Another Concerned Voice

January 28, 2008

Brother Louis DeThomasis, FSC, PHD
Chancellor
St Mary¹s University of Minnesota
700 Terrace heights #30
Winona, MN 55987

Dear Brother Louis:

I heard recently heard of the plan of the SMU Alumni Board to build a veteran¹s memorial. As a former seminarian at IHM Seminary and a graduate of the IPM program in 1989, I am deeply concerned about having such a monument on a Catholic University campus.

A tribute to the military and to militarism is contrary to what is central to what makes us Catholic. Jesus is the prince of peace. The heroes among Catholic faithful are those who have died for their faith, or those who led heroic lives helping the poor and suffering and being people of prayer. If a monument is to be erected, it should be for people who brought Christ to others by how they lived their lives.

We already have a veteran¹s memorial at the Lake Park. Please reconsider this project, or at least wait until you have received more input from others who are affiliated with St Mary¹s University.

Yours in Christ,

Thomas Parlin
853 West Mark St.
Winona, MN 55987

CC OFFICE OF ALUMNI RELATIONS

Imagining Peace

Brother Louis DeThomasis, FSC, Ph.D.
Chancellor
Saint Mary's University of Minnesota
700 Terrace Heights #30
Winona, MN 55987-1399

Dear Brother Louis,

I am blessed because of the education, direction, and opportunities Saint Mary's has given me and I am grateful for the leadership and gifts you have brought to Saint Mary's University and our larger Lasallian community. I am writing to you because of the challenge the proposed veterans' memorial project presents to the Lasallain vision of faith and service to the poor and youth of our world.

It is not the goal of this letter to foment division but instead to present one social and theological analysis of the Saint Mary's community's conflicting desires, on the one hand to remember the lives of friends and family, and on the other honor the reality of war and the Catholic teachings on it. Through that analysis I hope to call a community to have difference without division while being honest with history and to inspire hope for the future Lasallian vision. I will try to offer a number of constructive paths toward a concrete historical project that remembers our friends and family, restores us to a union with God in a repentant history, and envisions a world where violence is not the only recourse to conflict.

A memorial such as the one proposed is not simply a monument or specific place to remember Saint Mary's lives lost. As a cultural artifact, it will tell a story as long as it stands. It is with this lens that I challenge the administration to consider the past history such a memorial tells and the futures it will influence. The collective memory of a community can be a powerful force for change. Currently, the proposed veteran's memorial project obscures our history and fails to recognize the dignity of persons in our world. As followers of De La Salle's prophetic path of justice for the poor and powerless in the world, we too must bear that commitment of transformative justice. A university community whose mission claims dedication to social justice should reflect that.

Transformative justice demands that histories be told so that those hearing the story understand injustice as contrary to the will of God and the future of humanity, but also that stories be told of hope and change for a yet-to-be-written history free from violence and war. A veterans' war memorial that can remember and tell the history of sacrifice and service of our community, but that is also sorrowfully honest with the reality of the horror and injustice of that history is the only way that we can respond to the call for transformative justice.

Participation in violence, no matter what "justification," always reflects the broken covenant of a community with God. [1] A memorial that simply honors the SMU war dead explicitly tells the story of their heroism but implicitly tells viewers that the violence, collateral damage, and failure to achieve peace are of no import. Can we have instead a memorial that honors their heroism but also addresses what is necessary to be free from violence, to restore communion with God, and remember such covenantal brokenness with historical accuracy and mourning?

Some of the wars the United States has entered or started since the founding of Saint Mary's University have been "unjust" wars according to Catholic social teaching. If this part of the story is hidden from public consideration in the memorial, we lie to the future students of Saint Mary's University about the depth and difficulty of the discernment required before committing to military service. Such a lie would directly result in the loss of other Saint Mary's lives.

The proposed memorial also fails to acknowledge the many other lives that were lost in those wars, the lives of our brothers and sisters in the global Lasallian community and the lives of our brothers and sisters in Christ.

We are called by God to act justly, love tenderly, and walk humbly with our God, a communion we share with the earthly community. This call does not end; we must strive for ongoing conversion to more justice, more love, and more humility. I am asking you to put a moratorium on this project while you bring all the Saint Mary's community, alumni, faculty, staff and students, together for conversation in a spirit of openness to conversion.

I propose the following suggestions to make such a conversation more likely to succeed in creating a new historical project that honors our Catholic, Lasallian heritage and mission:

• Honoring the reality of the violence suffered by the veterans and others in any war.
• Rooting the personal services and sacrifices of the veterans within the social contexts of the wars in which they served: what are the larger, historical, theological, and moral considerations of each context?
• Considering how a memorial project embodies the SMU mission to help students live ethical lives of service and leadership, especially the poor (who traditionally serve as cannon fodder).
• Asking the questions "what kind of future do we want to believe in" and "how is what we are doing embody or disembody that reality, both in the process and product of the memorial project?"
• Using language that is honest, acknowledging the violence and suffering in war and the demands and struggles nonviolent peacemakers face.
• Allowing for wider community input in a project that affects so many people. Encourage and stimulate discussion about our differences, but do so without division.

The preservation of peace falls on the shoulders of war-makers and politicians of nation-states and by extension, the veterans of Saint Mary's. The building of peace falls on the shoulders of peace-makers and believers of a nonviolent Spirit of God. Please help us take a step toward being peace-makers by reconsidering and reworking what this War Veterans' Memorial Project means to all those committed to Lasallian service.

Live Jesus in Our Hearts,

Jake Olzen, '07

411 Mensching
Roselle, IL 60172

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[1] The Compendium of the Social Doctrine of the Church, No. 488 says, "Peace is founded on the primary relationship that exists between human beings and God himself, a relationship marked by righteousness (cf. Gen 17:1). […] Violence made its appearance in interpersonal relationships (cf. Gen 4:1-16) and in social relationships (cf. 11:1-9). Peace and violence cannot dwell together, and where there is violence, God cannot be present (cf. 1 Chr 22:8-9)."

Letter Sent To The Cardinal

January 18, 2008

Dear Editor,

Memorials are loaded structures. I grew up in the South, a land laden in Civil War memorials. Every county seat has some memorial to Confederate soldiers who died in battle. It's a difficult thing to deal with when, 150 years later, the prominent sentiment is no longer 1866's “we want this statue to remember lost friends”, but instead 2008's “we want to live in a community that reconciles old racial divides and not be bound by tragedies and evils of our past”. That's hard to do with that piece of Confederate patriotism staring you in the face. Yet the memorials are even harder to tear down. They perpetuate division.

There is a movement by the Alumni association to create a large memorial on our campus to honor all military veterans connected to SMU. There are many reasons why I think that is misguided: if we should honor veterans, do so through scholarships. Set up a simple historical marker (there is a historical connection to WWII involved). But this memorial, as promoted and planned with huge, sweeping arches signifying the five branches of U.S. Military, makes a very divisive statement: that all military service is a sacrifice in keeping with Catholic teaching. And that statement simply is not true. Some wars may be just, and people may engage in wars according to informed conscience. But many wars have not met the criteria of just war. Just war theory is a complex teaching that seems dismissed by the grandeur of the memorial's proposed structure, which seems to elevate the U.S. military to transcendental status. Yet transcendence belongs to God alone.

I’m not against people in the military. Members of my family have served (one is in Iraq now), and I respect their decisions of conscience; if you are a student in the Reserves or National Guard, I respect your decisions as well. I'm not necessarily against all memorials, either. The Vietnam Memorial is a memorial which brings people together, and the thousands of names speak well to the scale of casualties, tragedy, loss, and some kind of peace with history. But that memorial is on federal land in the nation’s capital. Why is Saint Mary's considering such a sweeping memorial that makes a theologically questionable statement on private land, at a school run by an order that primarily educates the poor?

And if this memorial is divisive now, won't it likely be more so 100 years from now?

Sincerely,

Dr. Susan Windley-Daoust
Assistant Professor of Theology

Lack of Communication

To: Br. Louis, Dr. John Ferrotte, Mr. William Herzog, and Mr. Timothy Tyre

My name is Jeff Austin, and I am a senior at St. Mary's Winona campus. I would like to share some concerns I have about the proposed Veterans Memorial Project. My first concern is the absence of publications of this memorial to the general campus. As a student enrolled since fall of 2005, I have not heard anything of this project until November of this past year. It seems to me that this would be an exciting undertaking for the Alumni and they would want to get the future alumni excited about it as well. My second concern is to the nature of this memorial. I would like to know more about the structure and reasoning beyond the brochure information. Our Catholic faith holds war to be unjust and unnecessary, and a memorial to the military seems to be contrary to our faith values. If this is to be a gift to the campus community, I feel that there are other ways to honor the lives of those who have served beyond simply honoring the military in general. From what I know of this project, the Alumni borard is under the impression that the students are aware of this project and supportive of it. To my knowledge, the students are unaware of this project and should be informed before they return next semester and find another structure on campus. It would be appropriate for the Alumni Board to present this memorial to the campus in order to explain the reasoning behind it, and be open to feedback from the student body. As LaSallian learners, it is important to be informed and involved in our community because SMU is our (alumni, students, and faculty) Home. Thank you for taking the time to read my concerns. As a future alumnus, I look forward to working with my fellow alumni to building up Saint Mary's University as a Catholic and LaSallian Institution.

In Christ,

May Christ's love bring you Joy!

From a Student (and Seminarians) Perspective

To Whom It May Concern:

I am writing this letter in regards to the 'veterans memorial' that is to be put up centrally located on Saint Mary's University campus. My name is Jason Kern and I am a senior at Immaculate Heart of Mary Seminary. I was recently reading the website with the information about the memorial and after thinking about the information I became quite concerned.
The first and main problem I have is that this project is due to begin construction soon and I had not heard about it all. I thought that I may have missed an email or something, and after asking around I could not find one seminarian who knew anything about the memorial. I even asked our representative on the student senate that goes to the weekly meetings and he told me they had never discussed it. I shared what I knew about the memorial and some of my fellow seminarians shared my concerns. The more I think about the project about to go underway the more I see the benefits of asking for a moratorium. This project needs to be discussed and thought through, especially since we are talking about something that will be permanent on our campus. Please consider this, so that at the very least we can share our full concerns about this memorial.

My second and surely more important concern is that I do not fully understand how a memorial as such fits in with a Catholic Institution. I recently read on the news that 151,000 was the most recent figure of casualties from the Iraq war. I have seen numbers that greatly inflate and deflate this, but the point is that too many people are dying. The Catholic Church upholds the life and dignity of each and every human person, there is no room for us to give the slightest idea that war is okay. In today's society, it is all but impossible to ever fight in a just war. It is my understanding that John Paul II directly asked our president to not enter into war with Iraq. There is no room in today's culture of death to give anyone the idea that war is okay or worse yet that we support war. Let's not memorialize our veterans with a piece of art, it is time to honor our veterans with a fund that helps them deal with the tragedies and horrors they experienced while serving our country. There are a number of options other than unneeded art on this campus that we can do. We need to make sure we are doing this in the right way and that is why I am asking for a moratorium.

I thank you sincerely for taking the time to read this and passing it along to those concerned. Please know of my prayers for this process, I pray that this process will be guided by the Holy Spirit and through the intercession of the Blessed Virgin Mary who is the Queen of Peace, we may come to do what is best for our veterans, our campus, and all of society. Live Jesus in our hearts!

Sincerely,

Jason Kern