Most of us value our education in a Catholic Jesuit institution. As a result of this shared love of values and persons we have encountered at a Jesuit university, I feel compelled to challenge the military presence at Marquette in the form of the various ROTC programs on campus for the following reasons:

1) The Catholic Church in no uncertain terms has declared the war in Iraq "immoral, unjust and illegal." Yet Marquette hosts an independent group, ROTC, that is not accountable to the university as all other programs are and that trains young men and women to fight this immoral war.

2) At the Ignatian Family Teach In, this year, at Fort Benning, Ga., speaker after speaker from Jesuit institutions all over the United States spoke out against the military training of soldiers from Latin America on this military base. No one spoke about this same type of military training going on at the Jesuit campuses. Finally, a brave young man from Loyola University used his five minutes to articulately point out how the presence of ROTC on 22 of the 28 Jesuit university campuses violated the very principles these schools teach. He logically took on and answered each reason for ROTC, money, Christianizing the military, etc. He dissected them and showed how ROTC training violated the values of these Jesuit universities.

3) Finally the straw that forced me into action was my attendance in November, to the première showing of the Dorothy Day documentary: "Do Not Call Me a Saint." I thought of the many attempts members of the local Catholic Worker community had attempted to engage in a dialog with Marquette about the presence of ROTC only to be ignored. It was not hard to imagine, after viewing the movie, what Dorothy Day would do or say about this situation.

St. Ignatius says that love should show itself in "deeds over and above words." However, since I know that some of you reading this support ROTC at Marquette by your word, deeds or silence, I am suggesting that we start with words or a dialogue on the question: Do ROTC programs belong at Marquette? After we see where we are, we can judge the situation and take the necessary actions to keep Marquette a place of sacred values on life and death issues.

One of the first acts of St. Ignatius, after his conversion, was to take a pilgrimage to Montserrat and lay his sword, the symbol of his former way of life, at the feet of the statue of the Black Madonna. Let us now put aside military training at Marquette and start the journey of renewing the soul of it.

For now I appeal to all of you, especially any of you that are students presently, to rise up and tear down the walls of institutional militarism. There is nothing inherently wrong with military training, it just seems wrong to host it on a Catholic Jesuit campus.

As the Rev. Dan Berrigan says: "It is a schizophrenia that runs deep in the soul to try to teach how to love God and to kill in the same place."

Nonviolence is a powerful force. Let us use it to overturn the presence of the military at Marquette.