Disarming through dialogue
By TIM LOGAN
Senior Staff Writer
Ben Peters remembers the night well.
He was walking into the Center for Social Concerns, where Pax Christi, the campus Catholic peace group of which Peters is a member, was hosting a lecture and discussion. The topic was to be the Reserve Officer Training Corps (ROTC) and its place on a Catholic university campus.
Having attended many other talks at the CSC, Peters expected that attendance would be light. He was wrong.
"I was thinking maybe 10 people," he said. "I walk in and see 100 people there, 100 kids there, most of them with buzz cuts; I just choked up."
That night was the first of Pax Christi's ROTC dialogues, an ongoing series intended to get people thinking about the role of the military at Notre Dame. These sessions have brought ardent pacifists together with future officers, and have provided a forum for both sides to discuss what it means to be a Catholic in the military, and what it means to be opposed to the military on Catholic grounds.
It is a discussion about two ways to seek peace.
With about 375 students in three branches, Notre Dame has one of the largest ROTC programs in the country. It is also consistently recognized as one of the best. It teaches how to maintain peace through strength, and its professors say the program produces some great young men and women who go on to serve their country well.
"What you see in the people coming out, the people you see on the other end, they are some pretty remarkable people," said Lieutenant Colonel Mike Edwards, Battalion Commander for the Army detachment.
But some people say ROTC shouldn't be here. Training students for military service, critics say, is antithetical to the mission of a Catholic school. They argue that the University should be training its students to better serve God, and war is not the way to do that.
"You can't love your enemy and participate in [killing them]," said Shawn Storer, a founding member of Pax Christi. "Christ died on the cross and victory comes in that example, not in war."
They are making an age-old argument.
The debate over ROTC on college campuses across the country has laid mostly dormant since Vietnam. But at Notre Dame, it resurfaces regularly, brought up by activists inspired by Catholic pacifism. At times, the dialogue on campus has been heated, but, unlike some schools in the 1960s, Notre Dame has never seen its ROTC building go up in flames.
These days, most students accept the military training program as a fact of life at Notre Dame. ROTC students are like everyone else, and everyone knows a few of them. There's not much to think about, as Notre Dame has the ROTC established as a solid program.
Pax Christi hopes to change that.
That is where the dialogues come in. The point of these discussions, at least at present, is not to rally opposition to ROTC, but to provide a forum for the two sides to come together and talk. There have been two this year, with another scheduled for Wednesday night.
But opening dialogue has been a challenge.
For understandable reasons, many in the military program have been suspicious of Pax Christi, a group which was founded two years ago essentially to challenge ROTC's existence at Notre Dame. They have brought several anti-military speakers to campus, and sponsored a lecture in April detailing "10 reasons why ROTC should be banned from Notre Dame's campus." The lecture was seen by many in the program as an attack, and it fueled doubts about the peace group.
"Things Pax Christi has done in the past has put barriers there," sophomore Andrew DeBerry, an Air Force cadet who is also involved with Pax Christi.
"When you do that and then try to communicate with someone, you immediately have a hostile environment."
The first dialogue this year was done differently. Shawn Storer of Pax Christi, shared the podium with Marine cadet Joe Zilligan, and the two compared two different Church teachings on war — Christian Pacifism and Catholic Just War Theory. Afterwards, the large audience split up into small groups — each a mix of future officers, peace activists and those in the middle — to discuss the issue. Leaders of the peace group call the talks a big success.
"They really have blown my mind away," Peters said. "Seeing all these people talking and really struggling with these issues."
Students are not the only people struggling together with these issues. Once each month, the officers who run Notre Dame's four ROTC programs have lunch with professors from the Peace Studies program. Their discussion ranges from current events to philosophical debates about the use of force. The different sides don't always agree, but they all say the sessions are worthwhile.
"I think they're of great value to all of us," Edwards said. "The people from the Peace Institute give us a pretty different perspective to look from but we make a pretty big contribution, too."
In recent years, prayer and discussion have been the primary weapons of the anti-military movement on campus. Pax Christi members have talked, and, now, sometimes to their surprise, ROTC cadets are talking back. As their dialogue continues, both sides hope, more people will listen.
All News Stories for Tuesday, January 30, 2001
