Some historical and global examples of tax resistance → religious groups and the religious perspective → Catholic churches → Donald C. Fisher

Here are some excerpts from The Catholic News Archive concerning tax resistance, from sources other than Catholic Worker, from the 1947–71 span:

First, a typed news dispatch from “M. Massiani,” Paris Correspondent for the National Catholic Welfare Council (U.S.) News Service, dated 4 August 1947:

Priests and People of Vendee, France, Protest Tax on Christian Schools and Refusal of State Aid

Paris, July 28. — 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 3 January 1967 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 4 February 1970 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 last summer 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 mid-February. Groups organized around such regional centers are to focus their tax resistance efforts on demonstrations on March 2 and April 15.

“We picked the March 2 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 April 15 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 1948, 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., last Nov. 15, 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 last year, while 1,025 refused to pay all or part in protest against the Vietnam war. The 1,025 protesters was an increase from 592 the previous year.

IRS counted 10,511 cases of refusal to pay the telephone tax in the first nine months of 1969, down from 14,396 in the same period of 1968. 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 1969, 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 last month, 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 1846–48.

About half a dozen have been jailed in the past 20 years. Juanita Nelson was arrested in Philadelphia in 1959, 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 1958, 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 1949. Eroseanna Robinson, sentenced to a year and a day in Chicago in 1960, was released unconditionally after 93 days. Walter Gormley got 7 days in Cedar Rapids in 1960.

And in the first such imprisonment in several years, Neil Haworth of New London, Conn., got 60 days in 1968 for refusal to produce records. He had served six months in 1959 for “committing civil disobedience at a missile site” near Omaha. And in 1962, 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 Dec. 19, written arguments were submitted on Jan. 2, and on Jan. 6 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 10 April 1970 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 Jan. 7, 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, 17 April 1970:

Five say they won’t pay taxes

Five local clergymen handed in their income tax forms at the Federal Bldg. downtown on Wednesday 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 Wednedsay (April 15), 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 19 March 1971 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 fiscal year 1971, 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, April 15. 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 April 2–4, 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 April 2, 3 or 4. 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 April 15. 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 April 2–4 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 28 May 1971 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.

Here are some excerpts from The Catholic News Archive concerning war tax resistance from 1972:

The National Catholic News Service carried this dispatch on 24 January 1972:

Episcopal Diocese Pays Protesting Priest’s Tax Bill

By NC News Service, Philadelphia (NC) — The Episcopal diocese of Philadelphia has decided to pay $545 in income taxes withheld by one of its priests as a protest against the Vietnam War.

After the Rev. David Gracie, an urban missioner here, had refused for 10 months to pay half of his income tax assessment, the Internal Revenue Service went to his employer asking the Episcopal diocese to turn over $545 of the priest’s salary.

Refusing to do so would have made the diocese liable for possible criminal charges for non-payment of the taxes.

Father Gracie appealed to the Episcopal council “to join in a corporate act of resistance against this barbaric, immoral war.” Paying the bill, he said, “will finish me as a tax resister.”

Voting to pay the tax bill, the council also set up a committee to study the theological implications of conscientious tax resistance and tax exemption.

Tom Cornell reviewed the book Ain’t Gonna Pay for War No More (Robert Calvert, The War Tax Resistance, 1971) in the March 1972 issue of Catholic Worker:

Ain’t Gonna Pay No More

This book represents a tremendous contribution to the movement against war and for a more decent society, in itself and in the War Tax Resistance campaign from which it emerges. Probably the most significant development in The Movement during the past two years has been the growth of organised tax resistance along with its alternate funds. Tax resistance has long been recognised as a pillar of anti-war activity, at least in theory. After long incubation since the beginning of the Cold War in 1948, tax resistance is taking its place in the minds of many pacifist activists alongside such stances as conscientious objection and draft resistance.

Ain’t Gonna Pay is an unusual movement publication. It is pocket size, has a soft cover, is handsomely but modestly produced. The type is legible and generously spaced. It is crammed with useful information in a digestible form, and it is sprightly and wryly humorous. To Bob Calvert is due not only credit for this most useful book, but also for the cohesion and outreach the national tax resistance has attained. A most extraordinary man, you may read more about him in his own disarming paragraphs “About the Author,” in the comments about him by Bradford Lyttle on the back cover, and in David Dellinger’s Preface.

Karl Meyer

Much of the impetus for the tax resistance movement has come from the writings of Karl Meyer. Karl has recently been released from Sandstone federal prison where he served 10 months for one of his experiments with tax resistance. An important new development he has spurred has been the alternate fund. Basic reasoning behind both tax resistance and the fund is well stated by Karl himself in his October–November 1969 CW article. It is well to repeat portions of it:

If we pool all of the tax money that we did not pay in locally administered funds, we can create a model for a future in which men can regain direct control of their common institutions and effectively deny their consent to governmental programs they believe evil.

In each community or region we can set up a common fund. Each contributor will have one vote, as in a cooperative. The members will meet from time to time to set priorities and guidelines for administering it according to their guidelines.

Assuming that the federal income tax contributions of most people in the movement probably exceed their voluntary political, organizational and charitable contributions, we would expect that the tax alternative funds could become one of the most substantial sources of money for the projects and purposes in which we most strongly believe. But beyond that we could hope that our experience in mutual aid through these cooperative funds would bear fruit in the development of ashrams and communities for closer economic and social cooperation, for it is when our constructive action and our resistance to evil become for real that we see the need and value of mutual aid and begin to create cooperative alternatives within the competitive society on which we live.

If we ignore or neglect the great potential of tax resistance joined to constructive action, we must be deaf to history and blind to experience.

Do we not know that tax resistance has been one of the greatest sources and strategies of revolutionary movements throughout history? Has not history shown that taxation is a process requiring the general consent and cooperation of the populace? Has it not been shown that when numbers of people reject a government by withdrawing their consent from the elaborate bureaucratic process of taxation, that government is in deep trouble? Did not the French Revolution begin with tax resistance? Was not tax resistance the slogan and rallying cry of the American Revolution: “Taxation without representation is tyranny I”?… Did not Thoreau fashion the cornerstone of American resistance theory out of his own experiences as a tax resister? Was not Gandhi’s largest and most significant campaign of civil disobedience, the Salt March, based on the strategy of tax resistance?

Can we not see what the IRS knows full well: that even where the public gives general consent to the process of taxation it is always and everywhere a grudging and tentative consent, a resentful and querulous consent, a fragile consent that must always be nursed and safeguarded by positive relations? There exists among the public at large a great reservoir of grievance, a vast subliminal potential for tax resistance and evasion that only needs to be aroused by news of widespread tax resistance.

Let us learn from the experience of the draft resistance movement and the telephone tax refusal campaign. A few years ago, many people regarded draft refusal as a personal witness of the solitary conscience. Today it has taken on the dimension of a social movement. It is, however, restricted by the narrow age and sex range of those who are subject to conscription, and even more restricted by the narrowness of the draft as a single focus of action.

When we combine real war tax resistance with the tremendous constructive potential of a Fund for Humanity, we will have raised a banner to which all honest and courageous men of conscience can repair.

Penalties

People are always anxious to know the penalties for various forms of tax resistance. There is a chapter of questions and answers taken from the column by Payno Warbucks in Tax Talk, organ of the WTR ($2 a year subscription). It is practical and accurate. Stories of individuals who have dealt with IRS’ and the courts’ attempts to make them pay are told succinctly. Long-time readers will recall the stories of Wally and Juanita Nelson, Rev. Maurice McCracken, Walter Gormly and Eroseanna Robinson. Some recent efforts to collect taxes-due through confiscation of property and sale at public auctions are related with hardly suppressed glee. Here is the story of Bob Marcus:

On November 18, 1970, the IRS auctioned the car of Bob Marcus at the National Guard Armory in Boulder, Colorado for $1.25 in phone tax money. People from the Institute/Mountain West, a branch of the Institute for the Study of Nonviolence and Denver War Tax Resistance decided to make good use of the opportunity. They sent out a leaflet to the 3500 people in the Institute’s mailing list, telling them what had happened and asking that they contribute to a fund to buy Bob’s car back at the auction. It was explained that all money bid for the car above the unpaid tax and fees is refunded to the tax (non)payer. The excess money would be put into the war tax resistance alternative fund. The auction was promoted as a “joint IRS/Institute for the Study of Nonviolence fund-raiser for war tax resistance.”

About thirty people showed up at the auction, held in a stiff wind outside the armory. “We passed around cookies in the shape of the resistance omega, tossed balloons of all colors into the air, and held signs which read ‘I ain’t gonna pay for war no more’ and ‘celebrate life — don’t pay war tax.’ ”

Beneath a skull and crossbones “Jolly Roger” kite that went wild in the wind, two revenuers read the IRS ground rules. They told Bob that he could still redeem the car. He stepped foreword and said, “But can I redeem my soul?” The car was sold for $277.00. It took about twenty minutes to complete the transaction because much of the money was in twenty dollar bills.

After the IRS got its blood money, and the Institute expenses had been paid, the war tax resistance alternative fund had netted $203.35. Bob donated the car to the community. He decided that he preferred bicycling to polluting the air.

In addition, all the media covered the story extensively and pretty sympathetically. It can be stated that the IRS bought tens of thousands of dollars worth of publicity for the idea of war tax resistance. “A final benefit is that we showed the people of the community that tax resisters will stick together and help each other out.” How’s that for a bit of nonviolent jujitsu? (pp. 89–90.)

The book ends with a listing of the eighty-nine local War Tax Resistance centers around the country (as of press date last October). There are now almost one hundred more, as well as twenty-three alternate or “Life Funds.” These centers offer tax-resistance counseling, supply current literature, buttons and bumper stickers, coordinate speakers, produce demonstrations, and administer Life Funds. I suggest you buy at least five copies of this book to give to friends who might then help you to organise a war resistance center in your locale. You will get all the help you need from Bob Calvert

The National Catholic Reporter covered Karl Meyer’s war tax resistance in its 10 March 1972 issue:

An act of “political significance”

Resister urges withholding of taxes

By Jerry De Muth

Special to the National Catholic Reporter — Chicago — “Tax resistance is now like draft resistance was in 1967,” Catholic Worker Karl Meyer told 1,000 persons who gathered to greet him on his parole from prison where he had been serving a two-year sentence for falsifying his federal income tax deductions.

“When I tore up my draft card in 1959, it was an act of personal witness,” the 34-year-old Meyer explained. “Today it has become an act of political significance because so many do it.

“In 1966, eight of us refused to pay the telephone excise tax. Now at least 100,000 do not pay that ten per cent tax.” The tax was levied for the expressed purpose of raising funds for the war in Indochina.

Today, Meyer sees the number of income tax resisters as numbering at least 10,000 and perhaps as many as 20,000. And, he hopes that soon this act of personal witness will also become an act of political significance.

In an interview after his talk, Meyer said, “I like concrete results. If you don’t send $500 to Washington, you can spend that $500 as you wish on something positive. That’s concrete, but there’s no other concrete result unless tax resistance becomes organized and grows.

“The first step,” Meyer said, “is nonpayment of the ten per cent telephone tax. Then there is nonpayment of any balance due or nonpayment of $50, $100 or a significant amount of the income tax. If many do this it does have political significance.”

The affair for Meyer included a $5-a-plate dinner, with the proceeds going to the Chicago Peace Council, Peoples Coalition for Peace and Justice and the Catholic Worker movement. Referring to the people who promoted the dinner, he said:

“They should have decided not to send $500 in tax money to Washington and instead sent it to the Peace Council. But instead they send $500 to Washington and send $5 to the Peace Council, and then they wonder why Washington is strong and the Peace Council is weak.”

Meyer was first exposed to pacifism by his mother, who taught him about Gandhi, and his father, William H. Meyer, a former U.S. representative from Vermont who was a conscientious objector during World War Ⅱ. While in the House, the elder Meyer proposed the abolition of both Selective Service and the manufacture of nuclear weapons.

In 1957, young Meyer became involved in active resistance, joined the Catholic Worker and converted to Catholicism. Also a believer in such “educational” acts as peace marches, he has participated in many such actions, including a ten-month, 6,000-mile San Francisco to Moscow march in 1961.

Meyer’s frequent protests against the war have resulted in numerous arrests. In 1966, he was expelled from South Vietnam for antiwar activities and, he says, similar efforts resulted in his being beaten up by delegates to the Lions International convention in Chicago in 1967.

Meyer began his protest against the use of tax money for the military in 1958 by having his income tax underwithheld. In 1960, he progressed to all-out resistance through the influence of a Chicago tax resister, Eroseanna Robinson, an Olympic high jump champion.

So that no income tax would be withheld from her pay, Miss Robinson would change jobs every time her income from a job totaled more than $600. At the end of the year she did not report any of her income. She was arrested and while detained in Cook county jail in Chicago began to fast while Meyer and others picketed outside. Sentenced to a year in prison, she continued to fast. After 108 days the Bureau of Prisons, Meyer said, asked the judge to release her and the judge complied.

“I said to myself then that I was not going to pay taxes any more,” Meyer said. “I began by leafletting the IRS IRS offices.”

At the time Meyer was supporting a House of Hospitality in Chicago and legally claimed as exemptions the persons who were living there. As a result, no taxes were withheld. “But as I phased out the house,” he added, “I no longer legally had a sufficient number of exemptions. But in 1969 I claimed 12 anyway, and in 1970 I claimed 10.”

Meyer was legally entitled to four — for himself; his wife, Jean; a son, William, now eight, and a daughter, Kristin, now four. (They since have had a third child, Eric, now one year old.) It was for those extra exemptions that Meyer received a maximum two-year sentence plus a $1,000 fine last May 21. He was released from the federal prison at Sandstone, Minn. — where Joe Mulligan and Ed Hoffmans of the Chicago 15 are also imprisoned — on Feb. 16 and will remain on parole until May of next year.

Meyer has frequently changed jobs to avoid a lien on his wages. Once, the government got $46.60 before he quit one job. It is the only income tax he has paid in the past 11 years, he says. He has also avoided paying all but $8 of the federal excise tax on phone service.

“My jobs were determined by my radical pattern of life,” he explained. “I was in jail a lot. I was not thinking of building a career, which was good because, as soon as you stop living as the poor live and stop working as the poor work, you stop caring about their needs.”

A simple lifestyle is a very important part of tax resistance for the Meyers. “There are essential principles more important than tax resistance,” Meyer emphasized. “They are the idea of voluntary poverty and simplicity of life which we have done through our House of Hospitality, sharing our income with others.

“The other major principle is the refusal to do harm to others, especially to claim control of our own productivity and not pay for the killing of others. We can claim control of our lives through tax resistance.”

Meyer said there is only one reason why more persons, even if they strongly oppose the war, do not refuse to pay part or all of their income taxes — “They’re afraid.”

“But the first time it’s done, there’s certainly no risk,” he said confidently. Partly for this reason he backs mass tax resistance as a national antiwar action.

“The question,” he said, “is how do you tell people about their own strengths. They mistakenly think that Karl Meyer is stronger then they.”

Meyer, who frequently delves into history with a preference for the writings of Thomas Paine, fondly points out that the American Revolution, the French Revolution and Gandhi’s movement for Indian independence all had their roots in tax resistance.

The step of tax resistance, he feels, is important for those who have unsuccessfully urged their senators to vote against military appropriations. “When the time comes for us to vote against appropriations — and that day comes April 15 — do we vote against appropriations?” he asked. “The courage we ask of our representatives should not be greater than the courage we ask of ourselves.”

As for the Meyers’ future, Meyer said that they will not pay the $2,000 in taxes owed for past years going back to 1962, will not pay the telephone tax and will not pay his $1,000 fine.

“But in order that we may be allowed to remain together and not be separated by imprisonment,” he added, “we will limit our income to an amount that will not be taxable, to about $4,800. It’s easy to live on this. In fact, I think we can live on $4,000 by the simplification of our life. We will then be in a position to share the surplus with others not so fortunate as us.”

Meyer was working at a hospital when he was arrested a year ago and now is employed by “an association,” working with the mentally retarded. “We will continue to do productive work for the good of society,” he vowed. “We will continue to oppose this war and all other wars and all militarism by the testimony of our lives and the witness of our actions.”

From the 30 March 1972 The Catholic Advocate:

Promotes “Tax Resistance” to War

A 27-year-old priest refuses to pay the “war share” of his federal income tax. Rev. Thomas McKenna, assistant pastor at St. Luke’s, St. Paul, Minn., in a letter to more than 100 priests inviting them to discuss possible tax resistance, said: “No matter how we vote, no matter what we say, no matter how many statements, marches and demonstrations we endorse, we still support the war (and the weekly death toll) with a large portion of every dollar we pay in federal income and telephone excise taxes.”

A follow-up on this from the National Catholic Reporter, 7 April 1972:

17 clergy to withhold tax

Special to the National Catholic Reporter — St. Paul, Minn. — Seventeen Twin Cities’ area priests, ministers and seminarians have announced that they will refuse to pay a portion of their federal income tax to protest the Vietnam war. Among the group are five priests of the St. Paul-Minneapolis archdiocese.

“We cannot before God support or finance this unjustifiable killing of fellow human beings whether American or Southeast Asian,” said Father Thomas McKenna, a leader of the group, in a statement read at the federal building here. “Therefore, we feel that we must in conscience refuse to pay that portion of our federal income tax that goes to support this inhuman, ungodly war.”

Father McKenna, an assistant pastor at St. Luke’s Catholic church in St. Paul, said that 25 priests of the archdiocese had indicated to him that they might join in the tax resistance. The 20 who did not join, he said, are still considering other forms of protest, such as withholding the federal telephone tax.

The tax resisters’ statement came at the conclusion of a peaceful demonstration by more than 200 clergy, seminarians and laymen who marched from St. Paul’s Dayton Avenue Presbyterian church to the St. Paul cathedral and then to the federal building. The march was organized by the Ecumenical Witness for Peace.

A skeptical reporter for the Pittsburgh Catholic penned this for its 21 April 1972 edition:

Most pay little attention

Peace marchers get mixed reaction

By William McClinton

A procession of 25 people, even when escorting a black coffin and led by a man with a cross, doesn’t make much of a ripple in the hurrying crowds in downtown Pittsburgh at lunch time.

So it was with the 25 clergy and laity — mostly Catholic — who marched some 10 blocks to the Federal Bldg. last Friday noon to protest the escalation of the Vietnam war and the use of their tax money to finance the war.

Their sidewalk procession drew attention in some less busy areas, but in the main blocks was separated and absorbed by the crowd.

Nevertheless, the war headlines at every newsstand illustrated the relevancy of their concern, and the news media was present, almost as numerous as the marchers.

The 25 were members or friends of the recently opened Thomas Merton Peace and Justice Center, an interfaith but predominately Catholic effort on the South Side.

Larry Kessler, director of the Center, said the cross was to illustrate the religious motivation of the protesters who cannot “in conscience” support “this atrocity we call the Indochina war.”

Asked if the escalation wasn’t the result of North Vietnam’s attack, several responded in essence: “What do you expect? We’ve had plenty of time to get out. We shouldn’t be there in the first place.”

The demonstrators chose the front of the Diocese of Pittsburgh Bldg. to form, unknown to diocesan officials. As they filed through town they passed out handbills signed by 45 persons, including 12 diocesan priests and three nuns, announcing the undersigned were withholding part of their federal tax payment or the 10 per cent phone excise tax to protest the war. The handbills urged others to “conscientiously object” the same way. Many people took the bills and read them impassively.

The procession stopped at Trinity Episcopal Cathedral on Sixth St. for a brief prayer service and again at the Methodist Bldg. on Smithfield at Seventh where the closest thing to an incident occurred.

The ground floor of the building houses a bank branch, and Fr. Donald Fisher had hardly begun paraphrasing a psalm through a portable mike when the building manager rushed out and announced that “You can’t do that here.” It was private property, the manager said tensely and when the demonstrators tried to discuss it, he hurried off to call the police. By the time he returned, however, the demonstration had moved on.

At the Federal Bldg. on Liberty Ave. where several more demonstrators were waiting, the group set the wooden coffin down in the outdoor plaza, and after Kessler read from one of Fr. Daniel Berrigan’s writings, they tossed into the coffin some old phone bills and income tax forms as a symbolic gesture.

Several dozen persons who gathered to watch included four or five young men preparing to enlist at Armed Forces offices inside the building.

“It’s a shame.” said Robert DeRose Jr., 18, from Gallitzin in Cambria County, a sturdy, dark-haired youth who said — looking at his watch — he was to be sworn into the Navy “in 10 minutes.”

“All they’re doing is letting Communism spread around the world,” he said heatedly. “Yet they’ll be the first to scream when Communism comes in.”

There was a humorous moment when five of the priests went inside to pay their self-reduced income tax and — even as any hapless taxpayer — were unwittingly directed by a solicitous Internal Revenue guide to the wrong line.

“I don’t take any money here,” the official told them after they had worked their way up to his desk and Fr. Donald McIlvane had introduced everyone all around and explained their purpose. “You have to give it to the cashier.”

The cashier proved to be an attractive redhead at the other end of the room who listened politely to the priests’ explanations, smiled and said, “Thank you,” as she accepted each payment.

The procession’s religious aura commanded respect — the prayers, the obvious concern for peaceful protest, the appeal to Christian principles, as the marchers see those principles.

But the intensity of the division this war has generated was reflected by the reaction of a stumpy, graying man on one streetcorner. “They’re a bunch of Communists,” he told a companion contemptuously. “They wouldn’t do that in Russia.”

“Not in East Germany either,” his friend replied in a strong foreign accent.

The National Catholic News Service carried this dispatch on 5 June 1972:

Tax Problems Dog Catholic Worker Movement

By NC News Service New York (NC) — “My little case is to explain to the court that performing the corporal works of mercy is indeed charitable even under the standards imposed by our government, and I refuse to apply for tax exemption.”

With those words Dorothy Day, the 74-year-old founder of the Catholic Worker movement, has summarized what she expects to say when she appears July 3 in a federal court in Lewisburg, Pa.

Miss Day will have to explain why the Catholic Worker movement has not paid $296,359 in fines, penalties and back income taxes to the Internal Revenue Service for the past six years.

A confirmed pacifist, Miss Day has opposed the theory of a just war, a theory that has been foremost in her decision not to apply for federal tax exemption.

“Our refusal to apply for exemption status in our practice of the works of mercy is part of our protest against war and the present social ‘order’ which brings on wars today,” she said.

“One of the most costly protests against war in the way of long enduring personal sacrifice is to refuse to pay income taxes for war,” she wrote recently in the Catholic Worker newspaper.

She argues that the Catholic Worker organization has never paid salaries. Its volunteer workers are given room, board, clothing and free instruction in the Catholic Worker movement.

“So we do not need to pay federal income taxes,” she contends.

“I’m sure that many will think me a fool indeed, almost criminally negligent for not taking more care to safeguard, not just the bank account, but the welfare of all the lame, halt, and blind — deserving or undeserving poor — who come to us.”

Miss Day told NC News Service she considers the tax investigations a “harassment by the federal government” because the Catholic Worker movement is against all war.

The Catholic Worker is not incorporated as a religious organization and therefore is not exempt from paying federal income taxes. She said the Catholic Worker does not incorporate because it is a principal of the movement to avoid all ties with the state.

She says the Catholic Worker did not set up a defense committee to campaign for Catholic funds.

“I can only trust that this crisis will pass,” she said. “I am sure that some way will be found either to avert the disaster, or for us to continue to care for our old, sick, helpless, hungry and homeless if it happens,” she said.

The 21 July 1972 National Catholic Reporter reported that the “peace tax fund” idea had captured Catholic attention as well:

Applying papal suggestions

From tax dollars to peace fund

By Phil Haslanger

Special to the National Catholic Reporter, Madison, Wis.— Trying to apply papal suggestions to political realities is not the easiest job in the world. Take, for example, Pope Paul’s suggestion in his encyclical Populorum Progressio that a world fund be established “to be made up of part of the money spent on arms, to relieve the most destitute of this world.”

For Dr. Daniel J. Guilfoil, a 39-year-old philosophy professor at Edgewood college here, that suggestion provided the key to his dream of having part of his tax money be deferred from military expenses to help the poor.

With the introduction of a bill in the U.S. House of Representatives which would enable citizens to avoid paying war taxes on grounds of conscience (N.C.R., April 28), Guilfoil saw his dream moving closer to reality.

Although Guilfoil had worked for about two years to have his congressman, Rep. Robert Kastenmeier (D-Wis.), introduce such a bill, the push which finally got the bill introduced came from a citizens group in Ann Arbor, Mich. under the leadership of Dr. David Bassett, a physician.

Neither Guilfoil nor the Ann Arbor group had any knowledge about each other — a fact Guilfoil interprets as both a weakness in the tactical effort and a sign that the bill embodies an idea whose time has come.

The path Guilfoil followed which led him to work for such legislation was not dissimilar from that followed by other liberal Catholics in the wake of Vatican Ⅱ.

As enthusiasm for the declarations of the council yielded to frustration over the pace of change, Guilfoil, his wife, Barbara (“She’s probably more activist than I am”) and their nine children became a part of Madison’s John ⅩⅩⅢ experimental community.

With the community, they worked on civil rights and open housing legislation and, in Guilfoil’s words, “moved into the peace movement, if you will, as a connected issue.”

Working with the social action committee of Madison Area Community of Churches to establish a draft counseling center, Guilfoil became sensitive to the witness offered by conscientious objectors and he began to think that “the principle of alternative service should be extended to all people,” not just to draftable young men.

At the same time, he was aware of the growing tax resistance movement to protest the war and he was considering the implications of Populorum Progressio.

The various threads were woven together by Guilfoil and other members of John ⅩⅩⅢ into a petition, signatures were gathered and a resolution was adopted by the social action committee of the diocesan priests’ senate urging “legislation to create an alternate fund to administer to the needs of people.”

From there, more signatures were collected and on election night, 1970, Guilfoil talked with Kastenmeier about the possibility of having legislation to that effect introduced. The congressman responded favorably and suggested the petitions and information be sent to his administrative assistant.

Kastenmeier’s office considered the proposal, but decided that the time was not yet ripe for such a bill.

Some time later the idea of just such a bill was stirring in Ann Arbor. By fall the World Peace Tax Fund steering committee had been established. According to Arthur Mack, the committee’s corresponding secretary, a second committee was established in Washington to lobby towards such legislation.

Rep. Ronald Dellums (D-Cal.) liked the idea and put his office to work on rounding up cosponsors. In April of this year, he and the other nine congressmen introduced the “bill and saw it referred to the House Ways and Means committee.

April 19, Guilfoil prodded the faculty of Edgewood college to “go on record as supporting the right of all citizens to the privilege of the status of ‘conscientious objector.’ ” The following day, he convinced the social action commission of Blessed Sacrament parish in Madison to unanimously adopt a resolution asking the parish council to educate the parish “on the theology of alternate service.”

Resolutions written by Guilfoil supporting the passage of the World Peace Tax Fund act the bill pending in the House were adopted by both the Second District caucus of the Democratic party (Madison) and, most significantly of all, by the State Democratic party as a part of its platform.

Guilfoil sees his efforts on the local level as part of the push to draw national attention to the bill. He said he hopes the National Conference of Catholic Bishops will consider supporting the legislation, and he would like to see other national groups support the bill.

As for the realistic chances of getting the bill out of committee and passed into law, Guilfoil admits, “I’m not optimistic. But if you told me two years ago it would even be a bill now. I wouldn’t have believed you.”

He sees lobbying combined with education as the lever to getting the bill moving. “There’s enough sentiment today that taxes are being directed foolishly,” he says. “It’s a matter of getting people aware that straight people can think about these things.”

For Catholic groups, he added, the concepts of the bill “must be tied to the pacifist and just war traditions of the church — the doctrine of the church is surely important.”

As for Guilfoil himself, he is not waiting for the government to pass legislation which will make that papal suggestion a political reality. He has joined with others in the state to form a Wisconsin Peace Fund.

The specifics of the group haven’t been worked out yet, but basically, members will put a part of their tax money into the fund and the group will disperse it to local causes.

What Guilfoil and the people in Ann Arbor hope is that someday that peace fund will be on a national or even international level. The World Peace Tax Fund act has helped sustain that hope.

The 18 August 1972 issue of National Catholic Reporter reported on a national war tax resistance conference and included a sidebar on “How tax resisters resist taxes.” From the opening paragraphs, it appears that a political endorsement was on the agenda, suggesting that the conference was much more mainstream-liberal then than it is now (I doubt such an endorsement would be seriously considered by a NWTRCC conference these days):

War tax resisters

Can’t quite “endorse” McGovern

Jim Castelli, Associate Editor

Kansas City, Mo. — The second National War Tax Resistance Conference, attended by about 40 persons from around the country, gave what amounted to a qualified endorsement to the presidential candidacy of Senator George McGovern.

The tax resisters approved a statement praising McGovern for his promises to end the war, cut military spending, restudy the entire tax system and support a guaranteed annual income.

The statement also said the political climate in the country would substantially improve with McGovern as president and that he would end “repressive” actions by the government.

But the tax resisters also said they saw a negative side to McGovern, saying he “completely believes in maintaining United States power in the world” and that providing more arms for Israel, as McGovern has said he would do, is not the way to end the crisis in the Middle East.

Despite such criticisms, the statement said that most of the participants would probably vote for McGovern. Discussion indicated that those at the conference not voting for McGovern would either vote for Dr. Benjamin Spock, the People’s Party candidate, or not vote at all.

One participant suggested that applying pressure on McGovern from the left would let voters see him as a moderate, and therefore more acceptable. Another noted that because War Tax Resistance has strong anarchistic tendencies, a statement in support of McGovern might induce some anarchists to vote in this election.

The conference was held at St. Mark’s church, an unusual church in that it is staffed by Protestant and Catholic clergy. The participants, for the most part, wore sandals, well-worn jeans and long hair but weren’t all young. They came from both coasts and such cities as Denver, Chicago and Ann Arbor, Mich.

Also coming out of the conference was an agreement to draw up a statement on what the focus of the war tax resistance movement should be when the war ends. It was agreed tax resisters should continue to oppose the domination of the federal budget by the military and the centralization of power in the hands of governmental and corporate structures.

This opposition, the participants said, should include presenting alternatives, such as a nonviolent peace-keeping force and a blueprint for converting to an economy based on peace — for example, an analysis of how to shift the emphasis at Boeing Aircraft to building mass transportation facilities.

The conference expressed opposition to key segments of the World Peace Fund Tax Act, a measure introduced in the U.S. House of Representatives by Congressman Ron Dellums (D-Calif.) and nine other legislators.

The bill would allow taxpayers who qualified for conscientious objector status under Selective Service standards to divert the percentage of their taxes slated for the military to a “world peace tax board,” which would study peaceful alternatives to international conflict.

The major objections to the bill were the screening process to obtain the conscientious objector status and the fact that the alternative funds would still be controlled at the national level, preventing tax money from being used in the community from which it was paid.

No specific action was taken at the conference on the bill, but Robert Calvert, coordinator of War Tax Resistance, said he expects a new national working committee to try to rework the bill in October.

Calvert, in an interview, said the number of Americans withholding taxes because of the war is growing. He estimated that between 100,000 and 200,000 are either refusing to page the 10 per cent federal telephone excise tax, which is used for the war, or refusing to pay all or part of their income tax.

At present, he said, there are 192 war tax resistance centers in the U.S. He added that each regional office of the Internal Revenue Service now has a person or department dealing with taxpayers protesting the war.

“We’d love to get our hands on the IRS list,” he said. “They have many more names of resisters than we have because many people resist on their own without working with a local center.”

The two main purposes of the conference were organizational: the creation of a working committee, and the question of whether or not to move the national office from New York to Kansas City.

The proposal to move the office was approved, partly because of expected lower operating costs, but mostly because War Tax Resistance wants to be closer to “middle America.” The move is expected to be made by the end of the year.

The working committee, now being assembled, will consist of representatives of national regions and the seven state area around Kansas City. The committee is to meet every two months beginning in October.

How tax resisters resist taxes

Special to the National Catholic Reporter, Kansas City, Mo.— How do you resist paying taxes as a protest against the war, and what happens when you do?

Interviews conducted at the second annual National War Tax Resistance Conference and materials put out by the movement provide these answers:

There are a variety of ways to resist taxes: Withholding the federal telephone excise tax, withholding all or part of the federal income tax, not filing a tax return at all, paying taxes under protest and keeping one’s earnings below a taxable level. All have a different set of consequences.

The most common form of resistance is withholding the telephone tax, says Robert Calvert, coordinator of the War Tax Resistance organization. The telephone tax, which helps finance the war, currently is 10 per cent.

To withhold it, resisters simply deduct the tax when they pay their phone bills, explaining that it is a protest against the war, not against the phone company. Members of War Tax Resistance say that telephone companies have told resisters that their service will not be interrupted, and that they regard the protest as a matter between the individual and the government.

They point out, however, that phone companies do provide the Internal Revenue Service with the names of resisters. The experience of resisters is that, after several written demands for payment, IRS can usually secure payment by attaching the resister’s bank account, taking the amount of the unpaid tax, plus up to six per cent interest.

Technically, a person who resists the telephone tax is liable to a year’s imprisonment and a $10,000 fine, but so far the government has been satisfied with collection, resisters say.

In Calvert’s opinion, the government might still decide to arrest telephone tax resisters. But, he adds, it has been the history of movements such as tax resistance that they are strengthened by governmental crackdowns.

Resisting income taxes is more difficult because taxes are withheld from most people’s wages during the year. Thus, resisters who owe money at the end of the year can refuse to pay it or, through the use of such tactics as claiming more dependents than they actually have, file for a refund.

Income tax resistance is viewed more seriously by the government; resisters have been jailed, but penalties are greater for falsification of income tax returns or failure to file than for refusal to pay. (Any tax returns indicating resistance should be accompanied by a letter explaining the nature of the protest.)

So far, however, either because their returns have been accepted by IRS computers, or because appeals proceedings can take years, most resisters have still not had to pay taxes.

Tax resisters advise against keeping withheld tax money, however. The organization instead advises putting the money into alternate funds which may be used to assist tax resisters who are challenged by the government.

The government can seize personal property such as cars and houses for public auction to bring in the owed taxes. (Whatever money is brought in over and above the taxes and auction fees is returned to the resister.)

These auctions have become occasions for peace demonstrations. An auction for a car that had been seized from a Kansas man for tax resistance heard bids of Vietnamese tears, coffins, and napalmed babies. Also, a resister can often arrange to have friends or a resistance center make the actual purchase at the auction.

The use of withholding allowances as a means of tax resistance was devised by John Egnal, a lawyer from Philadelphia representing resister Jack Malinowski. Malinowski was charged with supplying “false information” on his tax status; he had claimed 14 dependents (the number of other people in the Philadelphia tax resistance center), an amount which negated his tax for the year. He was found guilty, but has not as yet been sentenced.

The problem with past methods of tax resistance is that they are all technically illegal because they hinge on a yes or no answer to questions regarding certain parts of the internal revenue code. The use of withholding allowances, however, seems to avoid this situation.

An employee fills out IRS form W-4 to indicate to his employer the number of deductions he will claim for the coming year; form W-4E indicates that no tax liability has been incurred for the year, usually because of income below the taxable level.

People who expect to have a large number of itemized deductions can enter a number of withholding allowances — converted from dollar figures by a chart on the back of the W-4 form — which will reduce tax payments; this way, higher taxes are not paid and then refunded at the end of the year.

Egnal holds that “the withholding allowance claim would be applicable to any tax resister who believed that, as a result of the illegal and immoral conduct of the U.S. government, some or all of the federal taxes claimed could not lawfully be collected.

“If one held such a belief… it would be necessary to improvise some basis for preparing one’s income tax returns, since IRS has not, as yet, seen fit to follow the law of this country, which includes not only the Internal Revenue code, but also numerous principles of international law to which the U.S. has subscribed.”

This improvisation, according to Egnal, would be a “war crimes deduction” for which a withholding allowance could be entered.

Egnal, claims that if the government were to prosecute such a resister, “the only false statement they could point to would be ‘I am entitled to a war crimes deduction because…’ Such a statement reflects a legal conclusion which has never been ruled upon by any court, and which… enjoys the support of many noted scholars.”

Even if the courts eventually rule that such deductions are illegal, Egnal points out that past rulings would not allow prosecution because the fact that the legal question was in doubt erases the possibility of “willfully” breaking the law.

A similar situation exists with form W-4E, which states “Under penalties of perjury, I certify that I incurred no liability for federal income tax for 1971 and that I anticipate that I will incur no liability for federal income tax for 1972.”

A resister could, according to Egnal, use the “war crimes deduction” to justify the claim that he was not liable for any taxes.

(A follow-up brief in the 17 November 1972 issue read: “There was some discussion at the annual conference of War Tax Resistance last summer that if McGovern lost the election, his followers would make a prime target for the tax resistance movement. He lost, and the war is still going on; if it drags on until income tax time, it will be interesting to see if there is an increase in tax resistance.” Another, in the 24 November 1972 issue read: “The war tax resistance movement has found a new home in Mid-America — Kansas City. The organization moved from New York to save money and to be physically closer to ‘middle Americans.’ Nearby Independence, Mo. is the national headquarters of the paramilitary Minutemen, but tax resistance members don’t expect any hassles. One resister joked, ‘Maybe we can learn something from them about grassroots organization.’ The new address will be 912 E. 31^st St., Kansas City, Mo.”)

The same issue included this opinion piece:

War taxes and conscience

“It is the issue of coresponsibility and complicity that will become salient”

By Roderick Hindery

Even if United States military forces in Indochina should be reduced to a residual element or less before or after the November election, the war will remain an issue crucial for the conscience and morale of those who led it and those who were coresponsible. It is particularly the issue of coresponsibility or complicity that will become salient. The fact that the Indochina war was explicitly rejected by millions who simultaneously supported it by taxes and other forms of cooperation may make the judgment of Nuremberg the question of the present era: “that a person acted pursuant to the order of his government or a superior does not relieve him from responsibility under international law, provided a moral choice was in fact possible to him.”

One of the more constructive expressions of an emerging consciousness of coresponsibility for military action is the World Peace Tax Fund Act (N.C.R. July 21). Although the bill may never escape committee in the U.S. House of Representatives, as one attempt to legislate an alternative to economic participation in war for those conscientiously opposed, it is enormously important. The rationale attached to the bill argues that since compulsory significant participation in war against one’s religious conscience is opposed to the original spirit of the First Amendment, the law should allow a realistic alternative such as contributions to qualified peace-related activities — for example, research toward non-military solutions of conflict. The compatibility of alternate contributions with responsible citizenship is defended by reference to Christian tradition, the traditions of the United States, judicial interpretations and legal precedents.

In a survey of some of the bill’s ramifications, the authors assure their readers that tried and proven standards for determining authentic conscientious objector status can also be applied to military tax objectors. As for other possible abuses, it is alleged that the Peace Tax Fund’s passage would not open the floodgates to earmarking tax dollars because opposition to war involves a right of conscience that is uniquely fundamental. In a concluding section entitled “Effectiveness,” the Peace Tax Fund proposal realistically admits that the military budget would not decrease unless Congress were persuaded by the fund’s growth to reduce the priority of military spending. Tax exemption is primarily a means to that end.

In noting that the bill would “force” taxpayers to decide whether they can support military spending, the authors underline the thesis with which we began — the importance of an emerging consciousness about coresponsibility for war through military spending.

The Peace Tax Fund, of course, is not the only path of dissent being explored. An increasing body of tax resisters (192 listed groups in the United States) have experimented with alternatives ranging from individual protests to communal resistance and harassment of the Internal Revenue Service. Taxes are withheld totally or in amounts proportionate to military spending by the government. Equivalent sums are donated to social and charitable causes. However, if the citizen takes steps to insure that military taxes are not confiscated from his salary or property, he is liable to legal sanction.

While refusal to work for taxable wages and emigration are further options, emigration alone may offer the only route toward a “pure non-cooperation.” When economic systems can support war by deficit spending and by the transfer of non-military funds to military budgets, even participation in a future World Peace Tax Fund would not neutralize the fact that living within a military economy is itself a kind of cooperation in war.

The option most commonly followed is to justify support of military spending as a means of buying time and freedom to work toward a less militaristic administration.

None of these options to economic military support necessarily presuppose a totally pacifistic position. In principle they also apply to citizens concerned with the justice of supporting particular wars, revolutions, counterrevolutions, or exorbitantly massive forms of national defense. In each of these instances it is maintained that money becomes power and weaponry which kills against one’s conscience.

What was always true is becoming increasingly obvious. Conscientious objection is a problem not only for draftees but for all taxpayers and their dependents. The fact that the problem is not yet widely recognized is partly grounded in a profound dilemma never resolved in the history of theoretical ethics and only tenuously confronted by national constitutions and international law. The dilemma can be expressed in two questions: 1) Is there not a basic and inalienable human right/duty not to kill against one’s conscience? 2) If this right/duty is inalienable, how can the right/duty of national defense override it?

Within the legal dimension the dilemma is not yet totally resolved. The Russian Constitution, for instance, legislates that the duty of defense supersedes freedom of conscience. The United States Constitution refers to no such priority, only to a religious freedom which implicitly presupposes a prior freedom of conscience in matters so basic as killing. No subsequent legislation has inverted that valuation, and judicial decisions consistently interpret the Constitution in favor of the primacy of conscience (at least in reference to opposition to war in general). This priority of conscience was explicitly confirmed by the principles of Nuremberg, which were approved by the United States and promulgated as international law by the United Nations in 1950. In principle the United States accepts international law as an authority which obliges its own citizens.

In the United States the priority of conscience still needs clearer and more explicit legislation. The unconstitutionality of compulsory war tax may be argued from the perspective of the written Constitution (intentions or actual practice of the framers or citizens who first ratified it) or from the viewpoint of the living constitution (manifested in judicial decisions or people’s referendums). From either or both of these methodological perspectives the priority of conscience may be argued more cogently than it has in the past.

In other words, whatever may be said for or against other freedoms of conscience, the liberty not to kill, when killing is judged immoral, is unique. It is so basic to the freedom of conscience which the Constitution presupposes, that there is need of an explicit amendment or other legislation to guide courts in deciding all cases involved. A bill like the World Peace Tax Fund, while not as irreversible or desirable as a constitutional amendment, is needed to help explicate what is already implicit at the legal level.

Within the ambit of theoretical ethics which operate autonomously outside or within various world religions, the priority of the right not to kill against one’s conscience is in jeopardy due to two as yet unsolved theoretical controversies.

The first controversy is the one engendered by classic utilitarianism’s principle that morality is always determined by whatever serves the greatest happiness of the greatest number of people. As recently as John Rawls’ A Theory of Justice (Cambridge, Mass., Harvard U. Press, 1972; cf. The New York Times Book Review, July 16, 1972), philosophers have joined in continued debate about the adequacy of the greatest happiness principle and have argued the pragmatic need to supplement it by postulating an equal and, in some ways, prior principle of justice: Since certain individual rights of life or liberty are inalienable, their inviolability necessarily, if sometimes invisibly, brings about the greatest happiness. This principle is not acceptable to everyone since it seems verifiable only in the future.

The second controversy has been sharpened by analysis of ethical language. Are rights something people merely feel about and confer or bestow on one another? If rights are dependent on what others think of us or what they contract with us, how can rights be inalienable? Or, if some rights are inalienable, what is the source of human certitude in specifying them, intuition or what?

Ethical thought which is not rooted in heteronomous religious authority continues to founder on these two controversies and lacks the ringing certitude about inalienable rights proclaimed by the United States Declaration of Independence and the Founding Fathers, by the United Nation’s Universal Declaration of Human Rights, or by the international principles of Nuremberg. Consequently, the sources of national and international laws manifest a greater unanimity and authority than do conflicting approaches in theoretical ethics. Whoever does not immediately perceive the self-evidence of the liberty not to kill against one’s conscience will apparently function best when he appeals not to a universal authority in reasoned ethics but to the legal authority and presuppositions of constitutions or international law. As mentioned previously, those who are convinced of conscientious objection’s legality should work for its logical extension into the economic sphere.

Not all wars or military spending appear so clearly immoral to so many people as does the war in Vietnam. There are other issues on which progressives or conservatives may be divided among their own groups, e.g., future support of military operations in the Near East or Latin America, nuclear defense programs powerful enough to destroy the planet many times over, or foreign aid programs thought to be gravely exploitative and imperialistic. The authors of the World Peace Tax Fund Act give assurances that exemption from war taxes would not open the floodgates for citizens who wish to earmark their tax dollars in other programs. On the contrary, this concern may be offset with the judgment that, given a plurality of fundamental human rights, there may be many other crucial moral issues on which citizens should vote with their dollars.

The lasting merit of the growing war tax resistance movement may not be that it helped end the war in Indochina, but that it raised the question of citizens’ coresponsibility to the moral priority it deserves, not only in matters of war and peace, but in every matter of life and death. The issue of citizens’ coresponsible decision-making entails more than the purity and liberty of individual consciences. If free and informed decisions by greater numbers have anything to do with the effectiveness of democracy, the future of democracy itself may be involved.

---

Roderick Hindery teaches religious ethics at Temple university in Philadelphia.

Today, some excerpts from The Catholic News Archive concerning tax resistance in 1982.

The January 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 1979 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 1979, to use for building peace and living with the poor.

Since 1965, 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 January 23, 1982.

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 January 1982, 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 Jan. 28, 1982. 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 last June 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 Jan. 26 and released in the Jan. 28 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 last June 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 1981 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 Jan. 28, 1982. 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 Jan. 26, was released Jan. 28 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 (July 2, 1981): “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 Jan. 24 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 1969 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 4 February 1982, 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 1979 and 1980 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 1976, 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 1981 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 1969 decision of the U.S. District Court in San Francisco, which was upheld by the 9^th 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 10 February 1982 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 March 1982 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 3 February 1982 issue of the Inland Register (newspaper of the Diocese of Spokane, Washington), went out over the wire on 15 February. 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 23 February 1982 dispatch:

Tax Protester Gets Support in Iowa, Criticism in Florida

By NC News Service

Tax protester Tom Cordaro, who refused to pay $828 in 1979 and 1980 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 2 April 1982 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 1982 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 16 April 1982 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 April 15 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 1981 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 three months ago.

In Pittsburgh eight priests held a press conference on April 15, tax deadline day, 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 349^th 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.)

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Archbishop Hunthausen, whose January announcement of tax resistance drew national attention, said in April 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.

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Correction and Insert

At least 11 (NOT 10) U.S. priests…

After 16^th 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 this year 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 April 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 17^th 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 29 April 1982 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 April 22–27 next to the archbishop’s house and other protesters picketed the archbishop. In a statement released April 29 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 April. 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 since April 22 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 April 27, 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 April 26 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 since 1979, 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 April 27 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 (17 May 1982 dispatch):

Archbishop Calls Nuclear Threat History’s Greatest Crisis

By Tracy Early

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 May 16.

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 last year 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 earlier this year 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 this coming July or August.

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 December 1982 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 the second century in Egypt. Tax refusal movements focusing on opposition to war date back at least as far as 1515, 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 1709 refused a royal demand to appropriate money for an expedition into Canada. In the 1750’s, when the Assembly voted large amounts for the French and Indian War, many Quakers and Mennonites refused to pay taxes. During that war, 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 the following century, 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 the late 1940’s.

In early 1948, 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 the 1950’s and 1960’s.

Until 1963, 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 1966, was reimposed explicitly to finance the Vietnam operation and was extended twice during the Vietnam War. For a time 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 1969 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 December 16, 1969. 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 (1971 and 1972) 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 Vietnam era, 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 October 1969 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 the time the Vietnam War ended.

In 1971, 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 1972, 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 1975, the two committees consolidated their efforts into the National Council for a World Peace Tax Fund, operating from a staffed office in Washington. In 1977, 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 1981 by Rep. Dellums and 29 co-sponsors (as of November 1981) 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 1975 and formally dissolved the following year. 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 1978, 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 November 1978 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 1979 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 1979, 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 1975. 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 October 1978, 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 1980 reaffirmed the 1978 position.

In 1979, 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 June 12, 1981, 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 (1982 edition).
• Peacemakers, P.O. Box 627, Garberville, CA 95440. Handbook on Nonpayment of Taxes for War (1981 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, 1982, $6 plus postage.