The Catherine McAuley Spirit Award

Award designed by Sister Marie Henderson, RSM

Marie Dennis is the Inaugural Recipient of
Mercy by the Sea's
Catherine McAuley Spirit Award

Marie Dennis, a longtime leader in the global Catholic peace movement, has been named the inaugural recipient of the Catherine McAuley Spirit Award. Dennis will be recognized at the Celebration of Mercy & Service benefit on Sunday, Oct. 4, 2026, at 5:30 p.m. at Mercy by the Sea in Madison. 

The award celebrates an individual who embodies the enduring values of Catherine McAuley — mercy, hospitality, compassion, justice and service — and a deep commitment to the Critical Concerns of the Sisters of Mercy: immigration, racism, women, care for Earth and nonviolence. Dennis' six decades of faith-rooted peacemaking, and a life grounded in a rhythm of action and contemplation, reflect those concerns.

She is co-director of the Catholic Institute for Nonviolence, a project of Pax Christi International, where she also served as co-president from 2007 to 2019. From 1989 to 2012, including for 15 years as director of the Maryknoll Office for Global Concerns in Washington, D.C., she carried the experience of missioners worldwide into U.S. foreign policy, the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the United Nations. She co-founded the ecumenical Center for New Creation and helped launch Jubilee USA, a campaign to cancel unjust debt in impoverished countries.

In 2016, Dennis was a principal organizer of the Conference on Nonviolence and Just Peace, co-hosted in Rome by Pax Christi International and the Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace. That gathering launched the Catholic Nonviolence Initiative and has helped move Gospel Nonviolence toward the center of Catholic teaching. She holds a master's degree in moral theology from Washington Theological Union, honorary doctorates from Trinity Washington University and Alvernia University, and is the author or co-author of nine books, including “Choosing Peace: The Catholic Church Returns to Gospel Nonviolence.”

Dennis' path began far from peacebuilding. As a physicist, she worked for the U.S. Navy at the David Taylor Model Basin designing nuclear submarine nose cones. Her husband's military service took the family to Guam during the early years of the Vietnam War.

When they returned to the U.S. two years later, they faced a country in upheaval amid the civil rights movement, farmworker organizing and the assassinations of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert F. Kennedy. “I felt as though I'd come back to a completely different country,” Dennis says. “Social movements were pointing to major, deep challenges and injustices in our society that needed attention and to which I had not been paying attention. It started me down a road of trying to understand what was going on, asking questions and getting involved in community service work.”

Such work gave her an up-close look at poverty. “It disrupted my assumptions about how we live in the world.” What she realized: “There's such a gap between people who have security and a safe place to live versus families with no security, no safe place to live, no steady income or employment.” She came to believe that “in order to really follow Jesus meant doing everything I could to move more closely to the margins of our society in order to understand what life looked like from those places.”

Dennis, her husband and their six young children moved to a 65-acre organic working farm in rural Virginia, where she also continued her growing work for justice and peace. Since 1987, she has lived at Assisi Community in Washington, an intentional Catholic community which she co-founded with Franciscan Joe Nangle and two other friends, to live simply and support each other’s work for social transformation. 

Asked how people live nonviolence as a daily commitment, Dennis describes it as a spirituality grounded in the Gospel and shaped by Catholic social teaching. “Compassion, solidarity and mercy, based on love, make up the composition of nonviolence.” 

Her answer to the current expressions of violence at home and abroad is one she returns to often. “It can be overwhelming,” she admits. “All any of us can do is to take the next right step faithfully, make it a hopeful step and believe we’re doing it together.” 

The Oct. 4 Celebration of Mercy & Service benefit will introduce Dennis to the Mercy by the Sea community and support the center's mission as a place of rest, reflection and renewal for those who serve — embodying Catherine McAuley's belief that prayer, reflection and rest are not a retreat from the world, but the wellspring that makes courageous service possible.