During Lent 2009 Joe Radoszewski, with other members of the Marquette University Peace Action, (MUPA), held silent and prayerful vigils at Marquette protesting Marquette’s hosting departments of the military on campus. Here is his open letter to MU Peace Center, Fr Simon Harak,S.J. Fr Wild SJ and others stating his reasons why this was an important action.
An open letter (following the lead of those who have preceded me):
This Lenten season I, along with a motley group of individuals, have been joining in silent prayerful protest of what we believe is a complex conflict of values … and something even more. I will be writing again today, once more asking for physical, communal support in re this important issue - this kernel within which lies in a very deep sense - the germ of an evil facing this country and facing us, as individuals who pray for peace and justice. What we are facing is nameless and faceless and yet … the names and the faces of those millions upon millions whose lives have been laid waste for this nameless, faceless abomination remain etched upon the souls of all those who silently have condoned … and continue condoning … its presence.
When the reality of evil is ignored, the struggle for balance continues … obscured; the cries of the countless for justice … unheard.
A good friend and I were talking yesterday. He sent me this letter, below, from MLK. I had heard it read many years back and again recently on Democracy Now. But nowhere did it have greater impact on me than now, in these days of … well … I’ll let the folks at Irregular Times say it - for they put it best:
It is a time of fear in the face of freedom, a time for the widening of previous roads and the opening of new paths, a time of an emptying country and swelling cities, yet a time when these paths are mined by knowing algorithms of the all-seeing eye. It is the time of the warrior’s peace and the miser’s charity, when the planting of a seed is an act of conscientious objection. These are the times when maps fade and direction is lost. Forwards is backwards now, so we glance sideways at the strange lands through which we are all passing, knowing for certain only that our destination has disappeared. We are unready to meet these times, but we proceed nonetheless, adapting as we wander, reshaping the Earth with every tread. Behind us we have left the old times, the standard times, the high times. Welcome to the irregular times.
-- from [“Irregular Times” news unfit for print] 6/27/2007
And so it is. Having been baptized in the RCC and then bathed in the waters of Catholic catechism in grade school, I was further and more deeply immersed by steady Jesuit hands at MUHS. Whereupon graduating, I cast myself adrift - floating for years upon choppy waters of indecision and vice until I reached the distant shores of a Just Faith community where I was given a chance to heal and with new vision look truth and injustice square in the eye … never again to be able to turn a deaf ear or cast a blind eye to the evil holding us in hidden and silent bondage. Given my belief in the words of The Master, the germ that contains the truth of these words does indeed lie within the kernel of that important action we have before us today in exposing the hypocrisy of a Roman Catholic University attempting to serve more than One Master. I have included MLK’s letter … for hate, racism and hypocrisy all play on the same playground.
Peace, Joseph Radoszewski
“It is sometimes discouraging to see how small the Christian peace movement is, and especially here in America where it is most necessary. But we have to remember that this is the usual pattern, and the Bible has led us to expect it. Spiritual work is done with disproportionately small and feeble instruments. And now above all when everything is so utterly complex, and when people collapse under the burden of confusions and cease to think at all, it is natural that few may want to take on the burden of trying to effect something in the moral and spiritual way, in political action. Yet this is precisely what has to be done.”
-- Thomas Merton
Letter from a Birmingham Jail, Martin Luther King, Jr., 1963
