Documentary News: The Inspiration of Sister Pat McCormick

Happy holidays! December is a busy time for everyone, and I thank you for taking a few moments to read my thoughts and musings. I’m excited to bring you news and interviews from the forthcoming documentary on Rocky Flats. This is a kind and generous time of year and thus no better time to talk about someone I deeply admire and respect: Sister Pat McCormick of the Sisters of Loretto. Pat McCormick lives and represents a level of empathy, spirituality, and dedication to social justice that, to me, is truly humbling and inspirational. I first met Pat years ago and then interviewed her for my book Full Body Burden: Growing Up in the Nuclear Shadow of Rocky Flats. Her life story is remarkable, and her activist work at the Rocky Flats Nuclear Weapons Plant is nothing short of shocking. For the making of the documentary Full Body Burden (release date Summer 2024), I was very fortunate to travel with a film crew to the Sisters of Loretto “mother” facility in Bardstown, Kentucky, where Pat has recently semi-retired from her activist work in Colorado.

Director Nathan Church and filmmaker Alysha Havey. Photo by Kristen Iversen

As I write in Full Body Burden, I grew up just a few miles from the top-secret Rocky Flats Nuclear Weapons Plant, and later, like many of my friends and the parents of my friends, I worked there myself. The pay was good (especially for a young woman in graduate school raising two kids on her own), and the hours were flexible. Little did I know what I was getting into. For nearly forty years Rocky Flats had covertly produced tens of thousands of plutonium pits or triggers for nuclear bombs, each one roughly the size of a flattened half-cantaloupe, resulting in extensive toxic and radioactive contamination in the air, water, and soil. Contaminants included americium, tritium, carbon tetrachloride, and plutonium. (A minuscule particle of plutonium can cause cancer, and with a half-life of 24,100 years, plutonium will be with us for a very long time.) This contamination continued for decades, not just on the plant site but in surrounding neighborhoods, including mine.

No one really knew what went on at Rocky Flats – the Department of Energy and the operators of the plant, particularly Rockwell and Dow Chemical, consistently lied to the public and the press about what the plant was doing. The extraordinary work of activists and journalists not only helped close the plant but brought the truth to light. For the next few weeks, I will be highlighting the stories of some of the remarkable people we interviewed for the film – not just activists but also workers, scientists, attorneys, Daniel Ellsberg, and even the FBI agent who led the raid on Rocky Flats.

Peace activist Pat McCormick began participating in prayer vigils in 1980. Built in 1951, Rocky Flats had begun nuclear bomb production just a year later, but those early years were shrouded in falsehoods and glowing press reports about how many jobs the plant was bringing to the area. Pat’s nondenominational group of Catholic nuns, Mennonites, Methodists, Lutherans, Buddhist monks, and others met every Sunday morning at the west gate until the 1990s, for nearly twenty years.

Pat McCormick at Rocky Flats (archival)

First established in Kentucky in 1813, the Sisters of Loretto is an extraordinary group of nuns working to change the world in positive ways. Pat McCormick, the third of eleven children, grew up on a farm northwest of Chicago. She attended public schools until high school, when her parents helped pay for a bus that took her to Catholic high school. That’s where she first met the Sisters of Loretto, and she was impressed with how much they cared about students, education, and social justice. The sisters were not supported directly by the Catholic Church but supported themselves through teaching and other work. When Pat finished high school, she became a Sister of Loretto.

Pat’s work with Rocky Flats begins in La Paz, Bolivia. While training at a culture and language school in Voca, Mexico, she meets Daniel Berrigan, the pacifist Jesuit priest from Boston who had been exiled by the Catholic church for protesting the Vietnam War. Berrigan shares with Pat his thoughts on peacemaking, nuclear weapons, and war, and this work becomes the focus of Pat’s life and work. She returns to Denver and in 1980 her work at Rocky Flats begins. Each Sunday nearly a hundred people show up at the west entrance of the plant to pray for peace and oppose nuclear weapons, armed with signs, songs, and thermoses of hot coffee, despite being harassed with shouts and insults from passing drivers (including “get a job!”). Pat takes a job as a trained nurse aid on the surgical floor at Swedish hospital, among colleagues who support her peace work. “If I don’t show up for work on Monday,” she warns, “it means I have been arrested.”

Pat McCormick, Photo by Nathan Church

In 1981, two friends of Pat’s, Sister Marie Nord of the Order of St. Francis and Sister Pat Mahoney of the Blessed Virgin Mary, plan a bold move at Rocky Flats, a site secured by armed guards, tanks, and constant surveillance. They create fake security badges and decide to try to enter the plant to stage a protest. During the morning shift, on the east side of the plant, they join the line of workers’ cars and flash their badges at the guard. He waves them through. The women drive directly to the plutonium production area, the heart of the plant, and hang a protest sign on the fence. They are emotionally prepared when armed security guards show up, and the women are arrested and later convicted of a felony for falsification of documents.

During the year Sister Pat Mahoney and Sister Marie Nord spend in federal prison, Pat McCormick writes and visits. It’s not long before she begins to think of a plan to enter the gates herself for a nonviolent act of protest, and with the help of a Mennonite friend and a group at the Catholic Worker soup kitchen, the plan begins to take shape. The day they choose for the event is befittingly Ash Wednesday, and Pat’s act of repentance and prayer for the religious holiday will be to enter the heart of the Rocky Flats production facility.

Thank you for reading! To continue reading about Pat McCormick’s extraordinary act of protest at Rocky Flats, as well as the stories of others we have interviewed for the forthcoming documentary Full Body Burden (including workers, attorneys, local residents, scientists, and others), please consider upgrading to a premium subscription for a full year and enjoy a special 50% discount.

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