Catholic Workers Busted at Notre Dame Demanding Military Be Removed from Campus

international | anti-war / imperialism | news report Saturday March 31, 2007 14:40 by Brian Terrell - Maloy Catholic Worker Notre Dame, South Bend, Indiana, USA

On Monday, March 26, Catholic Workers from some 15 communities around
the Midwest and their friends closed their 5th annual Resistance
Retreat by attending Mass for the feast of the Annunciation of Mary at
the Basilica of the Sacred Heart on the campus of the University of
Notre Dame in South Bend, Indiana.

After Mass, we retreatants knelt in silence behind the basilica's
ornate main altar in prayer before the relics of Saint Marcellus. It
is customary in Catholic churches to keep remains of a martyr or other
saint in the altar and here at Notre Dame the saint whose bones lie at
the center of the university's sacramental and spiritual life are
those of Marcellus. St Marcellus was a Roman centurion and a convert
to Christianity who was martyred in 298 during the reign of the
Emperor Diocletian, after he threw down his sword and declared it is
"not right for a Christian, who serves the Lord Christ, to serve in
the armies of the world."

We exited the church through a side door over which is carved in stone
the famous motto, "God, Country, Notre Dame!" and the seals of each of
the armed services and went to the university's administration
building next door to perform a play based on the trial and death of
St Marcellus. The dramatic stage that the steps of the well known
"golden dome" of Notre Dame provided for our presentation was enhanced
by a vivid red banner celebrating Marcellus' courageous refusal to
kill for empire that was held up by Frank Cordaro of Des Moines and
Daniel Baker, 20 years old from Stockton, California, who had only a
month before left the US Navy as a conscientious objector after his
tour in the Iraq war brought him to the same conclusions about
military service and his faith the Marcellus came to centuries before.
Two coffins, one covered with the US flag and one with the Iraqi flag,
flanked the stage and put an ancient story in it's contemporary
context.

Michael Latsch of Duluth played a stellar Marcellus in this short
drama based on actual transcripts of the trial from Roman archives and
Father Jim Murphy of Portage, Wisconsin, drawing on his experience as
a defendant in Omaha's US Courts, was appropriately rigid and
dictatorial as judicial magistrate. Our little play attracted the
attention of passing students and others who joined the audience of
Catholic Workers. It also attracted the attention of campus police who
joined the drama as unwitting actors when they approached the stage
just as Marcellus was being warned by his friend, played by Ben
Jimenez, a Jesuit priest from Cleveland, to take back his sword
quickly before the approaching guards arrived.

Arrive they did and curiously the police did not attempt to disrupt
the unfolding drama but went first to Daniel and Frank holding the
banner on the steps and took them into custody after they refused to
put it away. The audience continued to listen as Marcellus made his
witness of Christian nonviolence to the Roman court while the
contemporary guardians of law quietly ordered Brenna Cussen, our host
from the South Bend Catholic Worker, to leave or face arrest. After
Brenna refused to leave and was taken away, the same offer was made to
and refused by Roberta Thurstin-Timmerman and Don Timmerman of Park
Falls, Wisconsin, Ed Bloomer of Des Moines, Steve Jacobs of Columbia,
Missouri and Michael Walli of Duluth who were simply kneeling silently
next to the coffins.

The last of these friends were removed from us as the Roman judge
sentenced St Marcellus to decapitation and there the play ends. As
epilogue to the performance I read aloud from a leaflet that was being
handed out in the audience and other places on campus- "Upon
converting to Christianity, St Marcellus threw down his sword saying,
'I am a soldier of Christ. It is not permissible for me to fight.' For
Notre Dame to fund and support ROTC (Reserve Officer's Traing Corps)
to teach war reverses the message
of Jesus to love our enemies. As Midwest Catholic Workers, we call on
Notre Dame to stop sponsoring ROTC and to make a deeper commitment to
peacemaking. Students should not have to compromise the Catholic value
of nonviolence in order to fund their education."

Our plan for after the play had been for Brenna, Frank, Ed, Roberta,
Don, Daniel, Steve, Mike and I to solemnly carry the two coffins,
symbols remembering and mourning the dead of the Iraq war, up the
steps of the administration building where we would have knelt in the
rotunda where Brenna would have lead us in praying the rosary. This
sad task was left to me alone and even I was apprehended, rosary in
hand, as I bent to lift one coffin to carry it up the long steps. An
officer politely asked me if I understood that I was trespassing on
the campus of the University of Notre Dame. Of course such beneficent
and helpful deeds as I and my friends were getting nicked for were not
inappropriate or out of place on the campus of a Catholic university.
It was ROTC and not the Catholic Worker, I told the officers, that
was the trespasser at Notre Dame. My invitation to the police that
they should join us in protesting ROTC was not immediately accepted.

The untimely detentions required another change of plan as Brenna had
also been prepared to read to the audience a letter our group wrote
to Fr. John Jenkins, C.S.C., president of the university, before we
went into the building. Fr Jim Murphy stood in for Brenna and read the
letter that said, in part- "We believe that Notre Dame has ceded its
autonomy as a Catholic institution of higher education and compromised
the values of its mission by allowing the Department of Defense to
exert financial and academic control over the education of its ROTC
students. We call upon Notre Dame, first, to reject military funding
for ROTC."

The sight of a Catholic priest in clerical garb being shouted down and
then led away by Notre Dame campus police while calling for an end to
"all Catholic affiliation with ROTC" and for "committing the rich
intellectual resources of our ecclesial tradition instead to teach
Christian non-violent love and the arts of peace," was a scandal, that
further dramatized the awful inconsistency of a school attempting to
teach Christian love and the arts of war.

With the exception of Fr Jim Murphy who got off with a warning, those
of us detained on the steps of the administration building were
released after a short detention with warnings never to come to Notre
Dame ever again and summonses to appear in court "when notified" to
answer trespass charges. John Heid, of Duluth and Liz Fallon of South
Bend were given trespass warnings while leafleting and escorted off
campus.

Banners were hung in various places around the campus including the
large, centrally located "Stonehenge" war memorial which was covered
by a large sign reading: "Blessed Are The Peace Makers." Joe Mueller,
of Cleveland, and George Artiaga of St Louis were caught in the act of
correcting the memorial. Joe was released with a warning and George
spent a night in jail before charges of trespass and disorderly
conduct were dropped.

As the police led me away from the scene of our little "crime," I saw
some students in tears, holding each other for support. One alumnus
who witnessed our theater followed the police and me, berating them
for treating us shamefully. The next day's newspapers on campus and in
the city of South Bend both published articles with interviews of
students and alums who expressed strong opinions taking different
sides in regard to our actions, to ROTC and to issues of war and peace
in general.

In his Letter from Birmingham Jail, Martin Luther King, Jr. said that
"nonviolent direct action seeks to create such a crisis and establish
such creative tension that a community that has constantly refused to
negotiate is forced to confront the issue. It seeks so to dramatize
the issue that it can no longer be ignored."

We can have hope, then, that our small effort will be fruitful, at
least that it will foster honest discussion, at most that it will be a
part of a chain of events leading our church one day to cease to offer
moral cover for state violence in any of its forms.

We will continue to pray even as Fr. Jim Murphy did, the prayer that
the University of Notre Dame and its police force attempted to shout
down, to suppress, to criminalize: "We ask Our Lady, Queen of Peace,
to pray for Notre Dame, the preeminent American Catholic university,
that it might bear ever more faithful witness to Jesus Christ, her
Son, the Prince of Peace."

List of Catholic Worker communities represented and attending the
Retreat:
South Bend IN, Chicago IL, Akron OH, Cleveland OH, Des Moines IA,
Maloy IA, Kalamazoo MI, Luck WI, KC MO, Columbia MO, St Louis MO,
Winona MN, Duluth MN Yankton SD, Marlboro NY