louie) engaged in nonviolent witness at the Nevada Test Site beginning in 1982 — some of whom netted significant jail time of several months — there question about effectiveness was a pointed one.  “What difference does this make?” some asked.

Yet it was the willingness of a growing number of people to voluntarily face and accept incarceration that helped motivate and build the movement (in the late 1980s as many as 8000 people at a time engaged in nonviolent civil disobedience over a ten-day period).  In the end, this effort — by the Nevada Desert Experience, American Peace Test, Greenpeace, and others  — helped create the conditions for the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty (signed by some 150 countries and leading to a US moratorium on full-blown testiong since 1993).

For Fr. Louie Vitale, while he probably hopes his witness can contribute to the closing of the School of the Americas, this willingness to spend lengths of time in jail is a spiritual practice undertaken to respond to the great crisis of our time: violence, war, injustice.  It is a clear statement that, for him, he must lovingly resist with every fiber of his being this juggarnaut of destruction.  For him this means openly resisting and, as Fr. Daniel Berrigan says, “paying up” for it.

Intriguingly, such a  witness — while not pegged to a certain outcome or direct change — can, over time, have a profound impact on generating or nourishing the people power that will be needed to make change possible, as in the case of the witnesses at the test site.  Whether that is Dr. King’s 200 arrests — or many such acts of conscience by many other women and men over the past 100 years — there has been a profound impact on many great movement for change, often in ways that could not be seen at the time they occurred.