Megan Rice, who crusaded against nuclear weapons, is dead at age 91

In summer 2012, in the middle of the night, an 82-year-old Roman Catholic sister hiked over a wooded ridge in East Tennessee and, with two fellow peace activists, intruded into a government facility nicknamed the Fort Knox of Uranium.

They evaded patrols, cut through sensored fences, entered a shootto-kill zone and, with relative ease, reached their target: A looming white building that contained a stockpile of material for nuclear weapons.

On its exterior wall the trio splashed human blood, as a symbol of the cost of war, and spray-painted biblical messages such as “THE FRUIT OF JUSTICE IS PEACE.”

Sister Megan Rice and her compatriots, Michael Walli and Greg Boertje-Obed, declared this an act of protest and love in the service of a higher law, but the incident prompted a two-week shutdown of the facility, and they were charged and convicted of intending to endanger the national defense. They spent about two years in prison, won release and vindication on appeal in 2015, and helped inspire other activists and works of journalistic nonfiction.

Sister Rice died Oct. 10 at the residence of her religious order, the Society of the Holy Child Jesus, in Rosemont, Pa. She was 91. The cause was congestive heart failure, said Colleen Carroll, the director of communications for the society.

“Has any empire or aspiring superpower not declined, not fallen apart from exceptionalism into decadence?” Sister Rice, dressed in a beige inmate jumpsuit, said in a Knoxville, Tenn., courtroom in February 2014. “So we had to come to this facility to call it to transformation.”

That facility, the Y-12 National Security Complex in Oak Ridge, Tenn., would not be transformed. It would instead proceed with the construction of a new uranium processing facility projected to cost over $6 billion.

But calling attention to the funding, possession and refurbishment of nuclear weapons - the United States is currently spending over $1 trillion to modernize its nuclear forces - was the capstone of Sister Rice’s lifelong commitments to education and anti-nuclearism, which took her from rural classrooms in Nigeria to desert peace marches in Nevada.

“She is a person of love,” Mary Evelyn Tucker, co-founder of the Forum on Religion and Ecology at Yale University and a lifelong friend of Sister Rice’s family, said at a sentencing hearing in 2014. Sister Rice is “in a great lineage of Gandhi, who transformed a nation, of Mandela … of Martin Luther King. She is in a lineage, clearly, that is transformative.”

Megan Gillespie Rice - her first name was pronounced “Mee-gan” was born in New York City on Jan. 31, 1930. She was raised in Morningside Heights, near Columbia University, in a liberal Catholic environment attuned to poverty and human rights. Her parents, an obstetrician and a historian, were friends and followers of Dorothy Day and the Catholic Worker movement, which opposed the drumbeat of war even after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor.

As a child, Sister Rice was shaped by the examples of her mother, who wrote a dissertation on the Catholic Church’s timid position on slavery in the 19th century, and her teachers in the Society of the Holy Child Jesus, an order of sisters whose mantra was “actions not words.”