Archbishop Oscar Romero
of El Salvador killed
by U.S. trained soldiers
March 24th, 1980

A few of us have been spending an hour of prayer on Wednesdays during Lent praying inside the lobby of Marquette University Library. We are praying for an end to the war in Afghanistan and an end to teaching and supporting the war at Marquette. We have posters with pictures of war victims and quotes from well know persons like Martin Luther King and Dorothy Day

Last year the security guards and police asked us to leave but let us stay. To
]have any type of ‘protest’, that is what they considered our hour of prayer for peace, on the grounds of the school you need permission from the Marquette administration. We have never asked for permission for any of our actions since we know we would be denied.

My role is to hand any willing students, faculty and administrators a flyer. Many say, No Thank You” to my outreach arm and some just ignore us. If someone seems interested I offer them a flyer and say “We are praying for an end to the War in Afghanistan”. If they stop I say we are also praying for an end to Marquette’s support of the war. I then followed it up with the sports slogan We Are Marquette.

Today one of the professors at Marquette, it turned out to be a theology professor, said NO to my offer of a handout in an angry voice. I made some comment like “You do not want to pray with us.” This got him really angry and he starting to yell at me. I backed off but then he complained to the library about us.

One, than two security guards then the Dean of the Library, then Dear if Student Development and his assistant all came up to me and asked us to move on the street. I politely said No to each one but did limit my moving around to hand out flyers.

All this commotion brought more interest of students and persons going by to what we all about. We had a time for some good conversation about how we felt responsible for the killing in the war and why Marquette should not be teaching war and values contrary to the Christian faith it stands for. We even got a few more persons to stand with us.

When I was a community organizer the goal of action we took was to get a response or reaction. It was the response of the authorities on any issue that aided in organizing people. Often our actions at Marquette, just like our letters and request are just ignored. It is hard to organize around being ignored.

In one of the quotes I used is from Elie Wiesel, a survivor of the Holocaust. He said: “The opposite of love is not hate, its indifference. The opposite of art is not ugliness, its indifference. The opposite of faith is not heresy, its indifference. And the opposite of life is not death, its indifference.”

Our movement that sponsors these hours of prayer is called “Breaking the Silence.”. Those “breaking the silence”, like in civil rights movement or in Nazi Germany, are often persecuted.

The “powers that be” these days have learned from the past and often just ignore messages they do not want to hear, like Marquette Teaching War and responsible for deaths of many. Without a response our actions become devoid of meaning and sometimes just fade away.

A few years ago I stopped updating the History of Resistance to the Military at Marquette partly because our actions resisting military training on campus were ignored. Now that we finally got a little response maybe I need to renew it.

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