Sister Megan Rice: The Outlaw Nun Turned Folk Hero

Beth Greenfield, Shine Staff

The world watched with intrigue this week as no-nukes nun Megan Rice, 84, was sent to the slammer — sentenced to 35 months in prison for breaking into a Tennessee nuclear-defense facility, spray painting it with peace signs and splashing it with human blood. When guards confronted Rice (along with her two male accomplices) back in 2012, she began singing and then offered him food. And on Tuesday, while being sentenced in federal court in Knoxville, she asked the judge for even more time behind bars. “Please have no leniency with me,” she said. “To remain in prison for the rest of my life would be the greatest gift you could give me.”

There’s no doubt that Rice is dedicated and fearless. But who is she? And where did she come from?

The answer to that second question may not be all that surprising: Manhattan. She was born there in 1930, raised by her father, an obstetrician, and her mother, who received her doctorate from Columbia University and was ahead of her time in many ways, including by being outspokenly in support of interracial marriage.

Rice went to Catholic schools and became a nun at 18, also receiving biology degrees from Villanova and Boston College, and eventually becoming an anti-nuclear activist. “It’s the criminality of this 70-year industry,” she told the New York Times in 2012. “We spend more on nuclear arms than on the departments of education, health, transportation, disaster relief and a number of other government agencies that I can’t remember.”

Other facts to know about Rice:

  • She served her order by teaching school in Nigeria and Ghana on and off from 1962 to 2004, sometimes sleeping in a classroom and living with no electricity or plumbing, and experiencing bouts of both malaria and typhoid.

  • She began joining in antinuclear protests in the 1980s, visiting the Nevada test site for prayer vigils, oftentimes with her mother.

  • She’s been arrested “40 or 50 times” for civil disobedience, and she’s also an ex-con, having served six months in prison for protesting at a now-defunct army school that had ties to human-rights abuses.

  • In 2005, she joined Nevada Desert Experience, a spiritual anti-nuclear activist group, before the actions that led to her 2012 arrest.

Though Rice may be rare in her extreme level of dedication to her cause, she’s far from the only radical nun out there—which might surprise anyone whose knowledge of sisters begins with Maria and ends with Deloris Wilson. “We are the risk takers in the church. We are down there with the people—we know what the needs are,” Sister of Mercy Lillian Murphy says in the 2012 documentary “Band of Sisters,” which tells the story of a dozen modern-day nuns—who are organic farmers, peace activists, environmental attorneys and more—and their dedication to social service.

Others recent examples in the long line of prominent activist nuns include the Spanish feminist writer and public-health advocate Sister Teresa Forcades, known for her criticisms of the pharmaceutical industry; gay-rights proponent Sister Jeannine Gramick; Sister Helen Prejean, the anti-death-penalty advocate famously portrayed by Susan Sarandon; and the Sisters of Loretto, nicknamed the “anti-fracking nuns” by Slate for their protesting of the Bluegrass Pipeline in Kentucky.

“Pope John 23rd said we had to reexamine who we were as the church,” Sister Miriam Therese MacGillis notes in the “Band of Sisters” documentary, “and get back to the core of the teachings of Jesus, which were about compassion and justice.”

As for Rice, who had faced the possibility of 30 years behind bars before this week’s sentencing, she says she looks forward to being able to serve her fellow inmates.