Last night Jesuit priest and peace activist Father William "Bix" Bichsel died in Tacoma, WA. I was introduced to Bix two weeks ago after mass at St. Leo's parish, where I have been attending services since moving to Tacoma in September, but I had already heard much about him. A Tacoma native, he was one of the founders of Guadalupe House, the Catholic Worker community located just down the street from St. Leo's, and among other things, he participated in a number of acts of civil resistance in the Pacific Northwest and around the world to protest nuclear weapons. In 2011, he served a three-month jail sentence for an action at the Kitsap-Bangor Naval Base near Seattle.

It just so happens that this event is mentioned in an article in the most recent issue of The New Yorker, which is mainly focused on how the actions of Plowshares peace activists, like Bix, have drawn attention to the troubling lack of security at United States nuclear weapons facilities. The article is worth its own blog post, but I'll just quote the bit that mentions Bix:

Although Sister Megan had been arrested between forty and fifty times, this was her first Plowshares action. And it was her idea. It had occurred to her a year and a half earlier, while she was sitting in a Tacoma courtroom, watching the trial of five activists who had broken into Kitsap Naval Base, the home port for more than half of America’s Trident ballistic-missile submarines. During perhaps the worst nuclear-security lapse in the history of the U.S. Navy, Father William (Bix) Bichsel, Father Stephen Kelly, Sister Anne Montgomery, and two others had managed to sneak into the Strategic Weapons Facility Pacific—a storage area containing hundreds of nuclear warheads for Trident missiles. Those warheads don’t have locking mechanisms. If a terrorist group detonated one at Kitsap, it not only would destroy the base and the Trident submarines but could also deposit lethal radioactive fallout on Seattle, about thirty miles to the east. If the group set off conventional explosives close to the warheads, a toxic cloud of plutonium might blanket the city. The Plowshares activists easily cut through Kitsap’s perimeter fence, hiked around the huge base for four hours, ignored all the warning signs, cut through two more fences, and got to within about forty feet of the bunkers where the nuclear warheads are stored. Father Bix was eighty-one at the time. Sister Anne was eighty-three. Having survived two open-heart surgeries, Father Bix brought along his nitroglycerine tablets and paused to take some during the long hike. About twenty marines with automatic weapons stopped the activists, put hoods on them to prevent them from seeing any more of the top-secret facility, and made them lie on the ground for three and a half hours, while the base was searched for other intruders. When someone later said to Bichsel, Please, Father, don’t get into any more trouble, he laughed and replied, “We’re all in trouble.”