by Marianne Arbogast

Now living in Birmingham, Alabama, Shelley Douglass runs a Catholic Worker house while Jim Douglass pursues research for a book challenging the official version of the King and Kennedy assassinations--an unpopular subject, he attests, not only with the mainstream media but in progressive circles as well. Last November, when a jury in a civil trial brought by the King family found U.S. government agencies implicated in King's death, the verdict was almost universally ignored or discredited.

"I think it's hard, even for people in the peace and justice movement, to accept systemic evil in our immediate presence," Jim Douglass says. "We can talk about the CIA in Guatemala or the Middle East or Cuba assassinating people, but it seems to be impossible for us to accept that happening in the U.S.--which I think is naive. When Archbishop Romero was shot, the people of El Salvador didn't say, ‘There goes another lone nut killing a prophet.' They understood the source of his death.

"If we don't take King's death seriously, we don't take his life seriously, either. King was killed because he had moved beyond civil rights to a condemnation of the war in Vietnam and an organizing of the Poor Peoples' Campaign, whose purpose was to shut down Washington, D.C. until the U.S. government would agree to eliminate poverty. He envisioned a global poor people's campaign, which would dislocate the functioning of cities across the world without destroying them. That was taken seriously by people who control wealth and that's the issue at the center of the questions about the King assassination."

Both Jim and Shelley Douglass credit the Catholic Worker with helping to shape their understanding of the Gospel and its challenge to wrongful authority.

Shelley Douglass, who grew up in a CIA family posted to Switzerland, Pakistan and then Germany, was surprised when she returned to a U.S. that failed to match the picture she had been given.

"My family was Christian and we read the New Testament and I took civics at army high schools in Germany. When I came back to the States in the early 1960s I didn't know about segregation because that wasn't something that you read about in the military press overseas. It seemed obvious to me that segregation was wrong and we had a Christian and civic duty to do something about it, and the same for the Vietnam war."

As a high school student, Shelley Douglass had been drawn to Catholicism by the Latin mass, which struck her as a stable alternative to her family's practice of changing denominations with each move, going wherever services were held in English. Because her parents were opposed, she had promised to wait until she was 18 to become Catholic.

"By the time I turned 18 they weren't using the Latin any more, but once we came home one of the first things I discovered was the Catholic Worker and that more than made up for the Latin. Here were people doing what I thought the gospels said to do."

Authority in the Catholic Worker community is linked with responsibility, she says.

"We tend to call ourselves anarchists in the Catholic Worker movement, which does not mean that everybody goes around and does just what they want to do. It comes from the personalist philosophy, that each of us is personally responsible. When you see something that needs doing, whether it's mopping the bathroom floor or going out on the picket line, then you do it."

As the sole permanent resident at Mary's House, a house of hospitality for the homeless (the Douglasses maintain another house where Jim Douglass can continue his writing), Shelley Douglass finds herself the main decision-maker.

"It's a little scary because I call the shots and other folks don't have that power. I hope when people cooperate it's not because they're afraid I'm going to make them move out, but because it makes sense not to do drugs and to be here for dinner, to take care of each other. If I have authority, I would hope to have the kind of authority that comes from the inside and from who I am. That's the authority I recognize in my life. The people I look to are not necessarily the people with the titles, but the people I see who are living out what they believe."

In decisions on matters such as civil disobedience (she is planning a trip to Iraq this spring with the Fellowship of Reconciliation, of which she is past national chairperson), Shelley Douglass says she looks "inside--how it feels in my gut," as well as to Scripture and community discernment.

"I think the ultimate authority is the community we have with other human beings--and if civil authority seems to be violating that and I feel like I can do something to stop it, then I do it."

Firmly committed to nonviolence, she stresses the Gandhian principle that "everyone has a piece of the truth--which means the people on the Trident base, or the government of Iraq, or even perhaps the U.S. government. And nobody's perfect, so no matter how deeply I feel about something, I could still be wrong. I may not know all the facts, or I may be interpreting things incorrectly, or I may not be acting wisely on what I know. It's a difficult thing to keep as a duality, because you have to believe pretty strongly that you're right, in order to risk arrest or jail."

Jim Douglass discovered the Catholic Worker after a stint in the army, which he joined after leaving a nuclear physics program at the University of California in Berkeley.

"I kept turning in directions where I didn't have any sense of the end and wound up reading and meeting Dorothy Day. That brought me into an understanding of the gospels. It was through the question of nuclear weapons that I came to nonviolence, because how could one be a Christian and agree to the destruction of all life on earth? That was inconceivable when the question was raised to me by the Catholic Worker."

Taking up theological studies on war and peace, Jim Douglass found himself in Rome during the Second Vatican Council, where he advised bishops who were shaping the document to recognize conscientious objection as an option for Catholics.

"I talked to as many bishops as I could who seemed open to the question and, although I was a person of no import and didn't even have an advanced degree in theology, they listened to me more than I could have imagined, because there were very few theologians who had dealt with that question," he says. "I was able to work on speeches for some of the bishops, and thanks to a lobbying group that included Eileen Egan, Jean and Hildegard Goss-Mayr, Dorothy Day and, at a distance, Thomas Merton, the bishops did reach a position that turned the church in a new direction on the issue of war and peace."

He describes his relationship with official church authority as "ambiguous."

"I've fasted in support of the pope going to Bosnia and now to Iraq because I believe he has a conscience and a voice that can go beyond all governmental authorities in this world. When he uses it as he did, for example, in Cuba, it's a voice that can transform situations, and that's a voice right out of the Gospel. But on the other hand, when the Vatican demeans gay and lesbian people or refuses to recognize the priesthood of women, the Vatican has rejected the Gospel."

Shelley Douglass, who once considered being ordained in the United Church of Canada, says that she would not now choose ordination--even if it were open to Catholic women--unless church structures changed radically.

"It makes no sense to me for one person to be this sort of supreme being in a parish and it isn't something I'd want to be part of. But when it comes down to feeding the family, being able to consecrate the Eucharist ... someday, if things were transformed, if I were still alive, maybe."

She distinguishes between power and authority.

"Whereas the structure in the church has all the power, they don't have all the authority. What is it they said about Jesus?--‘He taught with authority.' That kind of authority comes from the integrity of a person's life. I do take the teaching of the church seriously, because it's a body of tradition that comes down from our ancestors. Ideally they all go together--the people who have authority in my life, the teaching of the church, Scripture and my own gut feeling."

Jim Douglass also speaks of an authority of those who suffer.

"The experience of being in Iraq four times since the Gulf War has made it impossible for me to read headlines about Saddam Hussein without thinking of the 22 million other people in that country. I think that's an authority that needs to be at the center of our foreign policy so that it becomes, as A.J. Muste said, a foreign policy for children. The suffering of Iraqi children in hospitals that I visited, who die because their water systems are full of sewage and they have no medicines to deal with the illnesses that come from the consequences of war and the result of U.S./U.N. sanctions--that's an authority that has touched me probably more deeply than anything else in recent years."