Some historical and global examples of tax resistance →
religious groups and the religious perspective →
Catholic churches →
John “Jack” O’Malley
Around the middle of April as the federal income tax filing deadline
approaches, tax resistance articles hit the media frequently. Here are some
examples from past years:
A post-tax-day wrap-up quotes war tax resister Ed Hedemann, and also Jack O’Malley, one of three Catholic priests in Pittsburgh who were refusing to pay war taxes.
A news report on tax day protests includes a mention of “Seven Pittsburgh priests [who] will refuse to pay about a third of their federal income taxes in a protest against the nuclear arms race” and of war tax resister Ralph Dull, who “drove a truck filled with 325 bushels of corn to the IRS office in Dayton” in lieu of cash payment.
Bill Ramsey, Jenny Truax, Rebekah Hassler, Tom & Suzanne Makarewicz, and Mary Loehr mentioned and/or quoted.
Here are some excerpts from The Catholic News Archive concerning tax resistance, from sources other than Catholic Worker, from the span:
First, a typed news dispatch from “M. Massiani,” Paris Correspondent for the National Catholic Welfare Council (U.S.) News Service, dated :
Priests and People of Vendee, France, Protest Tax on Christian Schools and Refusal of State Aid
Paris, . —
A delegation of 20,000 citizens from various parts of the Department of Vendee, one of the most Catholic regions of France, appeared in the town of La Roche-sur-Yon, where a number of priests were on trial for refusing to pay a tax exacted on entertainments and theatrical productions given to aid in supporting the free Christian schools of the Department.
A large group of priests and directors of Christian schools purposely decided to refuse payment of this tax and made public announcement of the decision in order to protest what is regarded by the people of the Vendee as a highly inequitable situation; the state taxing the people to support unneeded public schools, refusing to grant a subsidy to aid in maintaining the Christian schools, and at the same time taxing entertainments held to raise money for support of the Christian schools.
It is pointed out that in Vendee public schools are practically empty. The Christian schools, on the other hand, are educating the vast majority of the children of the region, saving the state more than 200 million francs in school taxes annually.
Yet whenever Catholics hold a festival to raise funds for support of their schools, the state intervenes to collect part of the receipts.
It is hoped that in refusing to pay this tax, public attention will be called to the injustice and the need of a state subsidy to help support the Christian schools, such as is granted in other countries, including Belgium and Holland.
Bishop Antoine Cazaux of Lucon, who went to La Roche-sur-Yon to testify in behalf of the defendants, stated that his priests are neither rebels nor evaders, and that the court, in order to judge equitably, should take into consideration the unjust situation that exists with regard to education.
Many thousands of people were in the streets outside the courtroom.
Decisions were rendered in only two of the cases, the defendants being acquitted on procedural grounds.
The other cases were postponed. The action of the court caused anti-religious groups and newspapers, particularly in Paris, to demand that new suits be instituted and that the law be applied with severity.
In the Diocese of Lucon, two-thirds of the children attend the 461 primary religious schools. In six large districts, 13,757 children out of 15,183 are enrolled at the Christian schools.
In two other districts, the number of pupils in the public schools is only three per cent of the total.
In 41 settlements in the Department, with a population of 40,000, there are no public schools.
A National Catholic Reporter editorial (signed by editor Robert C.
Hoyt) in the issue recommended that men refuse military service, concluding that in Vietnam, “we are killing people and destroying a culture without adequate justification, without a rationale that meets the minimum requirements of morality.
That imposes obligations on all of us.
We believe that anyone who despairs of a political solution has a right and duty to search for more effective ways, including civil disobedience and tax refusal.
We have a responsibility to the rest of the world, to history, to God that nobody else can bear.”
In its issue, that paper published a lengthy article on the war tax resistance movement:
Protesters turn to taxes to fight against the war
By Gary MacEoin
Special to the National Catholic Reporter, NEW YORK—
Protesters against the Vietnam war are turning to the withholding of taxes as a way of fighting against the war.
A national campaign against the payment of taxes used for the war is being organized and its goal is to involve “tens and perhaps hundreds of thousands of people in conscientious tax refusal.”
The campaign is spearheaded by the War Tax Resistance, an organization founded which draws support from a broad spectrum of pacifist groups.
Its headquarters is in New York and it has offices in Philadelphia and Chicago.
Resistance spokesmen say they hope to have “at least a phone, an address and a contact person” in each of the principal 50 to 100 cities in the nation by .
Groups organized around such regional centers are to focus their tax resistance efforts on demonstrations on and .
“We picked the date more or less arbitrarily,” said Bradford Lyttle, clean-shaven and soft-spoken coordinator of War Tax Resistance.
“That’s about the time that thousands of accountants all over the country hang out signs offering to help prepare tax returns.
We want to provide an option for those who want not to pay.”
The choice of is more obvious, he said.
“It is both the final day for filing tax returns and the start of the Spring offensive of the demonstrations against the war in Vietnam.”
Lyttle, 42, works out of an office in Lower Manhattan (339 Lafayette Street).
It is also the home of the New York GI Coffeehouse, the Jewish Peace Fellowship, the Catholic Peace Fellowship, the War Resisters League, Win magazine (hippie-pacifist), and Liberation magazine (David Dellinger’s voice).
Between them, they occupy the two top floors of a three-story cold-water walk-up not far from the Catholic Worker.
Organized resistance to paying war taxes is not new, dating from , Lyttle said.
The War Tax Resistance is trying to give the idea broader appeal by modifying the totally pacifist position that its forerunners had adopted.
Lyttle, who himself is a pacifist, said the new approach was developed by a New York teacher, Norma Becker, who recruited a group of sponsors which included Joan Baez, Noam Chomsky, Tom Cornell, Dorothy Day, Dave Dellinger, Allen Ginsberg, Stewart and Charlotte Meacham, Grace Paley and Dr. Benjamin Spock.
“The result,” says Bradford Lyttle, “was a new emphasis.
Instead of stressing the total pacifist tradition as the others had done, we decided to concentrate on two more immediate and obvious reasons:
the horrors of the war in Vietnam, and the misuse of the taxpayers’ money by the government to the extent that it was neglecting national priorities.
“And instead of calling on sympathizers to pay no taxes whatever, we appealed to them to make a token withholding, if only $5, without of course ceasing to urge those who had the moral courage to go further.”
War Tax Resisters chose as their prime targets the 10 per cent surtax and the 10 per cent federal excise tax on telephone service — two taxes more clearly linked to Vietnam than any others.
Both War Tax Resistance and other organizations distribute literature explaining the various ways — some legal, some doubtful, some illegal — for nonpayment of federal taxes.
The first War Tax Resistance leaflet was prepared for the antiwar demonstration in Washington, D.C., , and 10,000 copies were handed out there.
“The act of war tax resistance creates a confrontation between the government and the conscience of the citizens,” this pamphlet states.
“We believe that the right of conscientious objection to war belongs to all people, not just to those of draft age…
Do whatever makes sense to your conscience. But do it.”
Among the ways to avoid paying taxes, the first is to earn an income so low as not to be taxable.
This means for the single person under 65, an earned income of less than $900 annually.
Yet a considerable number of pacifists choose this method.
Another form of protest is to refuse to pay the percentage of the tax that goes for war.
More than two-thirds of the federal budget pays for wars, past, present and future.
This is the amount some withhold.
Others refuse to pay the proportion of the federal budget (23 per cent) directly allocated to Vietnam, while others hold back a token amount.
According to Internal Revenue Service figures, 73 million Americans paid their income taxes in full , while 1,025 refused to pay all or part in protest against the Vietnam war.
The 1,025 protesters was an increase from 592 .
IRS counted 10,511 cases of refusal to pay the telephone tax in , down from 14,396 in .
Several factors combine to make the telephone tax the attractive target it has become.
For one thing, the American Telephone and Telegraph Co. has handled the situation with kid gloves.
So long as the protester makes it clear to the company with each payment that the amount withheld is the tax portion, it will not cut off a phone.
Printed forms are made available by the resistance groups to facilitate this notification.
What the telephone company does is simply to report to IRS the fact of nonpayment and the amount.
IRS also is anxious to keep the situation as cool as possible, but it wants at the same time to maintain whatever pressure is necessary to dissuade the hesitant from joining the movement.
Back in 1967, the first step was to send the defaulter a “notice of preliminary assessment” which enabled him to demand a hearing.
Because of the number of cases involved and the small amount in each, the IRS quickly eliminated this step and moved immediately to Form 17-A or some other “notice of final assessment.”
This notice contains a threat to seize property to collect a debt.
Ralph Di Gia of War Resisters League is one who has been through this process several times.
Early in , for example, the IRS computer at Andover, Mass., sent him Form 17 demanding payment of $2.25 owed as telephone tax.
Next a New York agent wrote him, then called on him in his New York office.
After checking with Di Gia’s landlord and the building superintendent to establish his political views, the agent tried to place a lien on his salary at the War Resisters League, but the League refused to cooperate.
After another confrontation with Di Gia, which merely established that it was “the principle,” not the $2.25, that was at issue on both sides, the agent located Di Gia’s bank account and collected the $2.25 plus 6 per cent interest.
Under the IRS code, it can take money from a bank account without a court order in payment of taxes due by the account holder.
Apparently the discovered account was then fed into the computer, because another section of IRS moved quickly to seize the entire balance in payment of income tax.
And as of , the IRS located a savings account recently opened by Di Gia in another bank and collected yet another telephone tax bill.
But Di Gia insists that he doesn’t mind.
“The issue isn’t withholding money from the government,” he says.
“They’re going to get it ultimately.
But I made a few collection agents think about what their job’s about, and now IRS is going to have to realize that there are people who aren’t afraid to resist.
They got the tax, but they had to come and get it, like when the agents had to go to the fields in France for collection.”
Unpaid taxes, whether telephone or income, can result not only in seizure from a bank account but also a lien on salary or the attachment and sale by auction of some property, usually an automobile.
In addition, some banks make a service charge — as high as $10, reportedly each time a lien is placed on an account, and the resisters suspect that IRS is pressuring banks to do this as a deterrent.
Such a fee every month would make telephone tax refusal impractical for most people.
But actually, the load on the IRS is such that it usually moves against any given individual only at much longer intervals.
Everyone who refuses to pay any taxes he owes is actually exposing himself to heavy penalties, and the resistance literature spells out this danger very openly.
Simple “willful failure to pay” is punishable by fine up to $10,000 and a year in jail, plus the cost of prosecution.
Similar or greater penalties are available for a variety of related offenses.
Although the offense of counseling or urging others not to pay taxes would seem greater than the simple act of withholding, the law on this point is somewhat ambiguous and apparently has never been tested in the courts.
There are few, if any, cases of conscientious tax refusers being jailed for not paying taxes or filing returns.
Most of the small number of cases on record have resulted from related non-cooperation with the courts, such as ignoring a court order to disclose financial records.
In addition, it would appear that prosecutions have been initiated by local collectors who did not first check with headquarters.
Current IRS policy on this issue apparently stops short of court action.
The most distinguished American to go to jail for refusal to pay taxes was Henry David Thoreau, the essayist, poet and naturalist.
He spent only one night in confinement, because a neighbor paid the tax, but the experience inspired his essay on Civil Disobedience, espousing the doctrine of passive resistance.
It deeply influenced Gandhi and has become the bible of the resistance movement.
One passage is found to be particularly relevant by today’s resisters:
“When… a whole country is unjustly overrun and conquered by a foreign army, and subjected to military law, I think that it is not too soon for honest men to rebel and revolutionize.
What makes this duty the more urgent is the fact that the Country to overrun is not our own, but ours is the invading army.”
The reference is to the Mexican War of .
About half a dozen have been jailed in the past 20 years.
Juanita Nelson was arrested in Philadelphia in , threatened with a year in jail and $1,000 fine if she did not disclose certain financial information, but in fact was held only some hours.
Maurice McCrackin, arrested in Cincinnati in , was given a mental test, imprisoned “indefinitely” on a contempt charge, then sentenced to six months and a $250 fine.
James Otsuka got 90 days and a $140 fine in Indianapolis, in .
Eroseanna Robinson, sentenced to a year and a day in Chicago in , was released unconditionally after 93 days.
Walter Gormley got 7 days in Cedar Rapids in .
And in the first such imprisonment in several years, Neil Haworth of New London, Conn., got 60 days in for refusal to produce records.
He had served six months in for “committing civil disobedience at a missile site” near Omaha.
And in , he was a crew member of Everyman Ⅲ, a boat which sailed to Leningrad to protest the Russian nuclear tests.
Those who have refused to pay federal taxes and have got away with it include the Catholic Worker settlement houses and the settlement house of the New England Committee for Non-Violent Action.
“We pay local taxes,” says Dorothy Day of the Catholic Worker, “and we let the IRS people examine our records, but we pay them nothing.”
The New England group says that IRS has spent thousands of dollars going through their bills and receipts, without collecting a penny.
War Tax Resistance is now urging citizens “to sue the government to refund all your taxes on the grounds that the taxes have been used for illegal and immoral purposes.”
The main value of such suits to date has been the publicity.
Professor Donald Kalish, chairman of the philosophy department at UCLA, filed a suit to recover his telephone tax but it was dismissed by the District Court.
He appealed, and the appellate court has agreed to hear his appeal.
The most important case to date is that of Walter C. Pietsch, of Rego Park, N.Y., a 33-year-old administrative employee in a hospital.
Last year, he instituted “a class action” for an injunction to enjoin IRS from collecting the 10 per cent surtax and all other taxes used to propagate the war, and also for a declaration that the Vietnam war was unconstitutional.
A class action, if successful, would provide the same remedy for all taxpayers.
Pietsch, who served in Korea, “is not against all wars, just this one.”
The surtax he withheld was $190.84.
“The amount is insignificant,” he said, “It’s the principle I’m fighting for.”
After a preliminary hearing in the Brooklyn federal district court on , written arguments were submitted on , and on the case was dismissed on a motion by the defendants.
An appeal was filed immediately.
Although the Vietnam war is the direct issue on which tax resisters are concentrating, many of them insist that the campaign has escalated into something much bigger — the war mentality behind much of United States foreign policy.
“Maybe it’s a hang-up,” says Ted Webster, administrator of the Roxbury War Tax Scholarship fund, “but I personally have a great feeling of urgency, it seems the logic behind bombing North Vietnam can be so easily applied to China.
The influence of the Pentagon on policy, and the political expediency of yielding to it seems so obvious, I see the need to rapidly escalate resistance, or there will be a greatly expanded war — maybe with China — within one to three years.”
Another National Catholic Reporter article, from the issue, asked “In the name of God, how did Milwaukeeans get so radical?” A section of it covered tax resisters:
One area in which a number of community members are discussing is tax resistance.
Some say they have claimed as many exemptions as were needed to keep from paying any federal taxes used to finance the war.
[Richard W.] Zipfel, who is defense committee chairman for the Chicago 15, Feit and Father Robert W. Dundon, a Jesuit, have sent a letter to the Wisconsin Telephone Co. stating they are refusing to pay the federal telephone tax on their phone bills because “we can no longer tolerate our nation spending more than $75 billion on the military while our cities die.”
The letter, dated , added that “even if the present war ended, our policies would quickly create another Vietnam.”
Their resistance gesture is significant, they said, because the tax was argued through Congress as a specifically Vietnam war tax.
They have reserved a reply from the utility saying their letter was being forwarded to the government.
“I do believe in the legitimacy of the magistrates,” [Michael] Cullen said.
“In paying property taxes, I believe in the state.
“I’ll render unto Caesar what is Caesar’s, but when Caesar decides to take what is God’s, or if Caesar decides to look like God or act like God, I won’t render to Caesar.
“You only render to what is legitimate and what is human, and what is for the common good.
War destroys humans.”
Milwaukee’s Casa Maria Catholic Worker House still looks to be something like a hotbed of war tax resistance, at least relative to the current national lull.
Lincoln Rice of Casa Maria is the current NWTRCC coordinator.
I recognize the names of war tax resisters Roberta Thurstin and Don Timmerman among their volunteers as well.
From the Pittsburgh Catholic, :
Five say they won’t pay taxes
Five local clergymen handed in their income tax forms at the Federal Bldg. downtown on with the announcement they were withholding a portion in protest to the Vietnam War.
Joining them in the protest at the Internal Revenue Office there were several dozen local lay members of War Tax Resistance, an organization whose members carried out withholding actions in a number of cities , the last day for filing income tax returns.
It is headquartered locally at 3601 Blvd. of the Allies.
The clergymen issued a statement denouncing the Vietnam war as immoral and stating other means of protest had been futile.
“Now we must do more than talk.
The time is now that we must act,” they said.
They included three priests active in civil rights causes here: Fr. Donald C. Fisher of St. Francis de Sales, McKees Rocks; Fr. Donald W. McIlvane, St. Richard’s, Hill District; and Fr. John O’Malley of St. Joseph’s, Manchester.
Also taking part was Fr. Bernard Survil of St. Hedwig in Smock, Greensburg Diocese.
Protestant clergy included Rev. Oscar L. Arnall, a Lutheran, Rev. Thomas Whitcroft, an Episcopalian, and Rev. William S. Richard, a Presbyterian, signed the statement but weren’t present.
The clergymen announced they were withholding 25 per cent of their income tax, the proportion of the national tax that is estimated goes for the Vietnam war, they said.
Some said they would pay the money into local community action programs suffering because of the amounts given to the Vietnam war.
“We are conscious of our obligation to pay taxes, but we are equally conscious of our obligation before God to refuse to cooperate with evil,” the clergymen said.
The National Catholic Reporter, in its issue, printed the following letter from Robert Calvert of War Tax Resistance:
Tax resisters suggest: “Stop paying for it”
To The Editors:
Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos… young people by the hundreds of thousands are rebelling in disgust and anger against the squandering of lives and resources in an immoral and illegal war.
They are risking their freedom, careers and often their lives to protest and resist what they see to be wrong.
We, as participants in war tax resistance, are resolved to confront our own complicity in war, waste and callousness.
We resolve to end to the extent possible our cooperation in a federal tax program geared to death more than life.
For every dollar which the administration expects to spend in , 64.8 per cent will go for wars — past, present and future.
Of this amount, 48.4 per cent will go for current military expenditures, including Vietnam.
(The administration has not revealed the exact costs of the Indochina war.)
Another 17 per cent will go to health, education and welfare; 18.2 per cent for other expenditures.
The deadline for paying income taxes is close, .
Many who read this letter will owe the federal government money. Don’t pay.
War tax resistance is being supported by numerous civil rights, anti-poverty and peace organizations in our call to help end the war by widespread tax refusal.
Widespread tax refusal does more than force the government to spend much money to try to collect unpaid taxes.
It confronts the government with the political fact of massive non-cooperation with its war-making policies.
We need to dramatize war tax resistance and to expand it from an act of individual conscience to a nationwide demonstration of collective civil disobedience.
On , the People’s Coalition for Peace and Justice — which includes such groups as the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, the National Welfare Rights organization, the American Friends Service committee and the Fellowship of Resistance — is calling for a nationwide “Tribute in Action to Martin Luther King.”
The theme is “Freedom from Hunger, War and Oppression”; the event will be observed by hunger marches, fasts, teachins, demonstrations and religious services.
War tax resisters will relate to these events in a real way.
We are asking people to refuse to pay $10 to $50 or more of their federal income taxes, and to publicly turn this money over to a local community group on .
We will thus take our tax money out of the hands of the government and put it into the hands of the people.
If we work hard thousands of dollars can be rechanneled to the people.
We can not wait for the government to change priorities. We must change them ourselves.
Find out what actions are being planned in your city or region and build a demonstration dramatizing the transfer of funds to useful community programs.
A possible action: Rally at the IRS office where people put their tax money into a container of some sort.
The money is then carried to the main event and is turned over to the designated local community group.
There also will be actions at Internal Revenue Service offices across the country on .
We will publicly submit our 1040 forms to the IRS with all or part of our taxes deducted.
This is a simple action and serves as an extension of the observance.
If no action appears to be under way in your community, contact the nearest war tax resistance center or the People’s Coalition office (1029 Vermont avenue, Washington, D.C.).
Information about the WTR center nearest you, and about other forms of tax resistance, may be obtained from War Tax Resistance, 339 Lafayette street, New York, N.Y. 10012; telephone (212) 477‒2970.
Thousands are already engaged in these acts of peaceful, conscientious civil disobedience.
If you engage in any of the above acts of civil disobedience we strongly urge you to write a letter to the IRS setting forth the reasons for the steps you have taken.
Keep a copy.
Although there is a penalty for openly refusing to pay federal taxes (Section 7203 of the Internal Revenue Code — a fine of up to $10,000 and up to a year in jail, plus the costs of prosecutions) no war tax resisters have been prosecuted under this law.
The only war tax resisters arrested have been those who have filed “fraudulent” W-4 forms, refused to file any income tax form, refused to present financial statements to the courts when ordered to do so.
There have been prosecutions and convictions based on Section 7203 but none for openly refusing to pay for conscientious reasons, as far as we know.
We invite all Americans to join us in some form of war tax refusal.
We must now take a stand by refusing to support the governments destructive policies with our bodies, our skills and our money.
Robert Calvert
New York, N.Y.
Editor’s note: The writer is a member of the Working Committee of WTR.
Among sponsors of the organization are Dorothy Day, Joan Baez, David Dellinger, Arthur and Cathy Melville, the Rev. Richard J. Neuhaus, Rabbi Michael A. Robinson, Noam Chomsky, Peter Seeger and Theodore Roszak.
An op-ed from Eugene C. Bianchi, in the National Catholic Reporter:
“Maybe next year…”
To resist or not to resist
Two TV tableaus recently jarred me into fresh appreciation of how my tax money fosters the insanity of Vietnam.
In one film, helicopter gunships swooped down on a truck convoy; thousands of rounds of computer-directed cannon fire pierced the night.
There goes at least one year’s withholding tax, I thought.
But the commentator saw this military exercise as a demonstration of admirable killing efficiency.
It was so orderly and precise; nothing out of place, except perhaps some Vietnamese flesh and bone.
The second scene showed men carefully loading bombs into B52s.
The calm reporter noted how effectively these marvels of American know-how worked.
The big bombs tore open huge craters and sent waves of damaging concussion.
The antipersonnel bombs spewed thousands of body-ripping nails.
As I viewed the distant puffs of smoke, I mused about how many income tax returns it took to accomplish such a feat.
It’s appalling how resigned we are to this insane use of our financial resources.
Yet my and your tax money is closely related to the terrible statistic from the Kennedy subcommittee about 325,000 Indochinese, civilian deaths in recent years.
Many more are maimed and driven from their homes.
When I drop that IRS envelope through the red and blue bomb bay of the mail box, I wonder how many sad faces I’ve put behind the fences of relocation camps, how many children I’ve separated from parents.
If Mr. Nixon is a prime candidate for war crimes according to the Nuremberg principles, we have all in some degree had our hands on the tax trigger.
Yet my courage rarely equals my insights.
I also tell myself that some tax money goes for good causes.
But the spirit of Ammon Hennacy, that holy maverick against war, won’t let me be content with such dodges.
The whole Catholic Worker crowd stares up at me from their penny paper.
I finally summon up the mouselike courage of refusing to pay the telephone war tax.
At least that will cost the government more in time and bother than they’ll eventually get from me.
Maybe next year around income tax time, I’ll be brave enough to risk other concrete gestures.
The words of Thoreau won’t go away:
“If a thousand men were not to pay their tax bill this year, that would not be a violent and bloody measure as it would be to pay them and enable the State to commit violence and shed innocent blood.”
War tax resistance, though only a small act before the mighty state, could have broad effects if it became more widespread.
It has the educational effect of conviction in action.
Such tax resistance is illegal; but the war, by an ever-growing consensus, is enormously more illegal and immoral.
Even token refusal to pay war taxes confronts the government with a concrete statement about its brutal policies.
Tax resistance also awakens conscience to active non-complicity, to a new level of sensibility.
For the situation is overwhelmingly clear: Tax money can be as killing as the weaponry it buys.
Since some risk is involved in tax resistance, it is worth reading a brochure or two about it.
These can be easily obtained from a number of peace action groups, such as the War Tax Resistance (339 Lafayette St., New York 10012; or War Resisters League-West, 833 Haight St., San Francisco 94117).
A Catholic group, Ammon’s Tax Associates (Box 1744, Indianapolis, Ind. 46204) is striving to awaken church institutions to their responsibilities for supporting conscientious tax resisters, as an extension of the church’s respect for conscientious objectors.
Perhaps the American church will end its complicity of silence with the warmakers when enough of us try to stop our own complicity in war taxes.
Today, some excerpts from The Catholic News Archive concerning tax resistance in .
First, from the Catholic Worker:
“Peacemaker” Refuses Taxes
By Ernest Bromley et al.
The federal government’s Internal Revenue Service on began proceedings against Gano Peacemakers, Inc. and against Ernest and Marion Bromley for taxes and penalties amounting to over $30,000, for .
The address for both is 10206 Sylvan Ave., Cincinnati, Ohio.
The locality is on the map as Gano.
As many people are aware, Gano Peacemakers, Inc. is a nonprofit corporation established by the Bromleys and others soon after they went to Gano as a community in .
It has held property, but has never operated a program, had any income from work or contributions, or had a treasury.
In , the mailing address of the Movement of Peacemakers, together with its organ, The Peacemaker, was brought to Gano, as Ernest Bromley had accepted responsibility for circulation and editing.
The Peacemaker files were brought from Yellow Springs, the financial records were brought from the former business address in Cleveland, and the sharing fund from Oberlin.
As is well known by all volunteers who have kept the records and everyone close to the Peacemaker Movement, The Peacemaker finances have continued entirely apart from the finances of the people at the house in Gano.
False Information
IRS arrived at this figure through the assertion that the Peacemaker Movement and its organ, The Peacemaker, housed at that address, are synonymous with Gano Peacemakers, Inc., which holds title to the house where the Bromleys live.
The erroneous claim, expressed in notations and figures on numerous IRS forms, is that the finances of the Peacemaker Movement are one and the same as the corporation holding title to the property.
Figures on these forms claim that all subscriptions to The Peacemaker and contributions to the Movement are income to Gano Peacemakers, Inc.
These IRS tables and figures, received at the house in Gano, go so far as to assert that all recipients of checks from The Peacemaker bank account are employees of Gano Peacemakers, Inc., and assessments are listed for FUTA, FICA and payroll income tax which they claim Peacemakers should have withheld from all those receiving checks.
People said to be employees are named in the documents; most are the families of imprisoned war objectors who received monthly checks for their period of need.
Apparently, IRS took these from copies of canceled checks kept by the Farmers and Citizens Bank, Trotwood, Ohio.
Whether IRS has made this move with the calculated intention of disrupting and diminishing the Peacemaker Movement and The Peacemaker is, of course, not known.
It should be stated that the Bromleys and others who refuse taxes for war have consistently refused to give IRS any information—partly because they wanted to make collection as difficult as possible, even though the amount might be very small—and partly because they wanted to offer total noncooperation with the machinery of a racist and murdering government apparatus.
Having gathered information which is totally-false as the basis for a claim, IRS should not be permitted to proceed in ignorance of the total misrepresentation they have made with regard to activities at Gano.
If IRS does proceed on the basis it has claimed, no assets called Peacemaker will be immune to its seizure at any time, be it a checking account where subscriptions are deposited or funds contributed for aid to imprisoned war objectors’ families.
Anything considered to be the Movement’s can be grabbed.
If that should happen, Peacemaker would find other ways to continue to communicate with each other and meet their obligations to families of imprisoned war objectors.
Claim Against the Bromleys
Ernest and Marion Bromley’s nonpayment of taxes for war antedates the founding of Peacemakers.
They have for many years made public their stand against paying taxes for war, and have refused to give IRS any information.
It is rather ironic that after making the house at Gano available without charge for The Peacemaker editing and circulation work, they are now being accused of receiving income from the operation of the Peacemaker Movement.
What Response to Make?
It is not likely that either individual refusers or any persons acting for Peacemakers will begin to fill out tax forms, open its mailing lists to IRS, show names of contributors and do any of the things people do who are merely looking for a better deal from IRS.
Even if such cooperation were acceptable to Peacemakers, it is no guarantee that IRS would accept the explanations.
And one thing quite repugnant to Peacemakers is the thought of applying to IRS for a right to continue.
There is the possibility that IRS is proceeding without knowledge of how far-fetched their claims are.
Those who know the principles on which Peacemaker finances are handled may wish to write to the IRS accountant who signed the papers.
He is Samuel T. Lay, IRS, P.O. Box 476, Cincinnati, OH, 45201.
Such a communication would be for the purpose of informing the IRS that their claims against the Peacemaker Movement are erroneous.
It would be particularly helpful if those knowing how the sharing fund operates would inform the IRS that those receiving checks are not employees either of Peacemakers or Gano Peacemakers, Inc.; that they have not performed any services for Peacemakers; and that they may have never had any other connection with Peacemakers than receiving financial aid during a resister’s prison sentence.
There is no true basis for a collection in the material IRS has assembled.
It may be that they will acknowledge this fact if they receive information from those who know how incorrect their assumptions are.
If letters go to IRS, it would be helpful if copies are sent to The Peacemaker.
Chuck Matthei reports that the Peacemakers’ winter continuation meeting in Indianapolis discussed mounting an educational campaign about tax refusal in the Cincinnati area.
They also foresee a non-violent, direct action response to the war-tax machine if an eviction or auction takes place.
Chuck stressed that the action would involve a no bail/no fine commitment from participants.
Although the Peacemakers wish to make refusal to support war, not concern to protect property, the issue in their tax case, they are collecting pledges of assistance for the Bromleys, should the need arise.
For more information, or to participate, contact:
The Peacemaker
10208 Sylvan Av.
Cincinnati, Ohio 45241
The National Catholic Reporter reported in its issue:
American Telephone and Telegraph reports that 22,000 people refused to pay the telephone excise tax in protest against the Vietnam war in , up from 17,000 and 12,000 in .
The Internal Revenue Service wants AT&T to disconnect all those phones, but AT&T says tax problems are IRS’ business.
Apparently, IRS wants as little to do with 22,000 prosecutions as AT&T wants to do with the $200,000 a month It would cost to disconnect protesters’ phones.
The issue of that paper, toward the end of a larger article about peace movement retooling toward the tail end of the Vietnam War, noted:
Bob Calvert of War Tax Resistance said his organization will continue to urge tax resistance in protest against the large amount of the federal budget — more than half — which goes into the military.
He said local tax resistance centers are preparing reports describing the amount of federal taxes taken out of each state, the amount returned through revenue sharing, the real needs of the state and the amount of money from the state which goes into the military.
Mike DeGregory penned an argument for war tax resistance for the issue of Catholic Worker:
Render to God: The Imperative to Resist
By Mike DeGregory
“There are two things I’ve got to do in this world — die and pay taxes.”
This sentiment presents a serious theological problem for the modern world: equating the demands of the nation state with those of God.
Given the violence and militarism of our times, the problem becomes a question of idolatry.
As such, the payment of taxes must be examined with all its implications.
God and State
Since biblical times there has existed a tension between allegiance to God and allegiance to the state.
Periodically, acts of resistance were made as a witness affirming God as the source of life in opposition to the state.
Recently this tension has been manifested in this country when hundreds of thousands of Americans, motivated by belief in a higher authority, refused allegiance to the state.
Draft resistance to the Vietnam war was widespread, and the war tax resistance movement reached a high point.
Now, however, that the ceasefire accords have been signed and American troops will be withdrawn from Vietnam, many consider war tax refusal an inappropriate anachronism.
Such a view is a misunderstanding of the nature of war and tax resistance.
Mr. Nixon has repeatedly said, “Peace, peace with honor,” but there is no peace.
The Vietnam war continues with intense fighting.
It is the Vietnamese people who suffer.
Over 200,000 refugees have been created since the ceasefire began, while American planes daily bomb Cambodia, and frequently bomb Laos.
Outside Indochina, a similar “peace” prevails.
America continues to arm other smaller nations for fratricidal wars, most recently in a $2 billion agreement with Iran.
And America’s nuclear overkill continues to increase, as does the military budget.
This is peace only in an Orwellian sense.
William James has described the true nature of this “peace” in his The Moral Equivalent of War:
“Peace” in military mouths is a synonym for “war expected”…
Every up-to-date dictionary should say that “peace” and “war” mean the same thing, now in posse, now in actu.
It may even be reasonably said that the intensely sharp competitive preparation for war by the nations is the real war, permanent, unceasing; and that the battles are only a sort of public verification of the mastery gained during the “peace” interval.
No Mere Protest
The existence of perpetual war makes war tax resistance relevant and necessary.
Tax resistance is not just another form of protest.
It is a refusal to participate in something, namely war.
It involves a change of worldviews, a conversion.
It demands a commitment to a new way of living.
It can be a truly religious response, stemming from moral obligation rather than expediency.
In this moral sense, it is for everyone, not just the courageous few.
For in modern society, how we use our money and how we relate to money determines what kind of lives we lead and the kind of persons we are.
For many Christians, this decision of how to relate to the issue of taxes is easily answered: pay them, for Christ said, “Render to Caesar the things that are Caesar’s, and to God the things that are God’s.”
The spirit of the Gospel is peace and nonviolence.
A biblical response to the “Render to Caesar” passage does not mean blind obedience to the state.
Rather, it suggests the responsibility to judge the “things” of Caesar in light of the “things” of God.
The essential part of the passage is the latter clause: “Render to God the things that are God’s.” Jesus intended no equality between God and Caesar.
Therefore, before rendering to Caesar one must judge if the things of Caesar are compatible with the things of God.
More specifically, today we must ask: is the payment of an income tax of which more than 50% finances the works of war, compatible with the things of God who desires from us the works of mercy?
We are faced with the moral imperative of examining war and our role in it as taxpayers.
In conscience we must decide whether to pay or not.
The New C.O.
In the modern process of violence, our technological society increasingly replaces men with machines.
The “big business” of modem war relies more and more on citizens’ money than on their bodies.
In light of this, it becomes essential that tax resisters be seen as the new conscientious objectors to war, withholding their financial as well as their bodily resources.
In the past, draft resistance has been seen as the refusal to place the pinch of incense on the altar of a false god.
Tax resistance deals more fundamentally with this same idolatry.
For tax money is the very gold of which the false idols of war are made.
War tax resistance is an alternative to this idolatry.
Some will object that war tax resistance, even with its corresponding alternate life funds, is ineffective.
This is perhaps correct, but as I see it, irrelevant.
Too often actions are undertaken simply for effect.
The words of Dietrich Bonhoeffer sum up the effectiveness of war tax resistance: “One asks, what is to come?
Another, what is right?
And that is the difference between the slave and the free man.”
“When it becomes the ‘sacred duty’ of a man to commit sin, one no longer knows how he should live,” said Reinhold Schneider.
“There remains nothing else for him to do but bear individual witness alone.
And where such witness is, there is the Kingdom of God.”
In this is the effectiveness of war tax resistance.
One of the best (and shortest) rationales for war tax resistance is Peter Maurin’s statement, “The future will be different if we make the present different.” If we continue to pay for war and the instruments of war, will we ever have peace?
(Ed. Note: For more information about tax resistance, write War Tax Resistance, 912 E. 31st St., Kansas City, Mo. 64109.)
The National Catholic News Service included this among its dispatches on :
Five Anti-War Priests Refuse to Pay Part of Income Tax
Pittsburgh (NC)—
Five priests of the Pittsburgh diocese have filed income tax returns but deducted 20 percent from their taxes which they contend would go to support a “totally immoral war” in Southeast Asia.
“The bombing in Cambodia going on right now is without any foundation in law — let alone morality,” said Father Jack O’Malley, spokesman for the group.
“The Thieu government in South Vietnam holds five of our brother priests as political prisoners because they have dared to speak out against the immoral actions of their government.
It is our taxes which is keeping Thieu in power,” Father O’Malley said.
The five priests waited until the deadline day of to file their tax returns at the Internal Revenue Service office here at .
Father O’Malley said the priests recognize that wrong is also being done by the North Vietnamese government. “But that country is not our ally,” he said.
“It is a privilege and duty to pay taxes,” the priest said.
“It is likewise a duty to resist evil in conscience.
When that evil is done by one’s own government, the duty is no less.”
During Holy Week the five priests prayed for an end to the bombing in Cambodia and an end to fighting and violence by all parties in Southeast Asia.
The other priests taking part in the tax resistance were:
Fathers Mark Glasgow, Patrick Fenton, Warren Metzler and Donald McIlvane.
A letter-to-the-editor in the Catholic Worker, signed by “Ammon Hennacy House” (Grand Rapids, Michigan), included this paragraph:
At this writing we have just ended a week-end tax resistance conference with about twenty-five people from around the state.
We have been promoting tax and draft resistance as part of our nonviolence workshop group Life Force.
With the beginnings of a tax resisters’ fund we are seeking an alternative to the violence and exploitation of banking.
Also, we are exploring possibilities of an insurance fund.
With four active children, we feel the need to be providing them with assurance of medical care in emergencies.
The National Catholic News Service included this among its dispatches on :
War Resister Gets Tax Refund
Altamont, N.Y. (NC)—
Mark Brockley of St. Lucy’s Parish here received a refund check from the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) for $250.50 for , which was the total amount IRS had withheld from Mark’s wages for .
The unusual aspect of Brockley’s case is that he received the refund after claiming his infant niece as a dependent on his 1040 form, knowing that she would not qualify as his dependent under the IRS definition.
Brockley explained in a letter to IRS officials that his niece, who was born the day of the Vietnam cease-fire, “represents all children, whether they be Mexican-American babies born in a migrant farm worker’s tent or Cambodian youths huddled in a village under American attack, who depend on each of us to create a livable world for them to grow up in and inherit.”
An IRS official said that if an audit showed that Brockley had claimed a dependent to which he was not entitled, any tax owed would be subject to normal IRS collection procedures.
Brockley is among a small but growing number of people who resist payment of federal taxes because of conscientious objection to government policies, especially to the large portion of the budget which supports the military.
He is 22 and single and describes himself as having been “gung ho for the war” (in Indo-China) until about his junior year in high school when his feelings began to change.
His feelings continued to grow until he was arrested in for protesting the mining of North Vietnamese harbors.
After a demonstration in support for the Berrigans during their trial for conspiracy, Brockley learned about the war tax resistance.
He then took steps to prevent the withholding of taxes from his wages, which is illegal.
“But since the government already had taken over $200 of my money for the year,” he said, “I thought in conscience I should get it back.”
To emphasize that his action was not meant to evade or defraud IRS, Brockley sent the letter explaining his irregular 1040 form.
He stated in part, “I intend that the government you represent shall not receive one penny more of my tax money while it continues policies to which I cannot in conscience lend my support.”
Brockley reconciled his duties as a citizen and his tax actions by noting that “people forget that Jesus did not simply answer, yes, when they asked him if you should pay Caesar’s tax.
It is well established that when you see a clash between Caesar’s law and the Gospel, the Christian’s allegiance is owed to the Gospel.”
The refunded money, Brockley said, is being donated to the Life Giving Fund.
This fund is used to support “groups we consider alternatives to the government’s priorities,” he added. “None of us is interested in tax evasion for personal gain.
We’ve given out over $1000 so far.
“Someday maybe I could get some land and be as self-sufficient as possible — so I could keep my income below the taxable level,” he said.
“That way I could follow my conscience without having to break the law.”
Mike Cullen, who had come to the United States from Ireland twelve years before, and had founded the Casa Maria Catholic Worker hospitality house in Milwaukee, was deported in .
Press reports (e.g. National Catholic Reporter, ) noted that the judge in the deportation case had “listed the cause of deportation as burning of draft files, interfering with administration of the selective service law, counseling others on conscientious objection, tax resistance, and burning his own draft card.”
The Catholic Worker devoted a page to tax resistance:
Conscience and Tax Resistance
Letter to the IRS
314-4th St. Brooklyn, NY 11215
Chief Collection Branch
Department of the Treasury
Internal Revenue Service 4901
Friend(s),
It’s taken me a while to respond because it’s been a very busy month at the house and it takes me time to express truth.
You asked for a tax return.
I wish to give what I have of life in serving others; and, since Federal taxes go primarily for war, I cannot help you in any way with data gathering and collection.
Rather, I wish to have back the $635.17 income tax and $373.95 FICA you took in , to use for building peace and living with the poor.
, I have been a pacifist and member of the Catholic Worker movement.
I quit the Navy Reserve and, rather than report for induction into the Army, briefly went to jail.
During this time I have lived and worked with the poor, actively promoting peace and running city and country “houses of hospitality” for homeless and helpless people.
I’ve done agricultural labor and all sorts of poor and subsistence work that poor people must bear — the basic labor that rich, comfortable, and professional people depend upon to live — though they little realize it.
For three and a half years, I lived with a Quaker family and have many Quaker friends who have strongly influenced me.
Currently, I help run the Arthur Sheehan House of Hospitality and the Christian Help In Park Slope (CHIPS) Shelter in Brooklyn.
I also am a poet and go to library school.
Since I refused to take part in killing or coercion, the only thing that makes sense is to refuse cooperation with the process of paying for it.
Cooperation builds a public spirit of deference and legitimacy that facilitates the process.
The process of taxation supports developments more far-reaching, serious, and monstrously perverse than even simply killing.
This country is spending more of the budget for war than ever before in peacetime.
We make, use, and export weapons which kill indiscriminately (even babies in womb or at breast) and en masse; and weapons which mutilate, pollute air, ground, and water, and corrupt forever the genetic heritage of future generations.
The government plans first strikes and preemptive war, destabilizes governments, foments discord and treachery, and brokers arms races.
Further, it actually has placed and planned to use weapons which can destroy every living thing.
Fear, greed, grasping to get one-up on others, and war, have distorted perspectives and led the Federal Government in every area and at every level (including health, education, welfare, agriculture, commerce, etc.) to adopt what amounts to an anti-life mentality.
I look long and hard to find anything the Federal Government does which is not in its own interest and is in a right spirit.
Support for abortion, though a relatively small part of the budget — an extreme case in point — is a sign that the spirit is anti-life.
Although for civic peace and good neighborliness, I file and go along with state and city taxes, despite whatever foolishness local government gets into, I draw a line.
All of these anti-life actions have been condemned by the Catholic Church. I am Catholic.
The American bishops, Vatican Council, Popes — I think by now most responsible religious bodies — have condemned especially weapons of indiscriminate destruction — even possession of such weapons.
Several American bishops have called for war tax refusal.
I believe the only way to peace is peace. Only winning hearts is effective.
Violence originates in human hearts; peace begins in self with faith, poverty of spirit, and fundamental change of heart.
Then, to make peace with each other, it is necessary to make peace with the earth.
Experience convinces me war is incompatible with any true problem-solving, dialogue, reconciliation, or ministry — war is futile for achieving peace.
It lacks room for forgiveness.
State resort to violence makes violence seem legitimate and helps create a climate of contradictions and violence.
All other violence pales in comparison to preparation of instruments for world destruction.
The government which prepares such things lacks qualifications to resolve conflicts, within or without.
I believe the only way to resolve social conflicts is to resolve and eliminate causes — works of mercy versus works of war.
I believe I must one day face Jesus as judge (Who said: “If you deny Me before men, I shall deny you before My Father in Heaven”).
He commanded “Love your enemy,” “Be perfect as your heavenly Father is, Who lets His rain fall on the just and unjust.”
He warned: “He who lives by the sword will die by the sword” and “What you’ve done to the least of these you’ve done to Me.”
He took judgment and killing out of our hands, because it is sacrilegious to kill within God’s family and killing leads to destruction of the killers — body, soul, mind, heart.
He left us the right to use, in constant prayer, only whatever truth and love God abundantly grants us.
We each face, in a way, the choice that humans have faced since the beginning, as in the story of Adam and Eve: to choose good only and thus find paradise or to choose the fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil and thus bring on ourselves pain, death, and destruction of everything most beautiful and precious to us in the world we know.
I want to give allegiance only to hope — to say “Yes!” to life, and to say “No!” to mad fear and scapegoating — while it still may possibly not be too late.
The Federal Government may go one way.
I go another — trying to build a spirit in the world, such that some day I may even be happy to contribute to what the government does; and the government may even be willing to allow me to contribute freely or not.
Can you imagine? That is world peace!
I care for your salvation. I pray you may have peace and freedom from the madness of arms.
Will you gather a harvest in spirit for Truth and Love rather than money for war and worse?
If you want to pursue this further may we meet and talk?
Daniel Marshall
Conscience & Military Tax Campaign
One of several groups promoting various ways to refuse taxes is the Conscience and Military Tax Campaign.
It is seeking people who will resolve to start withholding the full military portion of their Federal income taxes when notified that 100,000 people are ready to join in this action.
The Campaign encourages people to start at least symbolic withholding now, and offers support as well as advice on how to do it.
CMTC was organized by supporters of the World Peace Tax Fund.
Some may feel they cannot take such a risk because they are encumbered with assets and family obligations.
CMTC can furnish material that will explain how certain steps towards tax refusal can be taken with minimum risk.
One can withhold taxes in such a way as to not expose oneself to a jail sentence.
For further information, contact: Conscience & Military Tax Campaign, 44 Bellhaven Road, Bellport, NY 11713.
People Pay for Peace
An updated and enlarged edition of People Pay for Peace: A Military Tax Refusal Guide for Radical Religious Pacifists and People of Conscience, by Bill Durland, will be available by .
People Pay for Peace has been used for several years by people of religious and moral conscience who are contemplating or actually resisting participation in military expenditures for war, planning for war or weapons research.
Over 50% of U.S. income tax dollars goes to the military (for past, present and future uses), while social services expenditures continue to be cut by the current administration.
The new edition (published by The Center on Law and Pacifism, P.O. Box 1584 Colorado Springs, CO 80901 and available on order from them) is enlarged to include the following subjects: Part Ⅰ is entitled “Introduction to Military Tax Refusal” and contains four chapters.
Chapter One discusses the background of the movement including motivations and a history of war tax resistance.
Chapter Two outlines theological responses to paying taxes for war — both Christian and Jewish, including the relationship of civil disobedience to the Gospel and Torah.
Chapter Three deals with several philosophical questions on the “why’s” and “why not’s” of doing war tax resistance.
Chapter Four discusses the military budget, alternative funds and community organization.
Part Ⅱ is entitled “How to Refuse to Pay the Military Tax.”
This part also has four chapters.
Chapter One deals with the employee as tax refuser, with special emphasis on the problem of withholding and adjusting one’s W-4 form in order to have sufficient allowances so that by income tax time one may have some control of one’s tax payment, thereby allowing a war tax deduction.
Chapter Two is concerned with the problems encountered by employers, self-employed and community organizations as war tax resisters.
Such questions as the loss of tax exempt status are addressed in this chapter.
Chapter Three provides an historical background of the income tax and information on current trends in military spending.
War tax credits, deductions and refunds and, finally, an analysis of telephone tax refusal are also covered in this chapter.
Chapter Four reprints a number of examples of letters of conscience of people who explain to the IRS their reasons for war tax refusal.
Part Ⅲ is entitled “What the IRS Will Do To You” and treats the administrative process (the audit) in Chapter One; the collection process (the lien, levy, seizure) in Chapter Two.
Attention is given to specific questions such as: Can you be fired?
What are the specific problems of husbands and wives or other people with joint accounts?
What are the IRS penalties and interest?
What can you do about collection?
Part Ⅳ explains the court process.
Chapter One discusses both civil and criminal courts, especially the Tax Court, and the process involved in electing to go there.
Is it true you can be fined $500 for exercising your constitutional right to use the Tax Court?
What are the statutes of limitations for the IRS in prosecuting your case?
Chapter Two deals with current criminal and civil cases with a discussion of winning and witnessing and conscience and the courts.
Part Ⅴ reviews the major constitutional cases on war tax resistance brought before the courts by the Center on Law and Pacifism over the past several years.
Each chapter includes reprints of major sections of legal briefs and writs used at the Appellate Court and Supreme Court level.
These reprints are offered because they can be modified for use at all court levels by war tax resisters handling their own cases.
Chapter Seven of this section concludes with some observations about the future for war tax resistance.
War Resisters League Tax Refusal Guide
People at the War Resisters League, many of whom themselves have refused taxes, have put together a comprehensive Guide to War Tax Resistance.
Drawing on their own experiences and the kinds of questions many people have asked them through the years, they have compiled information on types of tax refusal and their consequences, a history of tax refusal, accounts of resisters, a list of local tax refusal centers or contacts, and an historical analysis of military spending.
Another section is on ways to resist collection.
The Guide is a very useful resource and easy to understand.
It is 120 pgs. long, with 8½×11 inch pages, and can be gotten for $6 plus $1 postage from: War Resisters League, 339 Lafayette St., NY, NY 10012.
―Peggy Scherer
When we last left Archbishop Raymond Hunthausen, he had issued a rousing cry for resistance to nuclear arms, and had suggested war tax resistance as one way to go about it, but had been a little coy about how he himself was going to respond come tax time.
In , he cleared that up.
From the National Catholic News Service:
1-1-27-82 ARCHBISHOP HUNTHAUSEN HOLDING BACK HALF OF TAXES IN NUCLEAR PROTEST (600 — EMBARGOED until .
Not to be published or broadcast before that date.)
Seattle (NC)—
Archbishop Raymond G. Hunthausen of Seattle has announced that he will withhold 50 percent of his federal income taxes as “a means of protesting our nation’s continuing involvement in the race for nuclear arms supremacy.”
The archbishop’s announcement, in the form of a pastoral letter, came seven months after he suggested to delegates to the Pacific Northwest Synod Convocation of the Lutheran Church in America that one possible non-violent form of Christian resistance to “nuclear murder and suicide” would be to refuse to pay 50 percent of one’s federal income taxes.
In his letter dated and released in the issue of his archdiocesan newspaper, the Catholic Northwest Progress, the archbishop stated that he is “aware that this action will provoke a variety of responses,” but urged all persons to “continue to discuss this nuclear arms issue in a spirit of mutual openness and charity.”
He also said that he was not suggesting that all who agree with his peace and disarmament views should imitate his action of income tax withholding.
“I recognize,” he said, “that some who agree with me in their hearts find it practically impossible to run the risk of withholding taxes because of their obligations to those personally dependent upon them.
Moreover, I see little value in imitating what I am doing simply because I am doing it.
I prefer that each individual come to his or her own decision on what should be done to meet the nuclear arms challenge.”
Citing a previous pastoral letter he wrote on the subject.
Archbishop Hunthausen stated that certain laws may be peacefully disobeyed under serious conditions, and that there may be times “when disobedience may be an obligation of conscience.”
“I believe,” he said “that the present issue is as serious as any the world has faced. The very existence of humanity is at stake.”
What he hopes his words and actions will do, the archbishop continued, is “to awaken those who have come to accept without thinking the continuation of the arms race, to stir even those who disagree with me to find a better path than the one we now follow, to encourage all to put in first place not the production of arms but the production of peace.”
The federal income tax which he withholds, the archbishop said, will be deposited in a fund to be used for charitable purposes.
When Archbishop Hunthausen called for unilateral nuclear disarmament by the United States in an address to the Lutheran synod meeting and suggested nuclear tax resistance as one possible response to nuclear arms spending, his comments received national news coverage.
His speech led Catholic and non-Catholic church leaders in the state of Washington to begin programs of prayer, study and discussion on war and peace issues in their churches.
Archbishop Hunthausen, 60, did not reveal the amount of federal taxes he usually pays or how much one half of his taxes would be.
His chancellor, Father Michael Ryan, said he did not think the archbishop would publicize the amount because it was the symbol of the action that was important rather than the amount of money involved.
Father Ryan also said the archbishop “realizes he’s responsible for facing the consequences” of civil disobedience, but “I don’t think he’d want to speculate on” the penalties he may face.
Deliberate refusal to pay taxes can be punished by fines or imprisonment or both.
3-1-27-82 NC DOCUMENTARY: ARCHBISHOP HUNTHAUSEN ON TAX RESISTANCE (1,080 — EMBARGOED until .
Not to be published or broadcast before that date.)
Seattle (NC)—
This is the text of a pastoral letter by Archbishop Raymond G. Hunthausen of Seattle announcing his decision to withhold half his federal income tax in protest over U.S. nuclear weapons policy.
The letter, dated , was released in the Seattle archdiocesan newspaper, the Catholic Northwest Progress.
My dear people of God:
As you Know, I have spoken out against the participation of our country in the nuclear arms race because I believe that such participation leads to incalculable harm.
Not only does it take us along the path toward nuclear destruction, but it also diverts immense resources from helping the needy.
As Vatican Ⅱ put it, “The arms race is one of the greatest curses on the human race and the harm that it inflicts on the poor is more than can be endured.” (“The Church in the Modern World,” n. 81)
I believe that as Christians imbued with the spirit of peacemaking expressed by the Lord in the Sermon on the Mount, we must find ways to make known our objections to the present concentration on further nuclear arms buildup.
Accordingly, after much prayer, thought, and personal struggle, I have decided to withhold 50 percent of my income taxes as a means of protesting our nation’s continuing involvement in the race for nuclear arms supremacy.
I am aware that this action will provoke a variety of responses.
Many will agree with me and support me as they have done in the past.
Other conscientious people will be puzzled, uncomprehending, resentful, and even angry.
For the sake of all, I shall clarify what I am attempting and not attempting to do by my tax-withholding action.
I do so in the prayerful hope that all continue to discuss this nuclear arms issue in a spirit of mutual openness and charity.
How ironic if we as Christians were to discuss the issue of disarmament for peace in a warlike fashion!
I am not attempting to say that there is but one way of dealing with the problem of the arms race and the nuclear holocaust toward which it leads.
I recognize the need for a number of different strategies for the promotion of arms reduction.
Accordingly, I welcome the diverse efforts of many individuals and groups, including the efforts of some of my fellow bishops to call attention to the seriousness of this matter and to suggest practical ways of acting with regard to it.
I am not attempting to divide the Christian community.
I pray that because of our openness and respect for one another we can grow together by our concentration on the goal of world peace and the eventual elimination of nuclear arms despite our disagreements over the best way to achieve such goals.
I am not suggesting that all who agree with my peace and disarmament views should imitate my action of income tax withholding.
I recognize that some who agree with me in their hearts find it practically impossible to run the risk of withholding taxes because of their obligations to those personally dependent upon them.
Moreover, I see little value in imitating what I am doing simply because I am doing it.
I prefer that each individual come to his or her own decision on what should be done to meet the nuclear arms challenge.
I am not pointing a finger of accusation at those who disagree with what I plan to do.
I would hope, however, that such persons will respect those whose views differ from theirs.
No one has answers that are absolutely certain in such complex matters.
I am suggesting that we must maintain a continuing and open dialogue.
I am not attacking my country.
I love my country.
As I said in a previous pastoral letter on this subject (): “It is true that as a general rule the laws of the state must be obeyed.
However, we may peacefully disobey certain laws under serious conditions.
There may even be times when disobedience may be an obligation of conscience.
Most adults have lived through times and situations where this would apply.
“Thus Christians of the first three centuries disobeyed the laws of the Roman Empire and often went to their death because of their stands.
They were within their rights.
Similarly, in order to call attention to certain injustices, persons like Martin Luther King engaged in demonstrations that broke the laws of the state.
The point is that civil law is not an absolute, it is not a god that must be obeyed under any and all conditions.
In certain cases where issues of great moral import are at stake, disobedience to a law in a peaceful manner and accompanied by certain safeguards that help preserve respect for the institution of law is not only allowed but may be, as I have said, an obligation of conscience.”
I believe that the present issue is as serious as any the world has faced.
The very existence of humanity is at stake.
I am not encouraging those who wish to avoid paying taxes to use my action as an excuse for their not paying.
I plan to deposit what I withhold in a fund to be used for charitable peaceful purposes.
I am saying by my action that in conscience I cannot support or acquiesce in a nuclear arms buildup which I consider a grave moral evil.
I am saying that I see no possible justification for the willingness to employ nuclear weapons capable of destroying humanity as we know it.
I am saying that everyone should think profoundly and pray deeply over the issue of nuclear armaments.
My words and my action of tax withholding are meant to awaken those who have come to accept without thinking the continuation of the arms race, to stir even those who disagree with me to find a better path than the one we now follow, to encourage all to put in first place not the production of arms but the production of peace.
I urge all of you to pray and to fast, to study and to discuss, and then to decide what you shall do to combat the evil of the nuclear arms race.
I cannot make your decision for you.
I can and do challenge you to make a decision.
May God be with you, His joy, His peace, His love.
Raymond G. Hunthausen, Archbishop of Seattle
IRS Could Prosecute Tax Resisting Archbishop
By Jerry Filteau
Washington (NC)—
If Archbishop Raymond Hunthausen of Seattle holds back half of his federal income tax in protest over U.S. nuclear arms policy, as he has said he will, the Internal Revenue Service could prosecute him.
In addition to having his assets attached to pay the taxes and interest or penalties on them, the archbishop could face up to five years in prison and $10,000 in fines for each year that he refuses to pay.
“We’ve got to administer the law regardless of the political or philosophical persuasion of the taxpayer,” said Larry Batdorf, an official of IRS’s national media relations office in Washington.
Archbishop Hunthausen said in a TV interview in Seattle that he planned to withhold 50 percent of his federal income taxes to protest U.S. involvement in the nuclear arms race.
In a pastoral letter to his archdiocese a few days later he stated his position more fully and explained it.
Batdorf, following IRS policy, declined to comment specifically on Archbishop Hunthausen’s action or how the IRS would respond, but he outlined the general IRS position and policy regarding those who try to resist or evade their taxes.
He cited the court case of Autenreith v. Cullan, in which a tax resister was trying to withhold part of his taxes in protest over the Vietnam War, as a key legal precedent for IRS policy in such cases.
Batdorf quoted the pertinent part of the judge’s ruling: “The fact that some persons may object on religious grounds to some of the things that the government does is not a basis upon which they can claim a constitutional right not to pay a part of the tax.”
“We feel that the court has ruled very clearly” on that type of protest of conscience, said Batdorf.
He said that during the Vietnam War one popular form of tax protest was to refuse to pay the excise tax on one’s telephone bill.
The IRS assessed and collected the taxes from “about 700 to 800 a year” who engaged in that protest, he said.
He said he did not have any specific figures distinguishing IRS cases involving protests of conscience from those involving mistakes on one’s tax return or fraudulent tax evasion.
But in general, he said, the IRS audits some 2 million tax returns a year, settles most of those cases civilly, and gets about 1,600 criminal convictions a year for tax evasion.
He said in most cases the procedure is to try for a civil settlement first.
If the person refuses to file a return or files a low return, the IRS computes the tax, informs the person of its findings, and notifies the person that he has 90 days to make corrections or petition the findings in court.
If the person does not petition, said Batdorf, the tax is presumed correct.
After the court decides in favor of the IRS or the person fails to go to court, the IRS is free to collect the money and can use various means to do so, including attachment of wages or assets.
If the case goes to criminal prosecution, he said, the maximum penalty upon conviction for tax evasion, which is a felony, is five years in prison and a $10,000 fine.
The actual penalties in each case are determined by the courts, not by the IRS, he said.
Another dispatch, from , read:
Church Refuses IRS Demand
Ames, Iowa (NC)—
A Catholic church in Ames has refused to cooperate with demands by the Internal Revenue Service to garnishee the wages of an employee who is a tax protester against the nuclear arms race.
Thomas Cordaro, employed by St. Thomas Aquinas Church as a lay campus minister for the parish’s Catholic Student Center at Iowa State University, owes the government $828.23 in federal income taxes.
He has refused to pay the taxes because of his religious beliefs.
He used the money instead to help found and run Loaves and Fishes Hospitality House, a shelter and meal center for the poor.
Father Thomas Geary, administrator of the parish, said an IRS representative from Des Moines, Iowa, served levies four times to the parish secretary, each time declining to wait to meet with the pastor.
He said he was frustrated at the lack of personal contact and called the IRS office, but the personnel there were unwilling to discuss the matter.
The parish council unanimously resolved “that St. Thomas Parish refuse to pay the IRS levy because we are not a tax collecting agency and because we see underlying moral implications that we have not had time to sufficiently explicate.”
Father Geary sent the IRS a letter communicating the parish council’s resolution and his decision to refuse to garnishee Cordaro’s wages for the government.
The decision means that the government could take the church to court to force it to pay the money.
According to an IRS spokesman, under Section 6332 of the IRS code an employer that refuses to honor a levy for garnishment of wages becomes “liable in his own estate to the extent of the levy not honored.”
If the IRS must take the employer to court to enforce the payment of that liability, the spokesman said, the court can force the employer to pay a penalty of 50 percent of the levy in addition to the levy itself.
Archbishop James Byrne of Dubuque, Iowa, the archdiocese in which Ames is located, has privately supported the parish’s decision to refuse to honor the levy in support of Cordaro’s conscience.
Father Geary said that the parish council’s decision was not based on the taxes and their use, but on concern for “respecting the conscience of Cordaro.”
“Also this council decision does not necessarily reflect the thinking of the parish members, who are now struggling with the issue before deciding what path to follow,” he said.
Cordaro agreed that the parish council is still struggling with the issue of his tax protest and said its action should not be interpreted as a condemnation of the arms race.
He said his decision to withhold his taxes as a witness against the nuclear arms race “is intricately linked to my concern for the poor,” and all his financial resources are used to rent and maintain the hospitality house for the poor.
Saying his action “is well within Catholic orthodoxy,” Cordaro cited the statement by the Vatican to the United Nations on disarmament in , which said that the arms race itself “is an act of aggression which amounts to a crime, for even when they are not used, by their cost alone armaments kill the poor by causing them to starve.”
Following a similar rationale, Archbishop Raymond Hunthausen of Seattle recently announced that he was refusing to pay half of his federal income tax as a protest against U.S. involvement in the global arms race.
He said the tax money would go into a fund for charitable activities.
In rejecting the right of citizens to withhold taxes because of conscientious objection to a government policy or program, the IRS cites the decision of the U.S. District Court in San Francisco, which was upheld by the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals.
That court ruling said in part, “The fact that some persons may object on religious grounds to some of the things that the government does is not a basis upon which they can claim a constitutional right not to pay a part of the tax.”
An article in the Catholic Commentator said that Archbishop Hunthausen had addressed “300 peace activists attending a meeting at Notre Dame University” in South Bend, Indiana and had again announced his tax resistance there.
Aside from that, the article just recycled already-familiar quotes and background.
However, the Catholic Worker printed a few excerpts from the talk:
“…Render to Caesar without question, and without question we will get nuclear war.
“As Christians, we once had a commitment of refusing incense to Caesar.
The Church resisted that idolatry, at the cost of martyrdom.
What has happened to the Christian belief in the Cross and rejection of idolatry?
“Now, on a more blasphemous scale than any homage paid to a first-century Caesar, we engage in nuclear idolatry.
It is not God in Whom we place our trust, but nuclear weapons…
“I believe deeply that God’s love is infinitely more powerful than any nuclear weapon, and that, in seeking to rediscover the Cross, we are on the edge of a discovery more momentous to the world than that of nuclear energy.
Nonviolence. Jesus’ divine way of the Cross, is, in its own way, the most explosive force of history.
Its kind of force, however, is a force of life — a divine force of compassion which can raise the people of this earth from death to life.
I invite you to join me in finding our way back to that nonviolent force of life and love at the heart of the Gospels, which offers a way out of our nuclear tomb.”
An editorial by Father Michael J. Savelesky, printed in the issue of the Inland Register (newspaper of the Diocese of Spokane, Washington), went out over the wire on .
It compared Hunthausen to the biblical prophet Jeremiah, and concluded:
Already people are calling Archbishop Hunthausen a prophet in our own time.
There is a subtle abdication of personal responsibility here.
If the archbishop is indeed a prophet, then we individually and collectively are obliged to face the truth he speaks.
His tax refusal will hardly affect the Gross National Product, but it does shock us into confronting in our own lives the moral issue of nuclear arms.
No one of us escapes that responsibility.
Even to do nothing is a moral stance whose consequences we bear.
A dispatch:
Tax Protester Gets Support in Iowa, Criticism in Florida
By NC News Service
Tax protester Tom Cordaro, who refused to pay $828 in taxes because of the nuclear arms race, has drawn support from the Dubuque Iowa, archdiocesan priests’ senate and criticism from a writer, a lawyer and a priest in Florida.
In an unanimous vote the Dubuque priests’ senate backed Cordaro and his parish, St. Thomas Aquinas, in Ames, Iowa, which has refused Internal Revenue Service (IRS) demands to withhold money from his wages.
Individual members of the priests’ senate also pledged $2,500 for a defense fund to be used if litigation with the IRS over the tax protest ensues.
Meanwhile, in Florida, writer and Scripture scholar Dick Biow and an attorney, Aldo Icardi, both of Winter Park in the Diocese of Orlando, and an unidentified priest, who all disagree with Cordaro, have sent the IRS $145 to cover some of the taxes Cordaro owes.
They said they acted out of concern for armed forces personnel and a “deep sense of shame that one of our co-religionists" would withhold taxes.
Cordaro is a lay pastoral minister for his parish’s Catholic Student Center at Iowa State University.
Because of his religious beliefs he withheld his federal income tax payment and used it to set up Loaves and Fishes Hospitality House, a shelter and meal center for the poor.
The IRS has served levies on St. Thomas Parish four times but according to Father Patrick Geary, parish administrator, has declined to discuss the matter with the pastor.
The parish council passed a resolution stating St. Thomas will “refuse to pay the IRS levy because we are not a tax collecting agency and because we see underlying moral implications that we have not had time to sufficiently explicate.”
Father Geary informed the IRS of the parish decision and the government could take the church to court over the issue.
Biow, a writer whose articles have appeared in the Florida Catholic, newspaper of the dioceses of Orlando and St. Petersburg, the priest and the lawyer listed three reasons for opposing Cordaro and for extending partial payment of his taxes.
They stated that they “would not like to see even one member of our armed forces deprived of the weapons needed to save his own life while he is protecting that of Mr. Cardaro” and that they “pay these reparations out of a deep sense of shame that one of our co-religionists would select such a callous and brutal way of articulating his anti-defense posture.”
“We hope to deny him the opportunity of playing the public martyr,” they added.
A convert to Catholicism, Biow served as a fighter pilot in World War Ⅱ and his son is now a student at the U.S. Naval Academy.
He has studied Scripture for the last 20 years and served as a Scripture consultant to Bishop William D. Borders of Orlando, now an archbishop who heads the Baltimore See.
Biow said he thinks the Reagan administration’s military budget is too big.
But he also said that seeking a strong national defense is good sense.
And, he said, those who believe a cut in military spending will mean more money for the poor are mistaken.
Reagan “is running the military on credit and he could do the same for the poor,” Biow said.
“People who want to help the poor could do a better job if they stopped tying in their arguments with military spending.
Reagan has to be convinced — or politically forced — to help the poor.”
A National Catholic News Service dispatch gave some more details about Hunthausen’s tax resistance (excerpt):
On his tax resistance the archbishop commented that the amount of money involved “will not be great” since “my total income for will be only about $9,000–$10,000.”
He said he will engage in the resistance by withholding half the amount due when he makes his quarterly estimated tax declaration.
He will divide the unpaid tax money “among a peace group — probably the Peace Academy — a pro-life group and perhaps a direct-service charity like our Society of St. Vincent de Paul,” he said.
“Increasingly I see the linkage between peace, life and charity issues, especially as I see the impact on people’s lives of the worsening economy,” he commented.
Asked if he would continue to withhold taxes until the arms race stopped, the 60-year-old Seattle prelate said, “I have not thought that through completely, but what has recently come home to me is the thought that I should be more closely living the poverty of the Gospel and should be giving away more of what I earn.
“In that case I would have no tax to pay.
However, I want to be sure that I am putting myself in that position for the sake of the Gospel and not because I want to avoid the difficulties of tax resistance.”
A dispatch from gives the appearance of a rapidly-developing story:
Priests Hold Back Taxes to Protest Nuclear Arms
By Jerry Filteau NC News Service
At least 10 U.S. priests refused to pay part of their federal income tax to protest American military expenditures and the nuclear arms race.
There was no way to tell how many others may have done so without saying anything about it publicly.
In Oakland, Calif., Father James A. Schexnayder said he “will not be part of a plot to incinerate humanity” and withheld half his taxes “as a conscious resistance to our nation’s nuclear arms race and our selfish and oppressive military interference in Central America.”
Father Schexnayder, 44, is director of the Oakland diocesan permanent diaconate program.
He said he had been considering tax resistance for some time but was “in a sense stimulated” by the similar decision of Archbishop Raymond Hunthausen of Seattle, which received national publicity .
In Pittsburgh eight priests held a press conference on , to explain their decisions to withhold part of their taxes to protest “the militaristic priorities of the federal budget and to resist our country’s obsessive participation in the arms race.”
“We are fully aware of the illegality of our action according to the U.S. Tax Code laws,” they said in a prepared press statement.
“We pray that the tension caused by our ‘peace gestures’ may turn people’s minds and hearts to the illegality and immorality of the arms race.”
The priests, all from the Pittsburgh metropolitan area, were Fathers Donald McIlvane, John Brennan, Patrick Fenton, Jack O’Malley, Robert Schweitzer, Donald Fischer, Mark Glasgow and John Oesterle.
After a brief press conference and prayer service at the Pittsburgh Diocesan Building, the eight were joined by other opponents of nuclear weapons in a march to the Pittsburgh Federal Building for a protest demonstration there.
Hearing of the tax protests in Pittsburgh and Oakland, the Indianapolis archdiocesan newspaper, The Criterion, called an associate pastor at a local socially active parish to see if he knew of any priests in the Indianapolis area who were doing the same thing.
The priest, Father Cosmas Raimondi, said yes, he knew of one — “me.”
He had made no public announcement of his decision, but he said that a few days earlier he had filed his federal tax return with a covering letter notifying the IRS that he was paying only half the tax due.
“In my own conscience I don’t feel that I can support a strong militarist spirit in government,” Father Raimondi explained.
“I respect civil law but I also feel that God’s law of love is superior to that civil law.”
He said he preferred to not to call his action of conscience “civil disobedience,” but rather “divine obedience.”
Father Raimondi said he objected to not only the nuclear arms race, which he said must be ended by “mutually monitored steps of disarmament, but also U.S. military aid to “repressive regimes” in Central America and the current program of draft registration in the United States, which he said will lead to a mandatory draft.
The fact that Father Raimondi said nothing of his tax protest until he was called by a newspaper indicated that there may be other priests in the country, influenced by Archbishop Hunthausen’s decision and by the numerous denunciations of the arms race by other American bishops in the past year, who have also engaged in tax resistance without publicity.
In virtually all cases the amount of money involved is slight, since the taxable income of diocesan priests is normally very low.
For religious order priests and nuns, tax resistance is not an option because of the vow of poverty they take.
Under federal law salaries received by members of religious orders are considered income of the religious order itself, not personal income.
Father Schexnayder said his protest was “largely symbolic” because half his taxes only came to about $60.
His tax resistance drew mixed reactions from other Oakland clergymen.
Three local military chaplains contacted by the Oakland diocesan newspaper, The Catholic Voice, expressed different views.
A retired National Guard chaplain, Father Paul J. Engberg, called it “anarchism” and said it was contrary to American principles of respect for law and working within the system if changes are needed.
Father Robert Ríen, chaplain of the 349th Military Airlift Wing, said, “If he feels in conscience that he has to do this, then I support him 100 percent.
At the same time, I hope brother priests will support me in bringing the ministry we share to the people in the military sector.”
Another National Guard chaplain, Father Ronald Lagasse, called Father Schexnayder’s protest “laudable” but “ineffective.”
It might “prick people’s consciences, but won’t go any further than that.
There’s no basis on which to build,” he said.
He and Father Ríen emphasized that military personnel do not want war.
Those in the military, said Father Lagasse, are going through the same qualms of conscience as everyone else on nuclear weapons.
Father Brian Joyce, president of the diocesan priests senate, praised Father Schexnayder for drawing attention to the nuclear arms race as “an issue of conscience, a major one that every Christian has to seriously address.”
But he said he would not take the same action for several reasons, including questions he had about its effectiveness and whether it was the right approach.
“For instance, while I oppose nuclear arms, I don’t necessarily oppose defense, and at the same time I have a lot of respect and admiration for what Jim (Father Schexnayder) is doing,” he said.
(Contributing to this story were Stephen Karlinchak in Pittsburgh, Dan Morris in Oakland and Jim Jachimiak in Indianapolis.)
Archbishop Hunthausen, whose announcement of tax resistance drew national attention, said in that the federal taxes he was refusing to pay were being placed in an escrow account for the World Peace Tax Fund.
Bills to establish that fund are pending in Congress.
If enacted, the legislation would change the U.S. tax code to let conscientious military tax objectors direct the military portion of their tax money to non-military peace-related purposes such as peace research, disarmament efforts, international health, education and welfare programs, and the retraining of workers displaced by conversion from military to non-military production.
A citizens’ organization, Conscience and Military Campaign-U.S., has established the World Peace Tax Fund escrow account to accept payments in anticipation of the legislation.
Correction and Insert
At least 11 (NOT 10) U.S. priests…
After 16th paragraph beginning, The fact that… INSERT the following:
Another priest who said nothing until a newspaper called him and asked was Father Joseph O’Hara, a sociologist at Loras College in Dubuque, Iowa.
When he was contacted by The Witness, Dubuque archdiocesan paper, Father O’Hara said he had refused to pay any taxes and had informed the IRS that this was a protest over the nuclear arms race.
Last year Father O’Hara refused to pay his taxes as a protest against the administration’s military support of El Salvador despite the Salvadoran government’s record of human rights violations.
Another tax protester in the Dubuque Archdiocese is Thomas Cordero, a lay minister employed by St. Thomas Aquinas Church in Ames, Iowa.
In the parish council voted unanimously to refuse IRS orders to the parish to garnishee his wages for payment of the taxes owed.
Members of the archdiocesan priests senate agreed to contribute $1,200 out of their pockets to reimburse the parish if the IRS succeeds in legally forcing the parish to pay the taxes plus applicable penalties for its refusal to comply with the garnishment orders.
Father O’Hara said that the money involved in his tax protest was not much, and he had not yet heard a word from the IRS about his refusal to pay taxes last year
PICK UP original 17th paragraph beginning.
In virtually all…
ADD to list of contributors at end of story: …and Father Thomas Ralph in Dubuque.
The Cordero case got more attention in a dispatch:
Tax Protester, Archbishop Clash Over IRS
By Father Thomas Ralph
Dubuque, Iowa (NC)—
Archbishop James J. Byrne of Dubuque and tax protester Tom Cordaro, a lay minister at St. Thomas Aquinas Parish in Ames have clashed over whether the parish should pay the Internal Revenue Service Cordaro’s unpaid back income taxes.
After a meeting between the two foundered, Cordaro held a five-day prayer vigil next to the archbishop’s house and other protesters picketed the archbishop.
In a statement released Archbishop Byrne stated his position.
St. Thomas Parish, the archbishop said, owes Cordaro a month’s salary for his services as a lay minister during .
Under the law of the Internal Revenue Service code, these unpaid funds are subject to taxation and the parish is obliged to honor the levy.
The archbishop further stated that he had been advised by legal counsel that the parish church is not “the proper or appropriate party to litigate the merits” of Cordaro’s refusal to pay federal income taxes as a protest against the nuclear arms race.
The archbishop’s response came two days after Cordaro ended a five-day prayer vigil at the Chapel of Perpetual Adoration adjoining the archbishop’s residence in Dubuque and returned to Ames.
Cordaro had been in Dubuque when he and Father Patrick Geary, pastor at the Ames parish, met with Archbishop Byrne at Cordaro’s request to discuss the archbishop’s decision that the parish must honor the IRS order to garnishee his wages for $1,300 in back taxes.
The archbishop requested confidentiality regarding the discussion, and when Cordaro said he could not honor the request the meeting ended.
Cordaro began his prayer vigil to protest the archbishop’s refusal to state publicly his reasons for his decision.
At a press conference at the Catholic Worker House before leaving Dubuque , Cordaro said the real tragedy of the past week had not been the archbishop’s demand for payment of his back taxes but “that those in the church with power and influence, who knew an injustice was done, have remained silent.”
He named moral theologians, religious communities, other bishops, teachers and presidents of the universities as examples of those he expected to speak out.
“The archbishop’s silence has made it impossible for me to obey his wishes,” Cordaro said, “and I will continue to withhold my taxes.
Blind obedience to authority is in itself immoral.”
Many groups and individuals in the Dubuque Archdiocese support Cordaro’s position of having the courts decide whether he can withhold payment of his taxes on religious grounds.
On the archdiocesan priests’ senate voted 23-1 for a resolution calling for the archbishop to clarify his decision for halting the tax protest.
The parish council at St. Thomas Aquinas voted unanimously the previous week to support Cordaro’s fight and refuse the IRS demand to garnishee his wages.
Cordaro had been refusing to pay his federal income taxes , giving all but $50 of his $874-a-month parish salary to Loaves and Fishes Hospitality House in Ames which furnishes food and shelter to the needy.
Father Richard P. Funke, vice chancellor of the archdiocese, said that neither he nor the archbishop had seen the priests’ senate resolution and questioned why the resolution was made public before the archbishop had seen it.
“The archbishop is equally concerned about the nuclear build-up,” Father Funke said, “but we are talking about two completely different issues.
“The church has the obligation to support the right of conscience and in this has been supportive of Mr. Cordaro and others in their protests of the nuclear arms race.
“The church also has an obligation to support obedience to duly authorized authority such as the government in its right of taxation for purposes of providing protection, order, freedom and services to its citizenry.”
Portions of taxes go to support “the elderly, the needy, the kind of people Cordaro seems to be concerned about,” Father Funke said.
“How he can withhold 100 percent of his taxes is a real problem to me.”
A legal battle over the right of the government to force a church to garnishee tax moneys in violation of a person’s conscience is being considered by Cordaro and the parish council, of which he is a member.
Approximately $9,000 in pledges has been received to support his legal defense, he said.
Gordon Allen of Des Moines, a constitutional lawyer and the chief counsel for the Iowa Civil Liberties Union, has offered to handle the case without cost.
Archbishop Hunthausen spoke about his tax resistance and the reasoning behind it — and took some questions from a skeptical audience — at a talk in Brooklyn ( dispatch):
New York (NC)—
The possibility of the human family’s destroying itself in a nuclear holocaust presents the greatest spiritual crisis in history, Archbishop Raymond Hunthausen of Seattle said in an address in New York .
Declaring that he saw no political solution to the crisis, he said that “conversion” was needed “at a depth in our lives we’d rather not know.”
Archbishop Hunthausen spoke at St. James Cathedral in Brooklyn, N.Y. following Sunday Vespers, one of several bishops appearing in a “Shepherds Speak” series sponsored by the Brooklyn Diocese.
The archbishop from Washington state was a focus of national news when he suggested that refusing to pay part of ones income tax could be an appropriate way of protesting the nuclear arms race, and again when he announced that he was refusing to pay half his own tax.
Instead, he said, he would put the money in a fund for such purposes as helping the poor, fighting abortion and promoting disarmament.
In his address Archbishop Hunthausen offered no analysis of how his approach would resolve the military issues involved in national defense but kept his argument on a religious level.
Faith in Christ he said, will liberate Americans from “fear of the Russians” and other fears motivating production of nuclear weapons.
These include the “fear of losing our wealth,” he said.
Archbishop Hunthausen reported that others had tried to convince him that the “realistic way of preserving peace was to build nuclear weapons and plan for the possibility of a first strike.
“I do not understand any of this as realistic,” he said.
Americans, he added, must get a new understanding of reality “or we shall be destroyed.”
As an alternative he advocated the “reality” of the kingdom of God as taught by Jesus.
Archbishop Hunthausen described the way of Jesus as “faithful non-violent action” and said he was seeking to follow that way in his tax protest.
As a result of taking this action, he said he has “begun to experience conversion myself.” Carrying the action a step further Archbishop Hunthausen said he would participate in a “non-violent peace blockade” trying to stop the U.S.S. Ohio, America’s first Trident nuclear missile submarine, when it is taken to its Puget Sound base .
Archbishop Hunthausen was enthusiastically applauded by nearly all of the audience, which numbered about 200–300.
He received standing ovations when he was introduced, at the conclusion of his brief talk, and again at the end of a question period.
However a few individuals had come to express opposition.
One of them, James Crockett, a retired layman from a Brooklyn parish, had prepared a large sign that he held up outside as people departed.
It read: “Archbishop Hunthausen: Would you have us abandon the defense of our homeland and our loved ones?”
During the question period, the archbishop was challenged by S.Z.F. Rutar, a layman of another Brooklyn parish who is the area chapter president of the National Alliance of Czech Catholics.
He told of leaving Czechoslovakia after seeing many friends killed by communists and went on to question Archbishop Hunthausen’s commitment to preserving American freedom.
“I love my country and it is because I love my country that I say what I do,” the archbishop responded.
“I would like for my country to put its confidence in the God we profess to believe in.”
Finally, Bill Samuel summed up the history and current state-of-the-art of American war tax resistance in an article for New Catholic World (reprinted in the Catholic Worker):
Refusing War Taxes
By Bill Samuel
Tax refusal is such an obvious and fundamental means of protest and resistance that it has been used for centuries for a variety of purposes.
Movements of tax refusers are reported as far back as in Egypt.
Tax refusal movements focusing on opposition to war date back at least as far as , when Danish peasants refused to pay taxes to support King Christian Ⅱ’s war against Sweden.
In the United States, war tax refusal is older than the country.
The Quaker-controlled Assembly of the Pennsylvania Colony in refused a royal demand to appropriate money for an expedition into Canada.
In , when the Assembly voted large amounts for the French and Indian War, many Quakers and Mennonites refused to pay taxes. , this was true throughout the colonies, and a number were imprisoned as a result.
The Quaker testimony became so strong that a number of Quakers were disowned by their Monthly Meetings (parishes) during the Revolutionary War for paying war taxes.
But it was not only Quakers and those of other traditionally pacifist religious groups who are engaged in war tax refusal.
The most famous early American war tax refuser was Henry David Thoreau, who was jailed for refusing to pay taxes for the Mexican War.
He eloquently defended his action in his landmark essay “On the Duty of Civil Disobedience”:
“If a thousand (people) were not to pay their tax bills this year, that would not be a violent and bloody measure, as it would be to pay them, and enable the state to commit violence and shed innocent blood.”
Over , there continued to be persons refusing taxes on grounds of objection to war, but war tax refusal was not a major part of peace efforts.
It took the dropping of atom bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and the growth of the Cold War, to make tax refusal again an important issue in the peace movement.
A number of peace activists, including A.J. Muste, began war tax refusal in .
In , about 250 people seeking a more radical approach to peace met in Chicago.
War tax refusal was one of the major issues at the conference, which spawned the radical pacifist Peacemaker movement.
Nonpayment of taxes for war has been a central tenet of this movement since its founding.
A handful of people associated with the Peacemakers were imprisoned on various charges connected with tax refusal during .
Until , little was published on war tax refusal except leaflets and magazine articles.
Two important books were issued that year.
The Peacemakers issued the first edition of their Handbook on Nonpayment of Taxes for War, which reported the experiences of a number of individuals and endeavored to explain both the whys and the hows of war tax refusal.
The other publication, Edmund Wilson’s The Cold War and the Income Tax, was written by a prominent literary figure who received the Presidential Medal of Freedom in the same year.
This blistering attack on militarism and the income tax system was greeted with critical acclaim and received mass distribution as a Signet paperback.
Although war tax refusal grew in the two decades following Hiroshima, it remained largely an act of deeply committed pacifists, a tiny minority on the fringes of American society.
It only became a mass movement when large numbers of Americans were killing and being killed in a war that was difficult to justify.
President Johnson aided the growth of tax resistance by identifying specific taxes as needed to finance the war.
The telephone tax, scheduled to expire in , was reimposed explicitly to finance the Vietnam operation and was extended twice during the Vietnam War.
For there was also an income tax surcharge to raise revenue for the war.
People who strongly opposed the Vietnam War, but who were not necessarily pacifists, were moved to resist those taxes.
Because it was both clearly associated with Vietnam and easy to refuse, the telephone tax was at one time refused by hundreds of thousands of Americans.
The War Resisters League (WRL) was the principal group promoting war tax refusal during the early Vietnam war years.
By it seemed to merit its own organization.
With considerable help from the WRL, War Tax Resistance was launched at a New York press conference on .
Aiming at the masses of Vietnam War protesters, WTR defined as a war tax resister anyone who refused at least $5 of some federal tax.
WTR struck a real chord.
Its initial hope was to encourage the formation of WTR branches in at least 25 cities.
Within a year, it had 160 WTR Centers in all parts of the country.
Tax resistance demonstrations were held, especially at filing deadline, in cities and towns all over the U.S.
Most national peace groups participated in the campaign.
Local churches of many denominations refused the phone tax.
Two editions () of a book, Ain’t Gonna Pay for War No More by Robert Calvert, on the reasons for and the methods of war tax refusal were published.
During , the movement attempted to conquer a major obstacle to income tax resistance, the withholding system.
Resisters began to claim additional exemptions on the withholding forms (Form W-4) they filed with their employers to reduce or eliminate withholding.
A number of resisters were indicted on withholding fraud charges.
A handful went to prison, but others won court decisions that an open aboveboard act could not be considered fraud.
Withholding resistance became more sophisticated as Form W-4 was made more complex.
Resisters began claiming allowances justified by large itemized deductions rather than additional dependents.
Large amounts were claimed as “war tax deductions” on tax returns.
This tax refusal method forced the IRS to allow the taxpayer appeals through the civil courts.
The movement also developed a concrete positive component, inspired by Karl Meyer’s article “A Fund for Mankind” in the issue of The Catholic Worker.
Alternative funds pooling refused taxes began to spring up in cities all across the country.
These funds would grant or loan money for a wide variety of social service and social change purposes.
Sometimes the money was dispersed in public and dramatic ways, such as handing people subway tokens with a leaflet at subway stations in poor areas.
Decisions about use of the funds have usually been made collectively by donors.
Most of the funds will return deposited tax money in the event of IRS seizure.
For this reason, many funds have retained all income tax deposits, spending only the interest earned on them.
There were about 55 funds in existence by .
In , a group of war tax refusers and others concerned in the Ann Arbor, Michigan area began meeting together to find a legal alternative to paying taxes for military purposes.
Under the able leadership of Quaker physician Dr. David Bassett, this group developed the World Peace Tax Fund Bill using the legal resources of volunteers from the University of Michigan Law School.
This proposed legislation would allow persons to declare themselves conscientious objectors to military taxation on their tax returns.
Their taxes would be diverted to a new government trust fund, the World Peace Tax Fund.
The military portion of the taxes paid by conscientious objectors would perform alternative service through support of a national peace academy, disarmament efforts, international exchanges and other peace-related programs.
The non-military portion would be returned to the Treasury for use in civilian government programs.
In , a related committee composed largely of church and peace group lobbyists was formed in Washington.
They persuaded Rep. Ronald Dellums (D.-Calif.) and nine other U.S. Representatives to introduce the bill that year.
The Ann Arbor and Washington committees, working from their own homes and offices on a volunteer basis, developed support for the bill from around the country from thousands of individuals and many Church, peace and political groups.
In , the two committees consolidated their efforts into the National Council for a World Peace Tax Fund, operating from a staffed office in Washington.
In , the bill was introduced in the Senate for the first time by Sen. Mark Hatfield (R-Oregon).
The World Peace Tax Fund Bill (H.R. 4897, S. 880) was introduced again in by Rep. Dellums and 29 co-sponsors (as of ) in the House and Sen. Hatfield in the Senate.
In the first years after the withdrawal of U.S. troops from Vietnam, the war tax refusal movement lost a lot of its energy.
Although there continued to be many more tax resisters than before the Vietnam era, the organized movement faltered.
National WTR published the last issue of its Tax Talk publication in and formally dissolved .
Many local WTR groups lapsed into inactivity.
Most of the national peace groups lost interest.
Individual resisters often had difficulty finding needed information and support.
As the much-heralded “Vietnam dividend” releasing resources for domestic needs failed to appear and military spending continued to rise, interest in war tax resistance began to grow, particularly within the religious community.
In , the Center on Law and Pacifism was formed.
The brainchild of Catholic attorney and lay theologian William Durland, it was conceived as a radical religious pacifist group focusing on the relationship of pacifism to law and legal institutions.
The Center has provided legal counsel to a number of war tax refusers.
It has not won any major legal victories, but its existence as an expert resource for support encouraged many to become war tax resisters.
A Center workshop in called for a People Pay for Peace campaign involving the refusal of at least $2.40 (U.S. military budget per day per capita) in federal taxes.
During the tax filing season, local groups formed in a number of cities, resulting in many new war tax resisters and a number of public witness actions.
The Center issued the first edition of People Pay for Peace: A Military Tax Refusal Guide in , and has issued a revised edition or a supplement to the book each year since.
At the same time, interest was increasing in historically pacifist churches.
The General Conference Mennonlte Church had been considering the issue for years, beginning its forum newsletter God and Caesar in .
The issue became a major one for the New Call to Peacemaking (NCP), a joint effort by Mennonites, Quakers and Brethren to revitalize their peace witness.
At the first NCP national conference in , the gathering called upon individual church members “seriously to consider refusal to pay the military portion of their federal taxes as a response to Christ’s call to radical discipleship.”
It further called “on our denominations, congregations, and meetings to give high priority to the study and promotion of war tax resistance in our own circles and beyond.”
This strong stand received considerable publicity in the mass media.
Particularly among Mennonites and Quakers, greatly increased consideration of the issue has resulted and many more individual members are engaging in war tax resistance.
A second NCP conference in reaffirmed the position.
In , Long Island peace activist Ed Pearson and others active in the World Peace Tax Fund movement launched a new national campaign to focus mass war tax resistance on passage of the bill.
The Conscience and Military Tax Campaign seeks 100,000 people to sign a Resolution stating that they are either now resisting the payment of war taxes or will do so by the time 100,000 have signed.
An Escrow Account of refused military taxes is maintained, to be turned over to IRS after enactment of the World Peace Tax Fund bill.
On , Catholic Archbishop Raymond G. Hunthausen of Seattle spoke to a regional Lutheran gathering, sharing “a vision of… a sizable number of people… refusing to pay 50 percent of their taxes in nonviolent resistance to nuclear murder and suicide.”
Although he later stated in a pastoral letter that this was a secondary aspect of the speech, his vision received considerable national publicity and sparked many Catholics and other mainstream Christians to consider seriously war tax refusal for the first time.
There is now a growing war tax resistance movement which has begun to reach Americans in the mainstream.
This movement has the potential of becoming a major component of a large and influential campaign to halt the arms race.
(Bill Samuel is a Quaker who has worked on tax refusal for years.
This article first appeared in New Catholic World.)
Resources
Conscience and Military Tax Campaign, 44 Bellhaven Road, Bellport, NY 11713; (516) 286‒8825. Newsletter, literature, escrow account.
National Council for a World Peace Tax Fund, 2111 Florida Ave., N.W., Washington, DC 20008: (202) 483‒3751. Newsletter, literature, slideshow.
Center on Law and Pacifism. P.O. Box 1584, Colorado Springs, CO 80901; (303) 635‒0041. Publishes People Pay for Peace: A Military Tax Refusal Guide ( edition).
Peacemakers, P.O. Box 627, Garberville, CA 95440. Handbook on Nonpayment of Taxes for War ( edition — $1.50) and The Peacemaker (monthly — $10 year).
War Resisters League, 339 Lafayette St., New York, NY 10012; (212) 228‒0450. Guide to War Tax Resistance, , $6 plus postage.
