A different kind of Catholic: Martin Gugino, hospitalised after police brutality

[Steve Hayes]

Martin Gugino’s Witness to Nonviolence

By Paul Moses / Commonweal / June 16, 2020

When the Jericho Road Community Health Center asked Martin Gugino to
explain why he was a donor, he responded with a passage from the New
Testament. “Jesus said to clothe the naked, shelter the homeless, feed
the hungry and give drink to the thirsty,” he wrote in the Buffalo
nonprofit’s newsletter last fall, praising its Vive Shelter for aiding
asylum seekers, including a large group of Congolese immigrants.

Now Gugino is under the glare of a much bigger spotlight, known
internationally as the seventy-five-year-old protester whom Buffalo
police officers pushed to the ground, causing him to bang the back of
his head so hard on the pavement that blood flowed immediately from
his right ear. He is the subject of one of President Donald Trump’s
most asinine tweets—speculation that Gugino faked his injury as an
Antifa tactic—and the victim of Trump-inspired conspiracy theorists
who wildly distort who he is.

People who actually know Gugino say his Catholic faith is the root of
his political activism, and that he’s a gentle man who advocates
nonviolence. “He’s a devout Catholic, and really I think part of the
reason that the two of us have developed a friendship is because
that’s where my own social activism comes from and I recognize it in
him,” said Mark Colville, who founded the Amistad Catholic Worker
House in New Haven with his wife, Luz. Colville is awaiting sentencing
as one of the Kings Bay Plowshares 7, the seven peace activists
convicted of federal charges for breaking into a nuclear arsenal at
the Kings Bay submarine base in Georgia as part of a protest on April
4, 2018.

Colville, who spent more than a year and a half in jail after his
arrest, said Gugino contacted him constantly during his confinement.
Postcards were the only permissible mail, and Gugino sent him
twenty-five a week, “sometimes more,” he said. “He was with me all
through the whole pre-trial and trial process.”

Colville said he asked Gugino to serve as a character witness for his
sentencing. To prepare, Gugino began making videos, posting them to
YouTube so Colville could review them. (They have since been removed
from YouTube.) Many of his friends said Gugino has read deeply in both
theology and constitutional law, and he used that knowledge to argue
that Catholic social teaching justified the Plowshares defendants’
civil disobedience. Gugino also cited the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther
King’s quotation that “the arc of the moral universe is long, but it
bends toward justice.” Colville said Gugino added his own twist: the
arc “doesn’t bend by itself,” but “we have to bend it.”

Colville said Gugino went with him on long drives to Washington D.C.,
where they took part in one to two weeks of fasting and protest with
Witness Against Torture, which advocates for the shutdown of the U.S.
detention facility at Guantánamo Bay. The group’s origins are in the
Catholic Worker movement and, as the Catholic Worker newspaper said in
2006, WAT holds that the jail “degrades the humanity not only of the
victims but also of its perpetrators,” adding an appeal “to the
soldiers at Guantánamo, our brothers and sisters, to end the torture.”

Jeremy Varon, a history professor at The New School in New York and a
“sort of token, secular Jew in this group,” said most members “are
coming from a deep place of religious faith. They feel called upon by
God to do the work of social justice…. They point out that Jesus
himself was the victim of torture. That kind of perspective makes for
extraordinary commitment.” Gugino is “right in the heart of that
community,” Varon added. It’s not a commitment for the sunshine
protester.

The group’s major annual gathering takes place at the most frigid time
of year, around January 11, since that is the date in 2002 when
detainees first began to arrive at the naval base. The members fast on
a liquid-only diet to be in solidarity with Guantánamo detainees, many
of whom have gone on hunger strikes as a protest.

Tom Casey, a friend of Gugino from Buffalo who is active in Pax
Christi, said Gugino was always among those who rose an hour early
(after sleeping on the floor) to take part in a prayer circle “for
those of us who wanted to get up.” These ecumenical prayer circles
include Bible readings.

For protests, Gugino and other Witness Against Torture members don
orange jumpsuits like those Guantánamo detainees wear, and sometimes
black hoods. They generally protest outside the White House, chaining
themselves to the fence. As Gugino notes on his blog, he has “Four
arrests, no convictions.” The news website PolitiFact determined that
Gugino’s arrest record was wildly exaggerated in false reports
circulated on social media—an attempt to portray him as a violent
anarchist who organizes riots “for a living.”

It is true that the Catholic Worker’s founders, Peter Maurin and
Dorothy Day, were not fans of government power. But their
understanding of anarchism is not the common one of bomb-throwing
radicals. In his biography of Day, former Commonweal managing editor
Patrick Jordan cites a 1957 letter in which she explained: “those
dreadful words, pacifism and anarchism—when you get right down to
it—mean that we try always to love rather than coerce, ‘to be what we
want the other fellow to be,’ to be the least, to have no authority
over others, to begin…with ourselves.” These “isms” didn’t exist
during the lifetime of Saint Francis of Assisi, but this is an apt
description of his message as well.

Gugino represents a face of Catholicism that Trump would not know from
the Catholics around him, such as Attorney General William Barr or
White House Counsel Pat Cipollone. Archbishop Carlo Viganò is Trump’s
kind of Catholic: the former papal nuncio to the United States wrote
to tell Trump that anti-racism street demonstrations are a tool of the
supposed “deep state” effort to defeat him in the presidential
election and “to build a world without freedom.”

Vickie Ross, director of the Western New York Peace Center and “very
interfaith,” said she came to understand the Catholic Worker
movement’s connection to the crucifixion of Jesus, and sees it in
Gugino’s outlook. “His commitment to doing the right thing, and his
willingness to sacrifice to do that, his service, all of those things
are very much in the Catholic tradition,” she said.

Gugino has been active on the group’s Latin American Solidarity
Committee. “He has strong ideas…often complicated ideas that he was
working on, but he didn’t insist on them to other people,” said
Terrence Bisson, a member of the committee and a mathematics professor
at Canisius College. “He wanted to serve in whatever projects were
being worked on.” Bisson said that if money were raised, Gugino wanted
to give it away immediately. “If Saint Francis was in a group with
you, that’s what he would be saying,” he added. “In my opinion he was
the kind of person that was drawing on religion all the time.”

Massachusetts peace activist Christopher Spicer Hankle said Gugino
relishes being part of a community that helped him to form his
conscience. “I think that was life-giving enough to him, he said. “He
was getting out of it a satisfaction…. He’s getting a soul
satisfaction.”

Gugino, whose lawyer said he suffered a fractured skull and brain
damage from the impact of his fall, is not in a position to give
interviews. “He would not want the focus on him,” said Matt Daloisio
of Witness Against Torture. “He would rather the focus be on the
issues he so dearly cares about.” That’s a common reaction from true
political activists, and it appears to be Gugino’s as well. His
attorney, Kelly Zarcone, relayed a quote from him: “I think it’s very
unnecessary to focus on me. There are plenty of other things to think
about besides me.”

Even as he faces serious health concerns, Gugino will also be
confronted by continued and hostile scrutiny as the criminal case of
the two officers accused of assaulting him moves forward. As a
much-viewed WBFO video shows, Gugino walked alone up to a line of
officers advancing to clear a plaza of any protesters who remained
from a City Hall rally after an 8 p.m. curfew on June 4. Gugino was
carrying a helmet, similar to the ones police wore, in his left hand.
He had a cellphone in his right hand and gestured with it, within a
few inches of an officer’s equipment belt and his holstered service
revolver.

From the perspective of police: in that moment, the officers could not
have known that Gugino walked a spiritual path as an activist, or that
he was a cancer patient. They could, however, have considered his
age—and they were charged under a special provision in New York State
law for felony assaults on those over sixty-five years old by people
at least ten years younger. For such assaults, prosecutors need to
prove an intent to cause physical injury, rather than an intent to
cause serious physical injury. The law will grind it out finely,
starting with a decision by a grand jury on whether to indict the
officers, thirty-nine-year-old Aaron Torgalski and thirty-two-year-old
Robert McCabe.

One of many chilling aspects of the encounter is not that the officers
applied overwhelming force to Gugino, but how quickly they resorted to
shoving him as they sought to move ahead without interruption to clear
a square that was pretty much empty. When a CBS News reporter asked
Buffalo Mayor Byron Brown if the officers were acting on their
training, he responded: “One of the things they’re trained to do is to
use common sense.” If they believed Gugino was breaking the law—and
Gugino is well-schooled on constitutional law involving the right to
protest—they could have arrested him without resorting to force. They
would not have spilled blood.

As Varon said, Gugino is one of “these kinds of silver-haired
warriors” found on the protest scene who are happy to be arrested for
their beliefs. “Yes, because they’ve lived these long lives and they
realize, yes, I have time. And what’s more important than living your
values?”

>> Paul Moses, a contributing writer at Commonweal, is the author of The Saint and the Sultan: The Crusades, Islam and Francis of Assisi's Mission of Peace (Doubleday, 2009) and An Unlikely Union: The Love-Hate Story of New York's Irish and Italians (NYU Press, 2015).

https://www.commonwealmagazine.org/different-kind-catholic


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