Bartimaeus Cooperative Ministries E-News, 2006. 3 pp.

On Sunday, Aug 6th, fifty of us gathered in central California to remind ourselves that communion with the Divine must be linked to resistance to evil. Organized by Catholic Worker communities, the event celebrated the traditional Catholic Feast of the Transfiguration, and mourned Hiroshima Day, with a vigil at the main gate of Vandenberg Air Force Base (VAFB). We then gathered at nearby Guadalupe Catholic Worker for lunch, and proceeded to the gravesite of Ladon Sheats for a memorial liturgy.

Disfiguration. This was the 61st anniversary of the inauguration o the nuclear age, when the U.S. dropped an atom bomb on the Japanese city of Hiroshima, instantly killing 100,000 people. We came to Vandenberg because it symbolizes the shadow of nuclear annihilation under which our world still shivers. Just one month earlier, U.S. National Security Adviser Stephen Hadley had described North Korean missile test launches as "provocative behavior." Yet VAFB has been test launching ICBMs into Kwajalein Atoll in the Marshall Islands since 1959 (right, a recent test). Who, then, is the real provocateur?

To download, click on the attachment below.