Before dawn on a recent Thursday, Joe Mueller and Peter Quilligan park their pickup in front of the Ameritemps office, across from the CSU Convocation Center. Seagulls teem like flakes in a snow globe above the building, their bellies shining white in the ground light, as Quilligan and Mueller unload a rickety aluminum card table, a cooler full of pastry, an urn of coffee and a pot of soup. Then they wait.

Soon day laborers make their way outside and head for the table. Some express thanks for the food, but most have little to say and Mueller and Quilligan don't try to make small talk. They just give away food, self-serve.

An hour later, after about 50 day laborers have been fed, Quilligan and Mueller pack up the truck and head back home, Whitman House in Ohio City, a Catholic Worker community where anarchy mixes with Catholicism.

Quilligan and Mueller explain the Catholic Worker philosophy by comparing it to a three-legged table: One leg is hospitality; the second is prayer; the third is resistance. It's that third leg — their wrench in the machine of government and hierarchical Catholic dogma — that sets them apart from others of the same faith. It also gets them into trouble.

Back at the house, Mueller attends Thursday morning prayer at 8 a.m. Stained glass windows give the room the look of a chapel, but other signs are scarce; no Stations of the Cross mark off the life of Jesus on the walls. Pictures of residents and guests cover one corner with a visual history of the house and its extended family. A couple of bicycles are stored in another corner. There are couches and a low coffee table, and an old piano.

Mueller, fellow Worker Chris Knestrick and a guest are the only ones in attendance this morning. Knestrick taps a brass bowl with a smooth wooden stick. When the single clear note of the bowl rings into silence, they begin reading from Jesus the Rebel, a book by the radical Jesuit Father John Dear:

"To engage in the nonviolent revolution that Jesus begins is to risk the cross. Like Jesus we face hostility and opposition, even from our own religious communities, and from the Church itself. We may even undergo harassment, ostracism, alienation, arrest, imprisonment, and death. But if we do, we will have the consolation of knowing that we served the mission of Jesus."

It takes about half an hour to read the whole chapter. In the short silence that follows, it's hard not to apply that text to Mueller and Knestrick and the other volunteers who live at the house. They take literally the calling to dedicate their lives to peace and social justice, and in the process they lead a rebellious life. Members of the Whitman House community have been arrested twice this year — while praying during a protest at the Armed Forces Recruiting Center in Lakewood, and during a protest at the Cleveland International Air Show.

After the short silence, Knestrick taps the brass bowl again, and the service is over. They thank each other and get on with the day.

THE CATHOLIC WORKER is a nationwide radical movement founded on both Catholic and anarchist ideals: not only prayer and service to God and the poor, but also rejection of hierarchy, and an embrace of personal responsibility. People who live at Whitman House come from various political perspectives, mostly leaning hard to the left, but Knestrick says that, in political terms, he thinks of the Catholic Worker ideology as more right than left, at least in that philosophical sense.

"We don't generally advocate building systems to deal with society's problems," he says.

The movement's founder, Dorothy Day, was born in New York in 1897. She saw Catholicism as the faith of the poor and immigrants, and converted. She had dabbled in communism as she worked for newspapers and wrote a novel, but she became critical of those ideals. In 1932 she met Peter Maurin, a Frenchman and former Christian Brother. Together they would found the Catholic Worker newspaper, selling it for a penny a copy, and spreading radical ideas about social justice. One of Day's best known lines is quoted on a poster in the Whitman house dining room: "Our problems stem from our acceptance of this filthy, rotten system."

BREAKING BREAD The Catholic Workers live on donated communal meals.

Soon the Catholic Worker ideas and passion crystallized into an ideological movement of lay people, not priests, brothers or nuns. They would have no formal leaders, and no official connection to the institutional Catholic church; just a network of decentralized communities, people giving away food and shelter, living in voluntary poverty on farms and in houses across the country, each of them bucking the oppression of corporations and government as they saw fit.

The farms didn't work out, but the houses flourished. An online directory says there are 185 Catholic Worker Communities in the world, with 168 of them in the U.S. (though Knestrick says that count is incomplete). It lists three in Cleveland, including Casa San Jose and St. Herman's House of Hospitality, but of the three, only Whitman House is propelled along by the urge to call the government and the institutional church on the carpet.

"The character of the movement is that people come and go," says Joe Lehner, who in the mid-'80s was a founder of the local Catholic Worker community and Whitman House. Lehner remains involved supporting the community, but he can't risk getting arrested in protest these days.

He says four or five years ago the future of the house was uncertain because no volunteers were living there. Then for a couple of years it was just one. But in 2004, three new volunteers moved in — Quilligan, Mueller and Knestrick — bringing with them energy that has grown. These days there are five volunteers living at the house, four men and one woman, and their hospitality programs are flourishing. Most of the guest beds are filled by people who might otherwise not have a place to sleep. A drop-in center in a Lorain Avenue storefront has operated since the '80s, and remains open and busy five nights a week. They've been taking food to the day laborers for two years now. They're collecting books to build a lending program for prisoners.

And as for the resistance, they're keeping that up quite nicely, too.

ABOUT 30 MEMBERS of the Catholic Worker extended community marked the third anniversary of the invasion of Iraq with a retreat at St. Coleman's Church the weekend of March 17. That same weekend, President Bush promised to "finish the mission" in Iraq with "complete victory," and Time Magazine reported that U.S. Marines had massacred at least 15 unarmed Iraqi civilians in the town of Haditha. After three years the number of U.S. troops killed was approaching 2,500, while estimates of the number of Iraqi civilian deaths were running above 30,000.

The retreat ended on the anniversary itself, a Sunday morning, and participants were looking for something to do with their resolve against the continuing violence. The crowd made its way to the Armed Forces Recruiting Center on Detroit Avenue in Lakewood. They brought banners, reading "Grief from America and Iraq," and "Let Us Repent of War," and a costume like the dark robes the prisoners at Abu Grahib wore. They read the names of Americans and Iraqis killed.

For most of the protesters, raising a little commotion on the street was enough. Knestrick and Mueller, however, had come prepared to be arrested. They went up to the storefront office, with its Army, Navy, Air Force and Marine banners and insignia, and they tried the door. It was open. They went inside to see if there was anyone to talk to.

The lights were on, but no one was home. They found stacks of recruitment flyers, decided that local kids didn't need to fall under the influence of that propaganda, and so put them in bags. They found a business card on a desk for Staff Sergeant Kimberly Middleton. They decided to give her a call.

"I asked her to come down so that we could talk about the war, and about shutting down the recruiting center," Knestrick says. While they waited, they sat down to pray.

Instead of coming down, Middleton called her supervisor, who called the Lakewood police. A police report doesn't differ much from the protesters' account: When Patrolmen Deucher and Fioritto arrived, they saw the protesters on the sidewalk, the front door open, and the two men sitting inside on the floor. Knestrick and Mueller told the officers they were waiting for Sergeant Middleton, so the police called her. She told them the protesters didn't have permission to be inside. The police told the Catholic Workers several times that if they didn't leave they would be arrested for trespassing. They had come prepared for that. They were in jail for less than two hours before they bonded out.

They were also prepared to take the trespassing charges all the way to jury trial, during which they would attempt to put the war on trial instead.

"We freely admitted to all the facts," Knestrick says. "We just didn't think we should be held criminally responsible."

A CHANNEL OF YOUR PEACE Megan Wilson, interrupting the flow.

Their lawyer, Scott Hurley, argued that they had to be there because their consciences compelled them. He reminded the court that the door was left unlocked, and that lights were on in the basement. He pointed out that journalist Carl Monday is often seen on camera being told repeatedly and emphatically to leave offices and stores.

Knestrick and Mueller did their best to put the war on trial. In the end they were found guilty of criminal trespassing. Judge Pat Carroll fined them $100, plus court costs, plus 50 hours of community service and a year's probation each.

NOT ALL THEIR BUCKING of the system is so dramatic.

Like most Catholic Worker houses, Whitman House has its own newspaper. Last winter they used it to write an open letter to Bishop Anthony Pilla, asking him for a meeting so that they could talk about his and the U.S. Catholic Bishops' failure to speak out strongly against the war. The letter noted that Pope John Paul II said "No to war," calling it "always a defeat for humanity," but that U.S. bishops hadn't been so clear. They cited a statement from Archbishop Edwin O'Brien, head of the military Archdiocese of the United States: "It was the opinion of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops that given the complexity of the countless elements and arguments on either side, people of good faith could arrive at differing conclusions as to the moral justification of our armed interventions."

The letter got them a meeting with Bishop Pilla, but Mueller says he spent most of the time talking about the importance of going through proper channels. Pilla, who no longer heads the Cleveland diocese, never spoke publicly in direct opposition to the war.

Last summer, they sent another letter, this one mailed to Pilla's successor Bishop Lennon, co-signed by Father Ben Jimenez, SJ. That letter got no response at all.

Robert Tayek, spokesman for the Catholic Diocese of Cleveland, responded by e-mail to the Free Times' query about the Catholic Workers' activism and diocesan views of the war: "The Church encourages all Christians to take seriously the Gospel call to be peacemakers," he writes.

Further, he says the Cleveland diocese held educational forums and prayer vigils "before the outbreak" of the war in Iraq. Those efforts involved "making better known the Church's teaching on war and peace, as well as the specific moral objections to any preemptive invasion of Iraq by the United States voiced by Pope John Paul II and then Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger (now Pope Benedict XVI)."

He points out that on the eve of the war, then-Bishop Pilla led a crowd, including more than 700 Catholic high school students, in a prayer service for peace at St. John the Evangelist Cathedral. Since the war started, the Diocese Social Action Commission has continued to hold education forums and prayer vigils for peace, and in memory of all those who have been killed.

"We continue to encourage Christians and all people of good will to make a serious commitment to working for peace and with justice for all," Tayek concluded.

But how exactly does a Catholic work for peace and justice, when elected officials continue to wage war? Does the work end with believing in peace and praying on it?

While the effects of the post-election power shift in Washington have yet to play out, Knestrick and Mueller don't put much faith in the vote. Knestrick says he has never cast a ballot in his life, and Mueller says he has voted only occasionally.

"If you do vote," Knestrick says, "you can't complain about the system, because you've helped empower someone to make these decisions for us."

FR. BEN JIMINEZ, SJ. Keeping it legal, for now.

FATHER BEN JIMENEZ, a Jesuit priest who lives in the Jesuit residence at St. Ignatius High School and is pastor of St. Augustine Church in Tremont, is part of the Catholic Worker extended community. He was with Knestrick and three other members of the community when they were arrested in September during a protest of the Cleveland International Air Show. Beneath the wing of an A-10 Warthog fighter jet — a plane which, as Knestrick noted in the Whitman House newspaper, "is able to spew out three to four thousand depleted-uranium rounds of ammunition per minute" — Knestrick and Megan Wilson held a banner that read, "War is not entertainment. These Planes kill." Jim Schlect knelt, as if to pray. Tim Musser and Father Jimenez lay on the ground, as if dead. And they sang the Prayer of St. Francis, which begins, "Make me a channel of your peace."

Jimenez described the bewildered, puzzled and uncomfortable faces of the air show visitors, especially families with children as they would stop to look for a few seconds and then move on before the kids could ask questions. He described air show officials approaching in golf carts, speaking into walkie-talkies and moving on. Then came the police, arresting all five. They took them away from an event that pulled in thousands of people, and charged them with "unlawful congregation." A Cleveland police report on the incident says the five were "blocking the visitors, as well as air show workers, from moving freely around the event."

Father Jimenez says he thinks it's because of Catholic families who have soldiers in the war that the U.S. bishops haven't spoken out more strongly. He says he's not aware of any public denunciation of the war by a U.S. Catholic bishop, including Pilla and Lennon, since the atrocities began.

"If there was," he says, "I would know about it."

Jimenez has repeatedly put his liberty on the line in the name of peace, and not only as it relates to the war in Iraq. He says the Gospels make it clear that rebellion against an unjust system is not only justified, but part of what Jesus calls us by example to do, beginning with the day he kicked the money changers out of the temple.

Every year since 2001, Jimenez has joined the InterReligious Task Force on Central America in an annual protest at the School of the Americas at Fort Benning, Georgia — a U.S. training ground for Latin American military personnel. The School of the Americas protests began in 1990, the year after six Jesuit priests and two women were murdered by SOA-trained military personnel in San Salvador. Among the school's alumni are at least 11 Latin American dictators, including deposed Panamanian leader Manuel Noriega. The SOA was officially "closed" at the end of 2000, but reopened just a few weeks later under a new name, the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation. According to School of the Americas Watch, the change has been entirely cosmetic. War training goes on, and so do the protests.

Two years ago, Jimenez's actions got him arrested and earned him two months in jail on trespassing charges. Next weekend, he and several members of the local Catholic Worker community plan to join the IRTF for the annual bus trip to Georgia. He's not planning on getting arrested this time. He's on probation.

THE CLEVELAND CATHOLIC Worker community's longest running program isn't about risking jail, and it probably has the effect of keeping some other people out.

A drop-in center — which people at Whitman House call "the Drop" — has held an open door to Lorain Avenue five nights a week since 1984. Last Friday night brought what Quilligan described as a modest turnout from the streets and shelters. About 25 people filled the room, with a half dozen out front smoking. The stress of poverty was visible on their faces, and audible in their voices. An apparently intoxicated woman lay by herself on a couch. Several people played cards, or sat around tables talking. There was a woman with her grandchild. Someone played an old-school funk CD on a boom box.

The Catholic Workers share the routine tasks of keeping the place open with several different groups, including the Interreligious Task Force on Central America, and students from John Carroll University, but most nights it's members of the Catholic Worker house who keep the peace. They talk people down from arguments, and get in between when it looks like they might get violent.

Ryan Seal, a Catholic Worker in fraying pants, a sweatshirt and knit cap, responds to Quilligan's call for help with some commotion outside. An apparently intoxicated man is arguing with a woman who can't seem to stop provoking him. She's with a second man, and the first seems to be trying to tell him something about her. They say "Motherfucking" a lot, and periodically the loud man whispers in the boyfriend's ear. Apparently the loud one was arrested and released earlier in the day, and he blames the woman for it. Quilligan and Ryan keep their hands in their pockets and keep their voices calm as they urge the people to just let their differences go. It's just another night at the Drop.

"Whatever they're talking about," Seal says, "that's not why they're fighting. These people are frustrated, and abused by the system. They're just taking it out on each other."

mgill@freetimes.com