Pace e Bene

 Franciscan priest and Pace e Bene staff member Friar 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. On February 25 he was transferred from Crisp County Jail in Cordele, Georgia (where he spent his first  month after being processed briefly at Muscogee County Jail), to the US Penitentiary in Atlanta, Georgia. He was then moved to Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, and now has arrived at FCI Lompoc.  To see other letters from Fr. Louie, click here.  Here is his mailing address:

Louis Vitale #25803-048

FCI Lompoc

Federal Correctional Institution

3600 Guard Road

Lompoc, Ca  93436

My Faith Journey

I was born June 1,1932 into an Italian Catholic family and culture, with baptism being top of the chronology of religious rituals. Next on the agenda should have been religious instruction culminating in first communion preceded by confession,  but through some dissatisfaction with the old Mission San Gabriel, my parents did not attend mass and I did not make those steps at the usual age of seven.

About the time I turned 12, a close friend of my father convinced him, after much resistance, to attend a weekend retreat at a Catholic Retreat Center.  My father, a great salesman, met his match and was so impressed by the priest he came home and announced that we were now going to Sunday mass. Within a year I was in a Catholic military school run by Dominican Sisters. There my religious upbringing got a jump-start.  I received instruction and made my first communion, confession and confirmation. 

A strong conviction and love of this pathway of Jesus and Francis engaged me at a very deep level, compelling me to go on.

My bent seemed to be enthusiasm.  I took to all of this with zeal.  I was very impressed with a Dominican priest, in long white robes , who seemed heroic to me.  During those World War II days, there were many stories of missionaries who seemed for our times like the martyrs of the early church, being place in concentration camps, tortured and even put to death. To me this seemed a very heroic life style.  But almost all of members of our family were engaged in business—fish processing and alcoholic beverages—so I presumed that would be my future life as well.  Yet those heroes remained ever present to me, as did war heroes such as General MacArthur and General Patton. Also the many war films highlighted such heroism.

Upon entering high school at Loyola, I had to strive to keep up with my studies and follow the faith.  Now I had a car and developed a wild streak with companions in all kinds of partying ventures.  ( A hint of identification with the early life of St Francis of Assisi, as yet unknown to me.)  In my Junior year I was talked into running for class president.  I faced the humiliation of losing, and blamed God for letting me be humiliated.  Yet I was sure it was some sign from God.  God was beginning to wake me up.

Previously my major religious motivation was fear of sinning through human weakness and going to hell. Mass and confession could save my soul.  But a new enthusiasm emerged. I approached a Jesuit campus chaplain and told him of my readiness to follow my enthusiasm. He knew of my worldliness, having been my high school principal.  He suggested I finish college and complete my three year obligation to the U.S Air Force, as an Air Force ROTC cadet.  Once again hedonism won the day. I went back to the partying and Jazz clubs. 

But the call never went away.  A deep devotional side continued to develop.  I made a retreat at a Franciscan retreat center in Indianapolis and later at Our Lady of Gethsemane among contemplative Trappist monks including the prolific spiritual writer Thomas Merton who had also turned from a profligate life to follow the contemplative, mystical call.  The starkness of their vow of silence frightened me.  The warmth and openness of the Franciscan Centers attracted me.

I picked up a vocation book at the center: “If you have a love of God, a desire to serve the poor as did Jesus, and if you have a sense of humor”…this spoke to me. I signed up. 

When I told my parents, who had come to Chicago for a Fish Convention (Dad was President of the national association that year) my father was dismayed. When he said “All this I will give to you…”  I remembered Jesus temptation in the desert.  I persevered in following the course.  At discharge time from the Air Force I faced options: re-up with the Air Force, apply to Harvard for a business degree, or join the Franciscans.  The Holy Spirit did not leave me in confusion.

As I learned more of St Francis—his profligate years, his attraction to be a heroic knight, his desperate years of torture as a prisoner of war and the subsequent severe illness of body and spirit (today we would call it Post Traumatic Stress Disorder)—I followed his path.

My initial experience as a Franciscan was as a penitent.  How can I regain God’s good standing and achieve “sanctity” –from spiritual hobo to fervent disciple.  The first two austere years were focused on submitting to discipline, putting on the Franciscan habit and taking up the religious life.  I recall the fear coming back, fear of failing to live up to this way of life—the sins we might commit, not only of commission but also of omission.  I was struck by St Paul’s confession, “The evil I would not do, I do; the good I would do, I do not.” 

But a strong conviction and love of this pathway of Jesus and Francis engaged me at a very deep level, compelling me to go on.  After Novitiate I was ordained as a Catholic priest and took on the life-long commitment to poverty, chastity and obedience.

Major currents were sweeping through society and the church at this time.  For the church it was the Vatican Council and the new insights coming from scripture, liturgy, and church history—new understandings of the religious life and the role of Bishops. Most amazing and hopeful was the presence of representative Bishops from emerging cultures of the world—Latin America, Africa, and Asia.  With this came new languages, new forms of worship, new understandings of scripture and of God’s message. 

From this came the breakthrough document, “The Church in the Modern World” with an awareness that the church was a church of the poor, an awareness which the oppressed well understood. This engaged us in a new expression.  The Spirit was moving within the poor to change history. Many of us experienced this as intoxicating.  We Franciscans were especially blessed to have far-sighted mentors who already were immersed with the poor throughout the world. Francis” charism for the poor and for all creation was our legacy.   

Then came the revolutionary movements of the sixties.  By this time I was out of seminary and sent to teach sociology at our church college at San Luis Rey, and engaged in doctoral studies UCLA. I also spent some time at Berkeley, where our theology school had located to be part of an ecumenical community of seminaries, also attached to the trailblazing icon of the University of California Berkeley. There the spirit of change was energizing in the Free Speech movement, literally flooding the seminaries in amplified voices booming into the Berkeley halls.  Great prophetic voices such as Robert Bellah, Michael Nagler, and Angela Davis were picking up the mantle of Martin Luther King in the midst of this was the epic anti-Vietnam war movement. 

By then I had come a long way from my U.S. Air Force days.  I joined with others in mounting the Federal Court House steps and boldly challenging the US government.  We Franciscans were also close to Cesar Chavez and experienced a new form of pilgrimage, marching to Sacramento under the banner of our Lady of Guadalupe.

When the Vietnam War finally ended I was in Las Vegas working with farm workers and for welfare mothers’ rights. As part of this process, we did a sit-in on the famed Las Vegas strip, temporarily halting traffic there.  A journalist covering the event noted to me that though the Vietnam War was grinding down, the nuclear arms race was heating up with the cold war.

It came to my attention that the leading edge of the arms race was the testing of new weapons, which was going on right near us in the Nevada desert.  If we could stop the testing, that might stop the arms race.  So in celebration of the 800^th anniversary of the birth of St Francis, the Franciscan community organized a new form of liturgy- a series of nonviolent vigil/actions at the Nevada Test Site culminating in an arrest action on Good Friday and a joyful welcoming of the resurrection at NTS on Easter morning.  Hallelujah! A new church was being born.

Over the years we did succeed in influencing a moratorium on testing that still holds, and helped create an outbreak of nonviolence actions in the corona of Marin Luther King, Cesar Chavez, Nelson Mandela, and people power movements in Poland, the Philippines, the Soviet Union and on and on.

Yes, it was a charismatic implosion of cultures, societies, universities, the peace movement, and including the Church’s Religious life.  It is amazing how this keeps growing.  Nevada Desert Experience has celebrated almost thirty years and is still going.  It gave impetus to the birthing of Pace e Bene Nonviolence Service, which recently celebrated twenty years of providing resources and training in the spirituality and practice of active nonviolence.  

And now we face a new breakthrough—Creation Theology.  Christians believe that the all-compassionate love, which fills our universe, fills all creation, is the presence we name “God” or “Gaia” or “Allah” or any other name.  Christians see this presence made present in the human world (incarnation) as in Jesus.  As we learn more and more, our understanding of this amazing universe enlarges.  Some say the Hubble’s giant telescope has revealed to us more of God’s creation than any previous books, scriptures or life stories. Francis of Assisi is seen by scientific and ecumenical ecologists as the first to understand this all-embracing unity—“Brother Sun, Sister Moon, Sister Water, Brother Fire—All Creation.”

This fascinates me beyond my imagination, even here in this lock-down near the counter sign—Vanderbilt Air Force Base, gateway of world-destroying missiles and rockets—as the U.S. seeks “Total Global Dominance.” In the face of this, from behind prison bars but with the confidence of glimpsing the truth which makes us free, we say NOT IN OUR NAME. NOT IN THE NAME OF JESUS, who calls us to be peacemakers, not as the world makes peace.  And so we happily join the band of Francis and Clare and Dorothy Day and Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King and Cesar Chavez and Gene Stoltzfus and…following Jesus to the peaceable kingdom promised to the peacemakers in our time.  And so, in many tongues, we celebrate ALLELUIA!         

Pace e Bene!  Peace and Good to all!  

Photo: Judith Kelly

 Click here to see Friar Louie’s other letters.