If Nuns Ruled the World Read Online Free PDF Page A

in design. Until the mid-1930s it was home to the publishing empire of a gentleman named Chris Whittle. The four-block campus, with its 250,000-square-foot neo-Georgian building, was once the headquarters for Whittle’s nine hundred employees and hub for forty media products, including nineteen magazines and the youth news program Channel One, most famous for giving CNN stalwart Anderson Cooper his first newsanchor job. When Whittle’s empire unraveled and the scraps of the company moved in a reverse carpetbag to New York City, the elaborate campus was sold off to the federal government.
    Sister Megan threw her shoulders back as she strode through the pristine white doors of the courthouse and past a statue of Lady Justice. Scarred by bird feces and wearing an odd Indian headdress, the mistress of the law faces away from the entrance to the Knoxville federal court.
    No one told the nun where she should sit, so she found a practical place in the third row of the courtroom. “When you’re the guest of honor, you get to sit up front,” her attorney, Mr. Lloyd, told her. She hugged him in thanks and he guided her to the defendant’s table by her elbow. Nearly dwarfed by the great piece of furniture, she sat calmly and quietly, placing her two index fingers in a steeple supporting her chin.
    The section for the audience was split into two sides like at a formal wedding, the defense on the right and the prosecution on the left. The right side was filled with gray-haired peace activists who held hands and sang “Peace Is Flowing Like a River” before the start of the proceedings. The prosecution, conservative in their well-tailored suits, glanced sideways at them with thinly masked disdain.
    â€œThe defendants know a lot of people think they’re fools,” Bill Quigley told me when he noted my own sideways glance during the hand-holding and the folk singing. “They know the judge and the prosecutors are looking down on them, but they don’t care. They’re totally at peace with themselves and what they are doing.”
    That day, the defense team argued to dismiss the charges against their clients on the basis of the presumed illegality of nuclear weapons under international law. The prosecution, meanwhile, was just keen to keep any conversation of morality and religion out of their courtroom. They knew the defense would play up the fact that Sister Megan was a nun and they wanted to neutralize it from the start.
    â€œThe whole legal process is trying to muzzle them so they can’t explain what happened. They will be gagged in court and stripped of any meaningful way to have a defense,” Mr. Quigley told me. “The chances of them being convicted will be extremely high . . . even Sister Megan. They want to seem tough enough to justify themselves to other people. Nobody wants to be the one who sentences a nun to die in prison.”
    Sister Megan is resilient, but she is not invincible. Just two months prior to her hearing in Knoxville for the Y-12 incident, she shattered both wrists after tripping over a box in the Washington, DC, office of the group Witness for Peace and had to have surgery on both joints. She circled them, first in one direction, then in the other, as the attorneys argued over what kinds of evidence would be allowed into the courtroom. Their arguments went on for hours, leading nowhere. It would be weeks before Judge C. Clifford Shirley would make any kind of decision, months before it went to trial, and almost a year before a jury would reach a verdict.
    I had planned on staying in a hotel that night, one of the Days Inns littered along the highway, but Sister Megan wouldn’t hear of it. She insisted that I come to a dinner with the group and then stay with one of the peace activists. “You’re one of us now,” she said, clapping me on the back before offering up half her own bed at the home of a woman named Shelly. “I don’t