Walking through Greece November 1983
Atomic Pilgrim:
My Adventures Walking to Bethlehem and Probing America’s Nuclear Weapons Complex
Watching a documentary of Mother Teresa shook me out of my comfortable complacency and catapulted me into walking halfway around the world, ending U.S. plutonium production, and uncovering deception in America's nuclear weapons complex.
Christmas morning in Bethlehem 1983
All Mother Teresa said was “love until it hurts.” After I heard those four words, I felt instantly that the rest of my life would be much different. Two months after I began serving people in poverty in Seattle as a Jesuit Volunteer, an apocalyptic pantomime provoked a dark depression about the threat of nuclear war. Striving to free myself from such doom, I joined people organizing the Bethlehem Peace Pilgrimage. During the next twenty months, I and nineteen other pilgrims walked 6700 miles across the United States and nine other countries as a plea for disarmament. Our oldest pilgrim, Fr. George Zabelka, had served as the Catholic chaplain to the men who dropped the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki during World War II.
Hanford plutonium plant, mid-1950s
Returning from Bethlehem, I discovered that my parents lived downwind from an aging plutonium factory that had recently resumed operations due to President Reagan’s nuclear escalation. Within months, I helped organize a citizens’ group to challenge Hanford, America’s first and largest nuclear weapons factory. We successfully campaigned to close that plutonium factory and began advocating for the millions of people exposed to secret radiation releases from more than forty years of plutonium production. My memoir concludes with me accompanying Archbishop Paul Etienne (Seattle) and Archbishop John Wester (Santa Fe) on their 2023 Pilgrimage of Peace to Hiroshima and Nagasaki.