During my time at Andre House, I gave some talks to local high school students. As a core community, we had wanted to do more of this outreach, but the daily demands of hospitality allowed little time. Still, I did a few presentations. Topics such as the works of mercy or the history of the Catholic Worker movement were met with great interest by young people.

One of the ways I often started the talk was with “The $50 Quiz.” I would bring in a new fifty bill that I would get at the bank—God knows we didn’t have them laying around Mom’s House—and say to the students “Okay, I will give this to the person who can answer just four basic questions about world history. All of them are answerable, and everyone can stay in the game until they miss one.”

The point of the game—which only I knew at this point—was to demonstrate the usual priorities of our social education. I would tell them we are taught to know and even idolize “the American Trinity,” praying in the name of Money, Power and Physical Pleasure. What we do not learn so well are the manifestations of the Holy Trinity: people who work for justice and peace, who live the Beatitudes.

When the first three questions—about notable people in the financial, military and entertainment worlds, respectively—were answered, many were set to cash in. Just one more question. But that one, about Dorothy Day or Ben Salmon or Gustavo Guti?rrez, proved elusive. The point was made, and I kept the fifty bucks.

The $50 Quiz, rigged though it was, can make a number of points about the Church’s education of young people. One of these points is about access. While an occasional visit from the peace movement is not uncommon, it pales in comparison to the access given, and taken advantage of, by another movement: the recruitment of young people for military service.

In both parochial and public schools, recruiters for the Armed Forces are waging a multi-billion dollar, multi-media, multi-faceted campaign to reach teenagers. This is no exaggeration. Given serious concerns at the Pentagon over troop depletement and the perpetual nature of the war on terror, the military has become a consistent presence at high schools—especially, but not only, at low income schools.

Under provisions of the “No Child Left Behind Act,” recruiters are required by law to receive the name, address, phone number and some personal information of every single student in our high schools. It is very difficult for schools, and even parents, to claim exemption from this ubiquitous system. Apparently, no child will be left behind when it comes to waging war…even Catholics in wars the Vatican has called “illegal, immoral and unjust.”

As a result of these changes in law and funding, recruiters have a presence at over 95% of the 22,000 high schools in the U.S.: setting up tables at lunchtime, speaking in classes, showing videos, making phone calls to students’ homes, and doing web-based target advertising to reach young people with slick sites and cool links.

This should not just concern pacifists, but all teachers, moms and dads and—to get to the heart of my point—those who take seriously the mission of the Church to teach young people about the mission of Jesus. The point is not to criticize Catholics who join the military but rather to raise a question about the ways our young people are being trained.

Are we educating them to be prophets of peace, soldiers of Christ, or are they so many foot soldiers for the nation’s wars? As the pope’s envoy, Cardinal Pio Laghi, said when asked for the pope’s instructions about the current war: “It is the Gospel that gives instructions to us, and the Gospel is about peace.”

Yet now the question is: who will pass along this great tradition of peace? Who will teach the next generation? Will the nonviolence of Jesus become a mere rumor, with people remembering long lost times when people actually took Christ’s words at face value?

All of this can be a call to do counter-recruitment in Catholic and public high schools. We cannot match the funding or manpower of the military recruiters, but we will continue an ancient Catholic tradition. As St. Clement of Alexandria put it over 1,800 years ago: “The Church is an army of peace which sheds no blood. In peace, not in war, are we trained.” And if we follow Dorothy Day’s advice to urge “a mighty league of conscientious objectors,” we also will show the connection between hospitality and peace in today’s world: the works of mercy do not end where terror begins.

Mike Griffin is teaching at Holy Cross College in South Bend and working for the Catholic Peace Fellowship.