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Michelle Nickerson To Speak on Catholic Radicalism

In 1971, FBI agents arrested a group of peace activists just as they were finishing a burglary of draft cards and vandalizing a federal building in Camden, New Jersey.  President Richard Nixon and J. Edgar Hoover had been trying for months to infiltrate and undercut their movement, known as the “Catholic Left,” which had successfully destroyed hundreds of thousands of draft cards in their efforts to apply steady non-violent pressure to end the Vietnam War.  On Wednesday, April 30th at 4pm, in the Gannon Center for Women and Leadership, Professor Michelle Nickerson will talk about her research on the "Camden 28" and the larger movement of Catholic radicalism.  Nickerson explores the formation of a Catholic "political identity" in the mid-twentieth century that, she suggests, takes shape in dialectic with, but also independent from, and in opposition to the church.