NUN SERVED TWO YEARS IN PRISON OVER PEACE ACTIVISM

Megan Rice, a nun and Catholic peace activist who spent two years in federal prison while in her 80s after breaking into a government security complex to protest nuclear weapons, has died. She was 91.

Rice died of congestive heart failure Oct. 10 at Holy Child Center in Rosemont, Pa., according to her order, the Society of the Holy Child Jesus.

“Sister Megan lived her life with love full of action and zeal,” said Carroll Juliano, American Province Leader for the order. “Her commitment to build a peaceful and just world was unwavering and selfless.”

Rice was born in New York to activist parents who would meet with well-known Catholic writer Dorothy Day during the Great Depression to craft solutions for societal problems, she said in a 2013 interview with the Catholic Agitator.

Her activism was also heavily inf luenced by her uncle, who spent four months in Nagasaki, Japan, after it and Hiroshima had been leveled by atomic bombs to hasten the end of World War II, bombings that Rice would later call the “greatest shame in history.“

Rice spent 23 years in West Africa working as a teacher and pastoral guide.

When she returned to the U.S., Rice began anti-nuclear activism.

Court records showed prior convictions for protest activities when she and two fellow Catholic peace activists, Michael Walli and Greg Boertje-Obed, broke into the Y-12 National Security Complex in Oak Ridge, Tenn., in July 2012.

The trio cut through fences and spent two hours outside a bunker storing bomb-grade uranium, where

they hung banners and spray-painted peace slogans.

They were arrested and charged with felony sabotage.

Rice was sentenced to three years in prison and Walli and Oertje-Obed each received more than five years.

The 6th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals threw out the sabotage charge and the three were freed in May 2015 after serving two years.