Earlier this year, Lily,* a Catholic doctoral student at a Midwestern college, was looking out the window of their library, intently watching the Catholic student center. To passersby, Lily’s actions might have seemed unremarkable: Perhaps they were waiting for a friend to leave Bible study. Maybe they were checking to see if afternoon Mass times had changed. But, in reality, Lily’s concern had less to do with who came in and out of the front door and more to do with the multiple police officers congregated on the building’s roof.
The officers, like the police drone that Lily observed flying over campus, were there to surveil (and, from Lily’s vantage point, intimidate) student protestors camping on the grass between the library and the Catholic student center. And Lily was in the library, listening to a police scanner app on their phone.
On October 7, 2023, Hamas-led military groups launched an attack on Israel, killing hundreds of civilians and taking over 200 hostages. In retaliation, Israel invaded Gaza later that month, starting what has been one of the deadliest wars against Palestinians since Israel was founded. Over 40,000 Palestinians have been killed, and almost the entire population has been displaced. Israel’s blockade of Gaza has cut off basic necessities such as food and water, and more than half the houses in Gaza have been destroyed, along with hospitals, universities and schools, and other necessary buildings.
As a result of what many argue is the genocide of the Palestinian people, students across the world—including Lily, leaders in their union, and many of their fellow students—set up Gaza solidarity encampments in the spring of 2024, demanding that their schools’ administrations divest from contractors and companies who sell weapons to Israel.
Lily’s love for their Palestinian neighbors came with clear risk: Because they’re an immigrant student and a campus worker, Lily decided against camping in the tents that their partner, Olivia, and many of their friends had set up on the grass between the church and the library. While Olivia chose a “red” camping role (one that came with risk of arrest), Lily chose a “green” support role, listening to the police scanner from a distance, watching the officers on the Catholic student center’s roof, and preparing to warn their fellow organizers if a raid on the camp was imminent.
And yet, despite the risk, Lily was motivated to support the protest because of their love for others and their Catholic faith. In a blog for New Ways Ministry earlier this year about the encampments, they wrote that “love is why many of us show up for the cause of Palestinian liberation,” encouraging their fellow Catholics and fellow queer people to “answer Jesus’ call by helping end the genocide in Gaza.”
Lily, a practicing Catholic, feels a sense of righteous anger at the student center for allowing police on their roof. While a Presbyterian church near campus supported the protestors, allowing them to use their bathrooms, members of Lily’s own parish invited and enabled police violence against their friends and loved ones.
“I was deeply upset that they would jeopardize these students, who I knew were protesting entirely peacefully,” Lily says. “I was disgusted that [Catholic leaders] would want to be complicit in state violence against innocent students,” especially students of color, “given everything that we know about how deeply racist the origins and current practices of the American police system are.”
Lily is not alone among their contemporaries. Many young Catholic activists are both inspired by their faith and frustrated by what they see as their church’s complicity in state violence. These young Catholic activists are bravely demanding that the church build alternatives grounded in justice.
Today, young Catholic activists in their 20s and 30s are involved in movements for solidarity with Palestine, racial justice, health justice, Pax Christi USA, and others. While frustrated with the church’s failure to act toward a more just world, these young activists are still active in diverse Catholic spaces and seeking to engage with their church and with elders in Catholic movements for peace and justice. They seek to develop multigenerational Catholic spaces where they can gain community, resources, diverse coalitions, and connect with other people of faith in transformative and mutually supportive relationships.
Building intergenerational community with young people
When you hear Michael Martin, the state coordinator of Pax Christi Florida, talk about intergenerational peace work, it’s clear he’s inspired by local Catholic elders, particularly their commitment to a dissenting Catholicism at the prophetic edge of the institutional church, a Catholicism that has been unafraid to challenge the church’s entanglement in violence and oppression.
Martin’s elders give him courage and inspire his work. But he’s also working toward a more fruitful exchange between younger and older Catholic leaders. For him, that means the Catholic peace movement has to move beyond simply trying to add young people to their ranks or folding young Catholic activists into existing initiatives.
When speaking about what older Catholic peace groups can do to appeal to young people, Martin says, “I think we’re better off not appealing to young Catholic activists.” This may surprise people in membership-oriented groups. However, instead of young adult recruitment efforts that connect young people to already-existing campaigns, Martin would like to see Catholic peace groups active in multi-group coalitions. This approach, he believes, could connect Catholic peacemaking elders with young adult organizers who are already working on a variety of issues. Martin wants to see Catholic peace groups bring their faith and their particular commitment to peace into these multi-issue coalitions, serving as a “node for networking and connecting.”
Betsy Ericksen, a Catholic organizer, echoes this desire for coalitions. Ericksen works with the Uncommitted National Movement, which mobilized hundreds of thousands of voters to vote “uncommitted” in key 2024 Democratic primaries to protest what they see, according to their website, as President Joe Biden’s “decisions to continue funding war crimes and the mass killing of Palestinians.” The movement, and the delegates it sent to the Democratic National Convention in Chicago, also pressured Kamala Harris’ presidential campaign to include a Palestinian American speaker at the Democratic convention and to endorse an arms embargo on Israel. (Both efforts have been rejected by the Harris campaign.)
Ericksen, who is active in Boston multifaith coalitions organizing for a ceasefire between Israel and Palestine—most of which are led by Muslims and Jews—is convinced that her fellow Catholic leaders could play a powerful convening role in organizing for peace.
“It seems like there’s a [Catholic] organization for every issue, rather than organizations that are a convening place for progressive Catholics,” she says. “I don’t know of any Catholic organizations that are really doing cross-issue work in a way that’s building a base.”
Ericksen is convinced that, were Catholic organizations and coalitions to take on such a convening role, the entire peace and justice movement would greatly benefit. She wants to see the leaders she lovingly describes as the “lefty-Catholic old guard” convene such a broad coalition by, among other things, boldly embracing Catholic liturgy and identity.
Setting an aspirational goal for U.S. Catholics, Ericksen points to her progressive Jewish colleagues, who are joining Amnesty International and former U.S. government officials in calling for an end to U.S. complicity in the Israeli government’s war crimes. She’s inspired by how these Jewish leaders bring the fullness of their Jewish identity, what she calls “ritual, symbolism, and practice,” into public space through powerful, lay-led faith witnesses for peace. At these actions, rabbis boldly call for a ceasefire, and young Jewish leaders pray for peace together, on the streets and in the U.S. Capitol building. Ericksen was surprised to see that Catholic leaders weren’t as visible doing the same.
This surprises Ericksen, since Pope Francis has consistently called for a ceasefire and a lasting peace in Gaza. The pope has called those who sell arms “merchants of death” and decried an Israeli sniper’s killing of two civilian women in a Palestinian Catholic parish as “terrorism.”
But, while U.S. Catholic intellectuals and organizations released some statements reflecting the pope’s views and how they seem counter to U.S. policy, Ericksen didn’t see mainstream U.S. Catholic groups organize clergy to name that reality.
Ericksen imagines a robust Catholic movement similar to the Muslim and Jewish movements she works alongside in Boston, one that mobilizes priests alongside laypeople—“working-class Catholics, Central and South American Catholics, Irish American Catholics, and Italian American Catholics,” she says—who could build broad, multi-issue coalitions and bring distinctly Catholic ritual, symbolism, and practice “into the streets, into our meetings, into our legislators’ offices.” She also wants these Catholic movements to be active in interfaith spaces, lifting up diverse religious practices while claiming their particular Catholic witness.
But before that movement can be built, Ericksen wants Catholic organizations and elders, particularly those mentors who are teaching young Catholic activists the lessons of the 1960s and 1970s peace movements, to ask a central question: What do social justice activists who are Catholic, or who were raised Catholic, need from us?
“Do they need spiritual direction? Do they need a monthly fellowship meal? Catholics have access to a lot of land and property and buildings, places to have meetings and places to go on retreats,” Ericksen says. “We need churches not to sell their buildings to property developers. We need the Catholic peace movement to think about what level of infrastructure they want to pass on to the next generation.”
A Catholic infrastructure for peacebuilding
Michelle Sherman, program director of nonviolence and campus outreach at Pax Christi USA, has some answers of her own to the question of what young adult peacemakers need: financial support, moral support from elders, a willingness to sit together in “uncomfortable space,” a grounding in deep spirituality, and authentic mentorship.
Sherman also wants to see her fellow leaders in the peace movement change the questions that they ask of young peacemakers. “When I’m in a group of predominantly older peacemakers or parishes, the question is always, ‘Oh, Michelle, you’re a young person. How do we get more young people involved?’ ” she says.
This is also a question that Sherman compassionately reframes for movement elders. Instead of asking, “How do we get young people involved?” she challenges peace groups to ask, “Where do we notice that young people are, and then how do we become present there?”
This approach, moving past transactional recruitment into mutual accompaniment and solidarity, has been at the heart of two projects that Sherman was central in forming and sustaining at Pax Christi USA: the Pax Christi Young Adult Caucus (PCYAC) and the Peace Pairs program.
PCYAC, which began in 2018 after Sherman joined two other young peacemakers on Pax Christi USA’s board to create a space in the movement specifically for young adults, was inspired by the Pax Christi Young Adult Forum, a project for young adult peacemakers in the 1980s and ’90s that nurtured many of the activists who still serve as key leaders in the organization today.
Today, the program includes a group of Pax Christi peacemakers in their 20s and 30s who meet monthly on Zoom and twice annually for retreats. Central to this initiative is Pax Christi USA’s commitment to making space specifically by and for young adults, where Catholic leaders from many movements (immigration justice, climate justice, Black Catholic advocacy, and Palestinian solidarity) support one another in their work for peace and justice.
PCYAC is a space specifically for young adult peacemakers, but it strives never to be isolated or cut off from Pax Christi USA as a whole. Central to that commitment is PCYAC’s Peace Pairs program, which seeks to intentionally build and sustain intergenerational relationships by pairing together an older and younger member. Now in its third year, Peace Pairs has brought together dozens of pairings for regular meetings, mentorship, and a year-end capstone project.
One of the PCYAC Peace Pairs, ambassador of peace Olga Sarabia and young adult caucus member Cindy Emenalo, makes clear the kind intergenerational solidarity that Peace Pairs seeks to build. Although they’ve already completed their capstone project, a report on racial health disparities faced by Black communities and farmworkers, Emenalo and Sarabia are still close friends, a fact that Sarabia points out may be surprising, given that “I’m three times Cindy’s age.”
Even with their differences—Sarabia is Californian by way of the Dominican Republic, and Emenalo comes from a Nigerian American family in Georgia—there is much that connects them in their peace work. Both are passionate about health equity, anti-racism, and immigrant rights. Both care deeply about their local communities and the national policies that affect those communities. And both know what it’s like to be part of important work for racial justice that white Catholic peacemakers haven’t always considered central to the movement.
Sarabia came to Pax Christi USA in 1999 and was a founding member of the Pax Christi Anti-Racism Team at a time when the national movement sought to dismantle racist structures in both its outward-facing work and its internal policies and practices. She trained local regional leaders in this work for three years in the early 2000s and has remained connected to the movement’s work to dismantle racism in the decades since. But in the early years, she admits that grounding overwhelmingly white peace leaders in a sense of solidarity wasn’t easy. “There were certain [concerns] of the Latino community, of the brown community, that were not part of the program. I did a lot of fussing about that,” she says.
Sarabia’s “fussing,” witnessing to white peacemakers and remaining steadfast in her belief that anti-racism is central to peace, has transformed Pax Christi USA, and her work is an inspiration to Emenalo 25 years later. When a friend recruited her to attend PCYAC meetings, Emenalo worried that she didn’t have much to offer the organization as a recent college graduate. She also thought that her local work in community-oriented health care wasn’t traditional enough peacebuilding work.
Sarabia, however, was quick to correct Emenalo’s doubts on this account. Just as Sarabia worked with colleagues to persistently push the work to dismantle racism into the center of the U.S. Catholic peace movement, she also taught Emenalo how her local work for health justice in Georgia is central to the international movement for peace.
This stuck with Emenalo. “It was great to learn what peacebuilding can look like in different forms,” she says. “What Olga was doing [in 1999] was my vision of what a peacebuilder is, but the things that I’m doing when it comes to health care and my community? All of that still counts.”
Peace Pair mentorships aren’t just one-way inspiration. They’re what Pax Christi USA calls “mutual co-learning and accompaniment,” and they’re outward demonstrations of deep care and kindness. And that matters, because while young peacemakers want to see big strategic and structural transformations in how Catholic peace and justice groups engage their young members, they also want something more intimate: care and kindness from their elders and mentorship that bridges the personal and the political, the structural and the spiritual.
Church support structures in action
Lily, the college protestor, had the opportunity to experience the benefits of this mentorship. Eventually, the officers on the Catholic student center’s roof came down and raided the tents where Lily’s partner and friends were camping. Protestors were arrested, and Lily jumped into action, calling fellow organizers to figure out next steps. In the midst of that chaotic moment, Lily received two messages of support from Catholic elders that grounded them in their work.
The first gesture was a call from Dorothy, an older Catholic, mentor, and friend who imparted weekly wisdom to Lily about her time protesting the Vietnam War and the AIDS crisis. Dorothy’s message was simple: “Just let me know what you need.”
The second message was an email from Johnny Zokovitch, then the executive director of Pax Christi USA. Lily doesn’t remember the whole email but does remember how it started: “Lily, thank you for your witness.”
In a moment of difficulty, chaos, and fear, Lily felt supported by these elders and heard by the Catholic Church. And that isn’t a way that Lily feels often. Like many of the young Catholic activists in this article, Lily has struggled with the church’s stance on many issues: the lives and dignity of trans and queer people, abortion rights, gender justice, and women’s ordination. They haven’t often felt heard by their church or honored as a young peacemaker. Their role has frequently been on the edge of institutions and organizations. Talking to Lily, it’s easy to see the prophet whom Jesus describes in Luke 4:24 as not welcome in their own community.
Because of this, it clearly means something to have elder Catholic mentors welcome and affirm young Catholic activists like Lily in their work when they support their communities in moments of crisis and moments of resistance.
That gives Catholic elders and U.S. Catholic organizations a clear choice: These organizations can choose strategies of recruitment or strategies of networking and solidarity, supporting and being supported by their younger peers. They can choose to relegate certain kinds of peace work to the margins of the movement, or they can bring that peace work into the church’s center.
Whatever they choose, whatever we choose, it won’t just affect our organizations and our church. It will ultimately affect our ability to make—and sustain—peace in the world today.
* Lily is a trans/genderfluid person who uses they/them pronouns. Their name, along with that of their partner who took part in the encampment, is a pseudonym.
This article also appears in the November 2024 issue of U.S. Catholic (Vol. 89, No. 11, pages 22-26). Click here to subscribe to the magazine.
Image: Unsplash/Ehimetalor Akhere Unuabona
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