A Talk With Sister Elizabeth

Among those indicted is Sister Elizabeth Me A lister, 31, a cheery, impulsive New Yorker, who took her vows in 1966 as a member of the order of the Religious of the Sacred Heart of Mary. Sister Elizabeth has been an art-history teacher at Marymount College in Tarry town, N.Y. Last week she talked with TIME Correspondent Robert Anson about her life, the peace movement and the charges against her:

CALL her Liz, she asked, or Sister Elizabeth, anything but Sister Lizzie, which everyone calls her, and makes her sound so young. Her father, a prosperous contractor who is now dead, and her mother came from Ireland in the early '20s; she was a twin in a family of nine. There is scant sympathy at home for her work in the peace movement. When her youngest brother brought the bail money to free her last week, he told her that the family thought that she had probably done everything the Government charged her with "and a lot more things."

As a young Marymount instructor, Sister Elizabeth was assigned the task of maintaining the college's current events bulletin board. The daily headlines she tacked up became talismans on her private path toward pacifism. "By 1964 I was going to New York City once a month for some kind of meeting or demonstration," she recalls. In September of that year, Dan Berrigan came to Marymount to say Mass and speak; for Elizabeth, he was revelatory. "What Dan was saying very beautifully was what I had been thinking and never been able to articulate." She did not meet him until 1966, when she was introduced by her provincial superior. "Dan was always somebody at a distance," says Sister Elizabeth. "Phil was an easy man to know and like. He always starts talking to you at precisely the point where he ended his last conversation."

Her radicalism deepened. "I just started feeling that our Government wasn't giving us the truth, that it was saying things to justify our being in Viet Nam that seemed to me to be wrong." She came to believe that "people have to take responsibility for their Government and what it does. Change is only going to be accomplished by bringing people to the point of consciousness that they change their own lives." -

Was there a plot as charged? "I'm not going to answer that." Then consider a theoretical question. What if all the nonviolent tactics had been exhausted and none of them worked and the only way things were going to change was through violence? Could she approve of that? "I can't answer. That is going too close to the heart of the matter." She is determined not to discuss the trial, not even to deny her guilt, until she has seen and talked to the other defendants. "The group is involved. We are responsible for one another. It is a Spartacist thing." She explains that in the film Spartacus, the Romans demand of the captured rebels that Spartacus identify himself, and one by one every man in the group stands and replies, "I am Spartacus."

There seems something very Irish in all of this--the priests and nuns, the faith, the romance, the ineptitude of the plot (if there was one) and, of course, the familiar informer. "I don't know about the last," she says. "I mean, we don't know for certain. Given my whole philosophy, how could I operate if I didn't trust people? How could I live in the movement?" And a final musing: "I guess Phil would say that unless we are willing to go to jail for our ideas, they aren't worth having. I don't know whether I can say that quite yet."

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