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27 January 1938—

Divine Obedience

Louisiana native Roy Bourgeois thought his education was over when he graduated from college. But the next four years as a naval officer, including ground combat in Vietnam that earned him a Purple Heart, taught him a new way of looking at the world. “I left Vietnam wanting to give peacemaking a chance,” he recalls. So he joined the Roman Catholic Maryknoll order, was ordained in 1972, and was sent to Bolivia, where he lived for the next five years. It was in Latin America that he learned yet another lesson: the connection between militarism, violence, and the poor. He discovered that ministering to the oppressed was only half of his calling as a Christian. The other half was resisting the causes of oppression, which in Latin America’s case too often were traceable to U.S.-backed military strongmen who ransacked economies and brutalized citizens.

Eventually Bolivian authorities, angered at Bourgeois’ public calls for justice, sent him packing back to the United States. In 1980, shortly after his return, three nuns and a lay missionary were raped and murdered by El Salvadoran soldiers of the U.S.-supported military junta there. Two of the nuns were Bourgeois’ friends. Their murders, as well as the slaying of Archbishop Óscar Romero and hundreds of others in El Salvador, prompted Bourgeois to take his activism against U.S. foreign policy in Latin America to the national level.

Bourgeois discovered that many members of the officers corps from repressive Latin American countries were trained at the School of the Americas (SOA), a U.S.-funded military training facility housed in Fort Benning, Georgia. Bourgeois also learned that SOA students were actually being trained in interrogation techniques and “counterterrorism” tactics. A frightening number of the school’s graduates were implicated in the kidnapping, torture, murder, or disappearance of dissidents in their native countries. Although he didn’t know it at the time, the El Salvadoran murderers of the four women were SOA alums.

Determined to do something to stop U.S. complicity in Latin American human rights violations, Bourgeois founded the School of the Americas Watch in 1990, an organization that seeks to close down SOA (now renamed the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation). Every November, thousands of protesters gather at the gates of Fort Benning to remember all those slain by its graduates. They call out the names of victims, and the assembly shouts “Presente!” Hundreds of peace workers, including Bourgois and dozens of priests and nuns, have been arrested in these nonviolent demonstrations. When challenged on his activism, Bourgeois responds, “When a law of my country contradicts the law of God, then I have no choice but to disobey the law of my country. Some call it civil disobedience; I call it divine obedience.”

In a further act of divine obedience, Bourgeois recently challenged the Roman Catholic Church’s refusal to ordain women. In 2010, he was excommunicated for participating in a women’s ordination ceremony.