Local Activist Patrick O’Neill Prepares to Serve 14 Month Sentence
By Margaret Damghani
During his most recent stint in jail in Woodbine, Georgia, the result of actions he will soon report to prison for, longtime Garner resident Patrick O’Neill threw parties for the men on his cell block.
He remembers saving up peanut butter, tuna packets, jelly, crackers and powdered drink mix, and enlisting the help of two friends he’d made in jail to set up the food and drinks. He took a piece of tape he found in an old book to hang up a flyer, inviting the entire cell block, making sure to include the guards so that it wasn’t torn down as contraband.
“It was fun to do that, and to give dignity and a loving encounter to people that are in the most oppressive situation you can basically be with in this country,” he reflected.
One gathering loudly sang “Freedom” by Richie Havens, and O’Neill remembers reading from Isaiah and sharing a reflection on the Pharisees.
“Jesus was always with prostitutes and tax collectors, the outcasts. I said ‘Guys, He’s here with us, at the jail. This is exactly where Jesus hangs out, here with us,” O’Neill recalled saying.
The Protest Path to Prison
That was over two years ago, and O’Neill has been on house arrest since then. He was sentenced to report to prison in Ohio on January 14 for 14 months and ordered to pay $33,503.51 in restitution for charges stemming from an act of anti-nuclear protest at the Naval Submarines Base Kings Bay. The offenses can be summarized as trespass, conspiracy and destruction of property.
The coordinated action took years of planning and saw O’Neill and his collaborators, called the Kings Bay Plowshares 7, stealing onto the base in Georgia on April 4, 2018, the 50th anniversary of the death of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. They engaged in acts of vandalism, ultimately providing a written statement of their opposition to nuclear weapons and peacefully accepting arrest, and resulting in jail and prison time for all seven.
Much of what the group did was symbolic, following in the tradition of other Catholic Plowshares peace actions, part of a decades long movement in the Christian pacifist community. O’Neill, for his part, brought with him a hammer made out of melted down guns to use against a statue of a Trident missile on the base, but did not ultimately do much actual damage.
The action statement from day of arrest read:
“We come in peace on this sorrowful anniversary of the martyrdom of a great prophet, Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Fifty years ago today, April 4, 1968, Dr. King was assassinated in Memphis, Tennessee as a reaction to his efforts to address “the giant triplets of racism, extreme materialism, and militarism.” We come to Kings Bay to answer the call of the prophet Isaiah (2:4) to “beat swords into plowshares” by disarming the world’s deadliest nuclear weapon, the Trident submarine.”
Progress Through Resistance
At 64, O’Neill is a prolific freelance writer, devoted father of eight, and co-founder of the Catholic Worker House in Garner with his wife Mary Rider. He also volunteers time in the hospital ministry at WakeMed. Sprinkled throughout, a lifetime of actions to bring awareness to various social issues add up to over 25 arrests, 7 at the Pentagon protesting war, and over 2.5 years in prison.
He served 90 days after his first arrest in 1982 for impeding traffic, when he participated in a sit-in at Fort Bragg protesting the overthrow of democracies abroad.
In federal prison in Atlanta in the mid 1980’s, O’Neill got the chance to know many among the group of Cuban refugees known as the Marielitos. Many wrote ‘Libertad’ on their bedsheets as a form of nonviolent protest, and when a mattress was set on fire, the guards reacted in retaliation to the entirety of the Cuban men there by seizing anything deemed flammable, including personal photos, letters and bibles and burning them in a large bonfire. O’Neill, working on the landscaping crew, saved as many personal items as he could.
He ended up finding ways to slip information to the press about the treatment of the Marielitos on the inside, resulting in more than one story in the Atlanta Constitution, and solitary confinement for him. It would be the year after he was released that an announcement about a deportation agreement led to what is commonly referred to as the ‘Atlanta Prison Riots’, though it is doubtful that O’Neill would agree with that characterization.
He was in jail for 15 days in Alamance County in 2009 for participating in a dramatic scene in front of the doors to the jail. Dressed as an ICE agent, he demanded the police arrest a woman costumed as the statue of liberty to call attention to issues in immigration policies and detainment.
Progress Through Compassion
O’Neill’s experiences have made him far more familiar with many realities many do not think about; the reasons people end up in jail, the cycles that previous offenses and poverty make it hard to escape, and the treatment of inmates.
“I’m not gonna go into the stories about guards beating them and people suffering with withdrawal,” O’Neill said. “It’s just kind of a place of despair. We are basically dealing with the same moral issues Jesus spoke about 2000 years ago, and a lot of people don't’ really think about that.”
O’Neill is inspired by other Christian pacifists who engaged in non-violent civil disobedience such as Philip Berrigan, a personal mentor, and Thomas Merton, a well-known Catholic theologian and activist, but his upbringing also influenced his life’s work.
Progress: The Roots of Justice
His mother, a resourceful woman who raised O’Neill and his brother after his father died, was not an activist but made it clear that she would not be sacrificing her children to the ‘war machine’.
His father died in a preventable construction accident when he was pre-school aged, and his mother was able to provide for her two sons by paying off the mortgage on their home with life insurance, and successfully winning in trial against the company his father had worked for.
And, of course, underlying all is his Faith. All four of his grandparents that immigrated to this country were Catholic, and O’Neill met his wife in 1977 when he was doing pastoral work at St. Gabriel Catholic Church in Greenville and she was a student at ECU.
That pastoral work is what brought him to North Carolina from where he was raised in Queens, and opening the first Catholic Worker house in North Carolina in 1991 brought him to Garner.
“My wife and I started an intentional community that does hospitality to women and children in crisis. It’s a pacifist community,” O’Neill said. “We have times that people will stay for a short period of time, we’ve had people stay for years.”
Rider, a home health care and social worker, supports her husband’s actions and often takes part as well, having been arrested similarly for nonviolent civil disobedience throughout the years. She was also raised in the Catholic Faith, and was influenced by being in a military family, born at Marine Corps Base Quantico.
“I think I had a heightened awareness to a lot of these issues. Even at 14 or 15 I was opposed to war,” Rider said. “I could see what it did to the people of Vietnam, and I could see what it did to my father.”
Catholic Workers model their lives after the Works of Mercy from Matthew 25, and O’Neill can also speak at length about the spiritual disciplines and practices of St. Ignatius and mysticism, and notes that preparing to go to jail has a spiritual aspect to it.
Progress Through Sacrifice
“It’s going to be hard for my wife. Taking care of the kids. Jail is just another address for me. I’m going to be lonely in jail. But I’ll make the best of it. That’s what I’ve always done whenever I’ve been in,” he said. “It’s unfortunate that we so easily accept this kind of suffering we impose on others, and it’s done with a cavalier attitude. ‘You get what you deserve’.”
There is a cohesiveness to the stories O’Neill tells from his life. The last work of mercy, to bury the dead, is one that many do not find themselves having to fulfill. During that time in the prison in Atlanta, when many of the Marielitos were suffering depression and away from their families, the suicide rate in the prison was, sadly, higher than usual.
“They were detained because they had no rights, just like the guys in Guantanamo had no rights. You can't go into a court of law and defend your rights. A lot of them were despairing. I supervised over a half dozen burials while I was there,” he said.
Progress Through Prison
This time, the stress of the pandemic is weighing heavily, but O’Neill said he will make the best of it as he always does. A request to not report to prison until after getting a Covid-19 vaccine was denied. His penchant for getting involved, such as with the Marielitos, often results in consequences for him, and he doesn’t count on having any days served for good behavior taken off of his sentence until it's granted.
“Sometimes I get the feeling of ‘Lord take this cup from me’. I wouldn’t mind just going to prison and doing my time, and not finding a cause to have to get involved in again, it just seems like that’s the way the spirit leads me. I kind of go into things kicking and screaming. When there is an issue of injustice involved, I feel like I have to speak up. it’s scary to do that. I’m not going to say it’s easy,” he said.
O’Neill spent the last few days before he’ll travel to Ohio with his large family, and he already has concrete plans to run a book club, starting with Gilead by Marilynne Robinson, and may host a prayer group as well. It certainly wouldn’t be in character for him if he didn’t find someway to be of service while he’s there.
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The Fr. Charles Mulholland Catholic Worker is at 124 Perdue St, Garner NC 27529. Info at https://www.catholicworker.org/communities/houses/nc-garner-charles-mulholland-catholic-worker.html