92 year old Jesuit priest dressed
as St. Ignatius of Loyola protest
the teaching of reflexive killing
in ROTC at Marquette.
Today a small but diverse group of us had a small Ash Wednesday service in front of Gesu Church on the Marquette University Campus. We ranged in age from 19 year old Catholic Worker to a 92 year old Jesuit priest. We had signs with our message: Marquette Teaches Killing” and our 92 year old Jesuit priest gave out Ashes to all who asked.
Students and staff came by with various reactions. Most ignored us and our message, few supported us and few did not. There was one girl, a sophomore Marine ROTC candidate, who told us that soldiers were fighting in Afghanistan for our right to protest. A few of us said that the military was ‘killing or being killed not in our name and not for us. She got upset and took our protest of teaching killing at Marquette in the ROTC as a personal offense to her.
]Is is not that patriotism had grown to mean unquestioned acceptance for what our political authorities tell us? In the State of the Union Address that will not be broadcast I forgot to mention how our civil liberties have been taken from us the last few years. See Bill Quigley’s, a civil rights lawyer, article on Obama Civil Liberties “F” Report Card. Yet people fight for gun rights not civil rights.
However, to a generation of young people and older ones certain information is ignored if it does not fit the propaganda of government, institution and Church. I do not get it or know what to do about it. All I know is that I must in faith continue my struggle for the Truth and, in conscience, act on it. In his homily today at the Vatican Pope Benedict XVI used Dorothy Day, co-founder of Catholic Worker, as a person with “the ability to oppose the ideological blandishments of her time to choose the search for truth and open herself up to the discovery of faith…”
Next Wednesday at the same time, 4–5pm we will gather in the lobby of the Raynor Library at Marquette to pray the Stations of the Cross so Marquette University can repent and stop teaching killing. Praying inside any building of Marquette is illegal, even though we do not disturb anyone but a few consciences that need disturbing. Dorothy Day might have said it best:
“When it is said that we disturb people too much by the words pacifism and anarchism, I can only think that people need to be disturbed, that their consciences need to be aroused, that they do indeed need to look into their work, and study new techniques of love and poverty and suffering for each other. Of course the remedies are drastic, but then too the evil is a terrible one and we are all involved, we are all guilty, and most certainly we are all going to suffer. The fact that we have “the faith,” that we go to the sacraments, is not enough. ‘Inasmuch as ye have done it unto the least of these my brethren, ye have done it unto me’ with napalm, nerve gas, our hydrogen bomb, our ‘new look’.” (“Are The Leaders Insane?” By Dorothy Day, The Catholic Worker, April 1954, 1, 6.}
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