Sr. Jackie Hudson, right, speaks with World War II bombing survivor Zita Howell.
Sentinel photo by Ed Langlois

Zita Howell, 90, still shivers when airplanes fly overhead. She was young when fire came out of the sky.

In 1944, she lived in Ulm in southern Germany, working in her aunt’s hotel. On a cold night a week before Christmas, U.S. planes attacked, killing hundreds and leaving 25,000 people homeless. The bombs did not discriminate between soldiers, Nazi supporters and people like Zita, who were just trying to survive.

Howell, a member of Ascension Parish in Portland, lived through the devastation and even married an American soldier. Now she hopes that no one else ever has to suffer a bombing at the hands of her beloved adopted nation.

Howell was in a Portland audience last month listening to a Dominican sister who is working to curtail U.S. nuclear capability.

Small and kind but fiery, Sister Jackie Hudson lives in Bangor, Wash., near the base that houses a fleet of Trident nuclear submarines. She protests there regularly. Each of the 14 subs, she explains, carries warheads capable of a blast more than 4,000 times the force of the Hiroshima bomb, which killed 150,000 people.

Sister Jackie and others in her movement want their country to abide by nuclear treaties signed over the years. To her chagrin, both Democratic and Republican presidents have pushed for new arms ever since. The Bush administration, for example, has proposed a whole new set of warheads and space capabilities at a cost of hundreds of billions of dollars.

But Sister Jackie sees a new chance.

“We’re at a moment in history when four of the five original nuclear nations will have new leadership in 2009,” says the 73-year-old nun. “There has never been a possibility quite as good to push for observance of our non-proliferation treaty.”

Henry Kissinger and other high-level leaders from past and present this year issued a statement calling for a nuclear-free world.

“It’s insane that we are maintaining ten thousand nuclear weapons,” says Sister Jackie, who spent two years in jail for a protest at a missile silo in Colorado in 2002. “We are asking for our country to become a law-abiding country, to follow the non-proliferation treaty.”

Sister Jackie entered the semi-cloistered Dominicans of Grand Rapids, Mich. in 1952, right out of high school. Taking the name Sister Mary Venard, she would teach music for several decades, work on human rights in Central America and then feel the call of the gospel and of science to become an anti-nuclear activist.

A talk by an Australian pediatrician, Dr. Helen Caldicott, convinced her of the urgency of the issue.

The Dominican superiors have been highly supportive of the work. While Sister Jackie and Sisters Ardeth Platte and Carol Gilbert were in jail for the Colorado action, the order’s leader in Rome sent a note lauding them for their powerful witness.

“We do not break the law,” Sister Jackie says. “We uphold the law and call out government to accountability to abide by the law.”