Fr. Louis Vitale, presente!

There are people who were always there.

Friar Louie Vitale OFM (1932-2023) was one of them, for decades he was a tireless campaigner for more love, more justice, more peace. Here he's handcuffed before being led away from the old Federal Building where he was part of a group that lay down in front of the doors to protest the U.S. war on Iraq in 2006.

Non-violent activist Ken Butigan catalogued some of Fr. Louie's works of justice and peace:

... a Franciscan priest, past provincial of the St. Barbara Province of the Franciscan order, co-founder of the Nevada Desert Experience, which worked with other organizations to successfully end U.S. nuclear weapons testing, founder of the Gubbio Project ... and a co-founder of Pace e Bene Nonviolence Service.

... He spent long stints in prison for nonviolent resistance to torture and war-making.  For thirteen years he was the pastor of St. Boniface Catholic Church in a low-income neighborhood in San Francisco, where he was actively involved with Religious Witness with Homeless People, an interfaith campaign challenging poverty and government policies of harassment against poor and homeless people. All of this and much more found its way into a graduate course entitled “Liberating Nonviolence” we team-taught a dozen times at the Franciscan School of Theology, mentoring the next generation of peacemakers.

... In the wake of the heady days of the Second Vatican Council, Vitale was seized by the conviction that the work for peace and justice was central to the identity of Christians. This in itself was not unique.  In the wake of Vatican II a growing number of Catholic clergy, women religious, and laity drew a similar conclusion and began to transform an insular church that had often supported social structures that reinforced injustice and war into a community prophetically seeking change.  What set Vitale and a relative handful of others apart were not their theological conversion but how they put it into practice. 

Louie lent himself to more mundane progressive causes -- though perhaps preserving Social Security might be a profound work of mercy in the US context. Here he stands with the then-head of the San Francisco Labor Council in 2010.

We might not see his like again.