No place but Notre Dame. Those commercials during football games are true -- once you've
been here, you never forget it. A Notre Dame education informs the way you respond to the
world and the way the world responds to you. It is an education that has taught me that my faith
is more than just a part of my identity, it is my identity.
This real-life application of my education was put to the test over fall break when I
traveled to Europe with 16 other students and our professor, Luc Reydams, for a political science
seminar: Non-proliferation of Weapons of Mass Destruction. We visited multiple organizations
that are key actors in the international nonproliferation movement; among them the Stockholm
International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI) in Sweden, the Organization for the Prohibition of
Chemical Weapons in The Hague, and the International Atomic Energy Agency and
Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty Organization in Vienna.
At each organization, we met with experts in the field who reiterated again and again the
importance of nonproliferation in establishing a peaceful world order. Based on months of
classroom research, we challenged these experts to articulate how nonproliferation strategies
might achieve greater success in light of the shortcomings of the modern nuclear system. These
meetings gave my classmates and me the unique opportunity to examine the question of nuclear
proliferation from a 360-degree perspective. Regardless of the differing content and viewpoints
presented in these meetings, however, I found myself constantly returning to the challenge of the
Catholic perspective to an international issue that is one of the most significant facing my
generation.
I can only assume that we were not unlike most college students in questioning the often
ambiguous role of the United States with respect to peace and nonproliferation. I also found
myself asking the question that has been brought up in every theology class I've had at Notre
Dame since freshman year: What does this mean to me as an American Catholic? With the
bridge Notre Dame has built between these two sometimes contradictory aspects of my identity,
how does my Catholic faith impact my participation in American politics?
The questions sparked by this trip led me to do some research upon my return, and I
discovered that the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops first addressed the issue of nuclear
weapons in its 1983 pastoral letter "The Challenge of Peace: God's Promise and Our Response,"
and in the 1993 follow-up letter "The Harvest of Justice Is Sown in Peace." What I found most
challenging as an American Catholic was the charge issued by the bishops in their second letter:
"Peacemaking is both a personal and a social and political challenge: How do we live
lives of love, truth, justice and freedom, and how do we advance these values through
structures that shape our world? International peace is not achieved simply by
proclaiming peaceful ideals; it also requires building the structures of peace."
In our meetings at SIPRI and the U.N. agencies, my classmates and I were some of the
privileged few who got to see some of these "structures of peace" at work; to see how they were
putting into action, in a secular context, the bishops' call to "responsible international
engagement." In their willingness to take time out of their busy schedules to meet with a group
of U.S. college students, these high-profile leaders are examples of that responsible engagement.
A person does not have to be Catholic to model, as these leaders did, how the Gospel values of
social justice and peace are debated and promoted in the international arena. This trip allowed
me to see the dire necessity of fundamentally transforming the nuclear landscape and re-orienting it toward peace.
As a Notre Dame student, policy informed by values is the gift I carry with me from
campus to the world beyond. Going on this trip and meeting these visionaries of peace gave me
the opportunity to confront the challenge of my Catholic faith in the context of serious
international issues. Notre Dame, I now know, doesn't just educate students. It commissions
them.
Danielle Palkert is a junior at Notre Dame from Eden Prairie, Minnesota.
(January 2007)
