Last Thursday, as Pope Benedict XVI addressed [1]a few hundred Catholic educators in Washington, D.C., a Marine Corps recruiter in full dress uniform set up shop outside the St. Michael’s College cafeteria.

For a couple of hours the recruiter, an officer named Will Morgan, shook hands and took down the names of a few interested students, then packed up his pamphlets and headed for the door. “Not bad,” he said on his way out.

Meanwhile, a few feet away, a handful of St. Michael’s students opposed to the Iraq war stood gathered around a cardboard sign: “Fight America’s WARS,” the sign read. “Sign up Here (straight folks only please).”

The contrast reveals a subtle tension: St. Michael’s is one of the more progressive Catholic colleges in America, and antiwar students say most of their classmates, like the pope, sexual-orientation policy [2]. But now, he claimed, campus pacifist energy is so faint you’d be hardpressed to know there’s a war on.

Not all of Landers’ colleagues agree with that assessment. Toward the end of lunch, the antiwar crew greeted Laurie Gagne, director of the college’s Edmundite Center for Peace and Justice [3]. St. Michael’s students are vocal advocates for humanitarian causes such as fighting HIV/AIDS, she said, and their lack of interest in the Iraq war is indicative of a national trend, not a campus-specific apathy.

But Catholics can and should take an antiwar stance, Gagne believes. The previous evening, she told an audience at St. Joseph Co-Cathedral in Burlington that the Iraq war can’t be reconciled with “just war” theory. Unlike NATO’s 1994 bombing of Kosovo, she said, Bush’s pre-emptive 2003 invasion wasn’t sanctioned by the United Nations.

Catholic doctrine holds that wars are only “just” if they are ethically sound in cause, intention and conduct, Gagne explained. Pope John Paul II, Benedict’s predecessor, employed “just war” theory to oppose the 2003 invasion of Iraq.

The same theory informs education on the St. Michael’s campus. The college’s Peace and Justice Studies [4] minor, for example, pays homage to a 1983 pacifist manifesto, “The Challenge of Peace,” [5] which was penned by American Catholic bishops. On March 5, Gagne’s Center for Peace and Justice sponsored a symposium entitled “Our War, Our Responsibility — Iraq at Five.”

But on Thursday outside the cafeteria, Gagne admitted that the wording of the antiwar resolution — which asserts that American troops have been coerced into defending “empire” — was a bit strong for her taste. She disagrees with Matt Howard, Burlington chapter president of Iraq Veterans Against the War [5], who feels the resolution accurately reflects student opinion on the conflict. Howard, an outspoken Burlington activist, said he thinks the measure failed for lack of student leadership.

As Howard and Gagne lingered by the cardboard sign, Student Association President Alex Monahan grabbed a chair outside the cafeteria entrance. Monahan resists Howard’s assertion that the Student Association didn’t show enough leadership on the antiwar resolution. He speculates that the “majority” of St. Michael’s students are against the war, but that the resolution’s “empire” reference made student senators apprehensive to sign on.

Monahan, a senior accounting and business major from Massachusetts, has short hair and a well-trimmed beard. His older brother is a former Student Association president. “It’s not our place to be there right now, and we need to get out,” he said of Iraq.

That same day, Pentagon researchers were admitting [6] that the war was, officially speaking, “a major debacle.” A suicide bomber killed 50 [7] at a funeral in eastern Iraq, and the U.S. military compound in Baghdad was strafed by rocket fire [8].

A few miles from the Pentagon, Pope Benedict told his audience that young people are losing sight of the connection between faith and civic life. It’s up to Catholic educators to help reinforce that bond, he said. Only then will students see that knowledge “opens up the vast adventure of what they ought to do.”

Alex Monahan admits that students today aren’t as indignant about the Iraq war as their parents were about Vietnam. Perhaps for that reason, he’s satisfied that the antiwar resolution prompted thoughtful discussion before it was struck down.

“Some feel that students live in this bubble, and I think that’s true,” he said. “But I also think they’re more informed than people think. It might be that they’re active in other things, but they do still care.”