After Arrests, Students Renew Call for Notre Dame to Follow Catholic Teaching on War, Investments

Days after the University of Notre Dame arrested 17 of its students during a peaceful protest on campus, about 200 students, faculty, staff, and people from the wider South Bend community rallied outside the university’s main gate on Sunday. Members of the South Bend Catholic Worker were among those who turned out.

Like other campus protests nationwide, students at Notre Dame have been calling for institutional divestment from companies connected to Israel’s war in Gaza. But the Notre Dame activists are also using the university’s Catholic identity—and its commitment to Catholic teaching about social issues—to press the point.

“The university is trying to silence us, so we are coming out to say we won’t be silenced,” Francesa Freeman, an Occupation Free ND spokesperson, told WNDU news. “We are more committed than we have ever been to aligning the university with its Catholic values by disclosing and divesting its investments in weapons manufacturing companies.”

Occupation Free ND is the group that has been organizing the protests.

It’s not surprising that Notre Dame students would point to Catholic social teaching principles; the university sponsors a Center for Social Concerns and a Social Justice Award, and offers a minor in Catholic social teaching along with an online certificate in Catholic social teaching.

Some students are also tapping into the long tradition of the Catholic Worker Movement.

“I am absolutely inspired by and drawing on the Catholic Worker tradition and the witness of Catholic peacebuilders such as Dorothy Day,” said Flora Tang, another spokesperson for Occupation Free ND. “My Ph.D. degree is in theology and peace studies, and my personal Catholic faith draws significantly upon Dorothy Day, Dan Berrigan, and other Catholic anti-war protestors.”

Tang says she is a convert to Catholicism, and the Catholic peace tradition was a significant draw for her. “My faith also takes the Bible’s words of turning swords into plowshares literally, as I strive to be a peacebuilder and someone who speaks against the ever-expansion of military forces and weapons of mass destruction.”

Signs at Sunday’s rally made pointed jabs at the contrast between Notre Dame’s Catholic identity and its investment practices: “Our Catholic University is funded by blood money,” read one sign. “You say you believe in CST,” read another. And a third: “Our Lady is a Palestinian-Jew.”

One of the arrested students was raised by Catholic Workers. Another graduate student was recorded invoking Dorothy Day as he was being taken away in handcuffs by police on Thursday night: “It is following Gustavo Gutiérrez, Dorothy Day, Daniel Berrigan—that’s why we are being arrested, because we are following Catholic social teaching!”

A protesteris led away by campus police on Thursday, May 2.

The arrested students have requested anonymity while they prepare to defend themselves in court at the end of June. University officials are pressing trespassing charges that carry a maximum penalty of up to a year in jail.

St. Peter Claver Catholic Worker (South Bend, Indiana) has been providing pastoral and practical support to the student protesters, delivering meals and “connecting our Catholic students with priests who can offer spiritual direction and sacramental support,” said Casey Mullaney, a member of the South Bend Catholic Worker community and an adjunct theology professor who has taught a course on the Catholic Worker Movement.

“Dorothy spoke a lot about the mystical body of Christ—how we are all members or potential members of that body, and that it’s on this basis that we should not drop bombs on one another,” Mullaney said. “Our students are enfleshing that solidarity in the knowledge that they are part of the same body as the people of Gaza.

“As a teacher and a Catholic Worker, I’m very proud of them.”

Occupation Free ND, the Notre Dame group behind the protests on campus, is asking the university to divest from weapons manufacturers, reevaluate the university’s ties with Israeli universities, and revise its rules restricting demonstrations on campus. The group consists of Notre Dame students, faculty, staff, and alumni.

During Sunday’s rally, Flora Tang read a statement developed by Occupation Free ND explaining how its demands align with Catholic social teaching principles.

“Notre Dame’s investments and partnerships with weapons manufacturers stand in complete contradiction to the longstanding Catholic Social Teaching tradition that calls all of us to align our spiritual, material, political, and economic commitments away from war and destruction, and toward peace and justice,” the statement begins.

Citing a wide range of Catholic social teaching documents, the statement recounts the Church’s teaching on war, then outlines principles of Catholic social teaching: the defense of human life and dignity, the preferential option for the poor and vulnerable, care for God’s creation, and more. It also cites the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops’ 2021 Socially Responsible Investment Guidelines, which in part call on the conference to “(refuse) to invest in companies whose products and/or policies are counter to the values of Catholic moral teaching or statements adopted by the Conference of Bishops.” The investment guidelines were developed for internal use by the USCCB.

The statement concludes by pointing to the Church’s constant condemnation of the idea that “war is a pathway to peace.”

“We further afﬁrm the Gospel belief that God takes sides with the starving (as the people in Gaza are); God takes sides with the widowed and the orphaned (as the people in Gaza are); God takes sides with the imprisoned (as the people in Gaza are); God stands on the side of the poor and the wounded and those who suffer from unjust violence (as the people in Gaza are). And that in the time of ﬁnal judgment, God takes sides with those who have sheltered the homeless, with those who build peace, and with those who defend the oppressed (Matthew 25)–as we, and as this university, must.”

Read the full statement at the end of this article.

Occupation Free ND plans to continue engaging with the university administration about bringing the university’s actions and investments more in line with its Catholic values, according to Freeman.

“We also plan to continue to develop relationships and strategize with other community groups, Catholic universities, and the broader student movement,” she said in a written statement. “We refuse to allow the university to make us all complicit in the genocide in Gaza, where Israel has killed over 34,000 Palestinians, including over 15,000 children.”