By Barb Arland-Fye
The Catholic Messenger
CLINTON — Marie Dennis, who worked as a physicist for the U.S. Navy after college and raised six children while discovering her mission to practice and promote nonviolence, will receive the Clinton Franciscans’ Clare Award. The presentation will take place July 25 at 6:30 p.m. at Rastrelli’s Tuscany Special Events Center and is open to the public.
The Clare Award honors women who exemplify the characteristics of St. Clare of Assisi, one of the first followers of St. Francis of Assisi, and the values of the Clinton Franciscans. Those values focus on the promotion of active nonviolence and the pursuit of peace with justice in right relationship with all of creation.
Dennis serves as senior director of the Catholic Nonviolence Initiative (CNI) and was co-president of Pax Christi International from 2007-2019. Pax Christi USA honored her with its 2022 Pax Christi USA Teacher of Peace. Earlier, she worked for the Maryknoll Missioners for 23 years, including 15 years as director of the Maryknoll Office for Global Concerns. She is the author or co-author of seven books.
Vatican II, the assassinations of Martin Luther King, Jr., and Bobby Kennedy, the eruption of violence in U.S. cities in the 1960s, and her involvement with the Community Concerns committee in her parish launched Dennis on a journey toward fostering peace and promoting nonviolence.
She became acquainted with the Clinton Franciscans through her decades-long work with Catholic religious communities for peace, social justice and respect for the integrity of creation. “During that time, the vision of the Clinton Franciscans has been consistent and important. For about the last 10 years, as my own focus turned more toward Gospel nonviolence, the Clinton Franciscan Sisters were again leading the way, repeatedly actualizing their commitment to nonviolence and just peace in their own community life and programs,” Dennis told The Catholic Messenger.
“I have tremendous respect for the Clinton Franciscan sisters, so I am deeply honored to receive this award. Also, as a secular Franciscan, I appreciate very much the significance of naming an award for St. Clare, whose commitment in her own times to poverty and nonviolence remain a huge challenge for those of us who try to follow her example.”
In 2017, Dennis gave a presentation organized by the Clinton Franciscans in which she encouraged all parties on conflicting sides of an issue (globally) to fill up their nonviolence toolbox. The Catholic Messenger asked her to assess the response to that effort in the world today.
“Wars in Ukraine, the Middle East, Sudan and other violent conflicts demonstrate that the ‘other’ toolbox is full and ‘at the ready’ with a vast array of powerful weapons and well prepared warriors,” she said. “Powerful decision-makers seem unable to imagine nonviolent approaches to addressing conflict by addressing the root causes, preventing or interrupting violence and protecting those who are threatened. Perhaps there is just too much profit in the production and trade in weapons to risk developing and testing nonviolent tools.”
“At the same time, at a grassroots level, thousands of people are being trained in nonviolent practices – from nonviolent communication to conflict transformation; from bystander intervention and de-escalation, from restorative justice to unarmed civilian protection/accompaniment and more,” she said.
In that same presentation in 2017, she referred to a landmark study of nonviolent civil resistance campaigns that found such efforts were twice as likely to succeed as violent campaigns for overthrow of a government.
Asked why the public doesn’t hear about these campaigns and what would help to amplify them, she said: “Nonviolence is not magic — we need to learn more about how and when nonviolent approaches work and how to apply them. We need to invest more in research and encourage universities to integrate nonviolence studies into different fields of study. We need to teach at every level about the many different ways that nonviolence can be effective, tell the stories of nonviolent practice in our schools and churches, and help our children — beginning with the youngest — learn the skills of nonviolent conflict transformation.”
Dennis said a huge challenge is “just getting people to understand how nonviolence works at a personal level and at a much broader level. People mistakenly assume that nonviolence is naïve or running away or too idealistic, she said.
“The reason we started the Catholic Nonviolence Initiative (CNI) was literally because we believe the Catholic Church institutionally has so much reach and capacity,” she said, to make an impact. In 2017, CNI encouraged Pope Francis to write a World Day of Peace message on nonviolence “and it happened, becoming the first major statement from the Church on nonviolence,” Dennis said.
She has hopes that Pope Francis will write an encyclical on nonviolence. “Fratelli Tutti is a wonderful step in that direction, but I believe there is still a need for an encyclical that helps us see that nonviolence is at the heart of the Gospel; that nonviolence is a beautiful spirituality and a very positive way of life — and that nonviolence can help the world move toward just peace at a very real level.”