Christopher Cox (Submitted Photo)
Following a Vatican-area conference, two Marquette scholars hope to bring Gospel nonviolence into Milwaukee parish life.
They met some of the world’s leading experts and practitioners of Catholic nonviolent peacemaking in Rome. They’re now looking to bring what they spoke about and learned, and decades of their own experience, to the streets and parishes of Milwaukee.
Dr. Michael Duffey, an associate professor emeritus of theology at Marquette University and scholar at Marquette’s Center for Peacemaking, and Christopher Cox, the center’s research coordinator, took home plenty of lessons learned from the “Unarmed and Disarming Peace: The Church’s Emerging Paradigm Shift to Gospel Nonviolence” conference held in early September by the Catholic Institute for Nonviolence and Pax Christi International.
Duffey spoke at the conference, hosted by the Pontifical University of St. Bonaventure in Rome. It included 100 Catholic nonviolence leaders from 30 countries.
“The history of this conference, including the one that Professor Duffey and I attended and participated in, [has] been fleshing out a richer understanding of peacemaking not only in the geopolitical space but also just very much in the local parish community space, with the vision of what the Church and society would look like if we really put peace and nonviolence at the heart of the Church,” Cox said. “It’s a compelling vision.”
The conference happened amid both a renewed call to peace by Pope Leo XIV in and beyond his recent encyclical “Magnifica Humanitas,” and the year the Holy Father declared as the Jubilee Year of St. Francis of Assisi, who called for us to become channels of peace.
“St. Francis of Assisi heard God’s call, ‘Rebuild my church.’ We too are called to renew the Church to bring the Gospel to our world through peace, faithful witness and action,” Duffey said.
“As we complete the jubilee year commemorating 800 years since the death of St. Francis, let us deepen our commitment to Gospel peacemaking.”
While in Rome, Duffey particularly focused his talk on how to move nonviolence to the heart of the Catholic Church, particularly his plans to engage and catalyze Milwaukee-area churches and their parishioners in Christ-centered peacemaking service.
“There’ll be opportunities for them to do some work in situations that are certainly replete with violence, but doing justice work, understanding structural violence more, and coming to some sense of what we can do,” he said.
He told the worldwide leaders about the 53206 ZIP code in Milwaukee where, according the the National Institutes of Health, life expectancy is 12 years less than that of residents in his zip code four miles away.
“Twice a week, I go there, get to know people and work with them,” he said. “I understand what we bear, what we have in common, and the challenges and the burdens they carry. It calls us out to do something about it.”
Duffey and Cox each took in countless other lessons from fellow presenters that they can take locally from their hub at the Center for Peacemaking to the parish level.
Some of the themes involve global efforts for peace and the different views on the just war theory, one where Cardinal Robert McElroy of Washington, D.C., spelled out gaps and issues that perhaps led Pope Leo XIV to call the theory “outdated” in “Magnifica Humanitas.” Other speakers like Gerald Schlabach from St. Thomas University in Minnesota discussed the idea of not discarding the just war theory since it can be used “as a second language for the Church, because not everybody is going to buy into Gospel nonviolence.”
Cox added that Maria Stephan, a co-leader and chief organizer with the Horizons Project and advisor to the Catholic Nonviolence Initiative, shared her research on how a small gathering of people acting nonviolently can stop violent, inhumane actions.
Milwaukee has a history of Catholic nonviolent action at the parish level, with the history of Fr. James Groppi of then-St. Boniface Parish in Milwaukee’s majority-Black central city helping lead marches connected to the cause of fair housing in 1967 and 1968, a cause which led to new laws protecting the civil rights of people looking to rent and purchase housing.
“There’s also that old phrase, ‘Think globally, act locally.’ ‘If you want peace, work for justice,’ St. Paul VI said,” Cox explained. “We want to be concerned about conflicts between the United States and Iran, and Ukraine and Russia, [but] there is absolutely valuable and important work for us to do right here at home, in our parishes, in our communities, in our neighborhoods.”
Cox called the Catholic Church’s ability to work at every level of society one of its greatest strengths. “We have nuncios and leadership in the Church that can meet with and attempt to influence the head of state in any country on the planet. We have episcopal conferences that do that work,” he said.
“But also, even in the level of the city, the relationship that the Church can have with city leaders or county leaders or state leaders, but even the kind of leadership for peace that we can exercise in our families and in our communities. And you go into the poorest, most violent places on the planet, and you will always find the Catholic Church there, too.”
Duffey said that he is finalizing plans for parish-level peacemaking initiatives in Milwaukee, with those expected to be announced in early 2027.
