c. 1999 Religion News Service

CLEVELAND _ Celebrities Martin Sheen and Susan Sarandon have done their bit in the campaign to close the U.S. Army’s School of the Americas. They have lent their famous names and attractive faces in videos and protest rallies.

A world away from Hollywood, Sister Marge Eilerman has followed her convictions, too. She became inmate No. 88106-020 in the Federal Medical Center prison in Lexington, Ky. She tested her spirit and her 62-year-old constitution by doing time for trespassing and vandalizing a government sign at the Fort Benning, Ga., School of the Americas _ called by its critics”the School of Assassins.” The farmers’ daughter from Ohio is one of a growing number demanding the school be closed. Organizers drew 7,000 protesters to Fort Benning last November on the ninth anniversary of the slaughter of six Jesuit priests, their housekeeper and her daughter in El Salvador. They expect 10,000 demonstrators this year.

A 1995 report from a United Nations Truth Commission tied 19 graduates of the School of the Americas to the Jesuit killings. It implicated three other graduates in the 1980 murder of four Cleveland churchwomen, also in El Salvador. Two more school alumni were named as the assassins of Archbishop Oscar Romero, who died in 1980.

Defenders of the school consider the blame leveled at it for these atrocities to be nonsense, saying it is no more responsible for the acts of its graduates than the Board of Education in Littleton, Colo., is accountable for the carnage of Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold last April.

Sister Marge, as she prefers to be called, sees the military-led killings in Latin America quite differently. She carried an 18-inch white cross onto the Fort Benning base and helped dig a mock grave at the Pentagon.

“I went from one act of civil disobedience to the next until the government said, `That’s enough from you for a while’ and they socked me behind bars,” the Franciscan nun said, a hint of merriment in her soft voice.

A year into her sentence, an appeals court judge released her, finding her 14-month sentence overly harsh. When this news flashed through the Lexington prison population in September, shouts of “Praise the Lord!” and screams of delight were audible 1,000 feet away, according to friends waiting at the gate.”People always ask me if I was afraid,”Sister Marge said,”but I always knew peace. I always knew what I did was right, then the consequences came from that. They were to be met, not feared.” Not that incarceration was easy. Sister Marge slept on a bunk bed alongside 11 cellmates. She lost 35 pounds on tasteless jailhouse fare.

Sister Marge links her protest to her own experiences in Mexico.

Having worked in her order’s mission in Chiapas, Mexico, Sister Marge was devastated when word of the massacre of 47 Mayans in Acetal, Chiapas, reached her right before Christmas 1997.

“I don’t know of another experience so deep for me that occurred so far away,” she said quietly, looking out at the whitecaps on Lake Erie. “It was a real event for me. I mourned that massacre all through Christmas. I had a real and vivid sense that what happened there happened because of the training of the Mexican military in the United States.

“A little girl, she was 4, was struck by a bullet that left her sightless. She hid under her mother and her mother was dead. There is something about the horror of that, that she will go through her life sightless now,” said Sister Marge, trailing off, her eyes reddening behind her glasses. “I kept her picture on the bulletin board while I was in prison. It put things in perspective. It made what I did seem very, very small.”

But champions of the School of the Americas argue what Sister Marge did was very misguided.

“There have been recent accusations that we teach torture, criminal conduct and rape,” said Nicholas Britto, the school’s public affairs officer of seven months. “That is false. That is, in fact, illegal. When you attack the School of the Americas, you attack the entire U.S. Army and Marine Corps.”

The school, housed in a pink building with a tile roof, enrolls about 800 students each year. It began in Panama in 1946 and moved to Georgia in 1984. Its students come from 18 of the 21 countries of Latin America and all coursework is in Spanish. In August, the House of Representatives voted to cut $2 million from its funding, but the money was restored by one vote in conference committee in September.

“This is an honorable, upright institution that carefully follows the law of the United States,” said the Rev. Donald J. Blickhan, a Catholic priest who has served 18 months as chaplain to its faculty and students. “A minister gets to know his people. This school is open. I can walk anywhere and attend any class. We have 55 courses, including de-mining and field medical procedures.”

Blickhan is indignant about the attacks on his school. He argues that the school fosters democratic ideals and human rights principles in Latin America.

Sister Virginia A. Welsh, community minister to Sister Marge and the other Franciscan nuns of Tiffin, Ohio, has heard this argument. She is not impressed.

“If the goal is to train people for democracy, as the school claims, then why are we training the military?” Welsh asked. “Why aren’t we offering the best and brightest students from Central America scholarships to study political science, giving them literacy and education?”

Protests against the school have a particular resonance in Northeast Ohio because of the death of Sister Dorothy Kazel, an Ursuline nun who argued against abandoning the Cleveland diocese’s dangerous Catholic mission shortly before her murder and rape alongside three other churchwomen in 1980.

“I hold that school accountable for the massacres, for the torture and for the disappearances,” said the Rev. Laurinda Hafner, pastor of Pilgrim Congregational Church. Her church will serve as a way station for protesters from Toronto. “I’d much rather my tax dollars went to a peace university.”

Pilgrim Congregational Church sponsored a resolution, passed by the United Church of Christ general synod in 1997, calling for all members to work to shut the school down. The Presbyterian Peace Board has joined the protest as well. But Archbishop Edwin F. O’Brien, who oversees the archdiocese for military services, is firmly behind the school.

Sister Marge believes the political tide is turning against the archbishop. “It reminds me of the waves on Lake Erie,” she said, smiling. “We just keep coming and coming and coming.”

DEA END LONG