Volume 26, Number 1 April 2004
Peace and Justice Snapshot: John Krejci
In place of our working parish snapshot, CTA News here inaugurates a new feature: a profile of a CTA member or local group whose action for peace and justice gives hope and inspiration to others. To nominate others for subsequent profiles, send an e-mail to bill@cta-usa.org
Name: John Krejci (pronounced cray-shee, it means “tailor” in Czech.)
Home: Lincoln, Neb.
Family: wife Jean and three children, 31, 30, 28.
Current organizational involvement (a selection): Nebraskans for Peace NFP (past president, board member since 1979), the longest surviving, statewide peace and justice group in the U.S.; the U.N. Association of Lincoln; Nebraskans Against the Death Penalty; Nebraska Chapter, National Association of Social Workers, Nebraska CTA (a founding member in 1996).
Current Activities (some examples): Organizer and supporter of sustained, public anti-Iraq war demonstrations in Lincoln since before the war; regular vigil keeper at the Air Force Strategic Command Center on the 6th and 9th of each month (the dates in June 1945 of the atom bombing of Nagasaki and Hiroshima) in Bellevue, Neb.; participant in the Criminal Justice Reform group in Omaha, Neb.; leader of effort to ban lethal injections on Nebraska death rows; conductor of teach-ins on the importance of the U.N. as a vehicle for world peace.
Past Activities (a few): marched with Fr. Jim Groppi in Milwaukee and with Dr. Martin Luther King in Selma, Ala. in the 1960s supporting civil rights; active in the Sanctuary Movement for illegal Guatemalan refugees in Lincoln in the 1980s; led marches in Washington, D.C., supporting Nuclear Freeze Campaign in the 1980s; actions against the School of the Americas throughout the 1990s.
Amazing Fact: He’s never been arrested.
Professional Background: Omaha diocesan priest, ordained in 1962, resigned in 1971; earned doctorate in sociology at Notre Dame in 1974 and masters in social work at University of Nebraska in 1983; taught sociology at Nebraska Wesleyan University and at Kearney State College; retired in 2000.
Major Influences: his father, John Krejci, who, as head of the Knights of Columbus in Omaha, led a long but successful campaign to admit black members and who worked 60 years with his parish St. Vincent DePaul Society; his wife Jean, a Benedictine sister and activist in Colombia in the 1960s; Fr. Jim Stewart, social justice pioneer in Omaha; the Benedictines at Conception, Mo., (where he was a seminarian) who gave him a liberal education; Fr. Cronin, a priest at the Gregorian University in Rome (where Krejci studied theology during Vatican II) who said, “Even if all the people in Latin America were saints, there would still be problems because the social structure is unjust.”
Heroes: Pope John XXIII, Martin Luther King, Thomas Merton, Dorothy Day, Daniel Berrigan, Cesar Chavez.
Hobbies: plays hockey (he’s “the checking Czech”); fishing, biking, swimming.
What Keeps Him Going: Hope (“There’s got to be a light at the end of this tunnel. You can’t dwell on the negative all the time.”)
Future Plans: “I’m going to keep doing what I’m doing until there’s a democratic reform of the church, a humane criminal justice system, a government sensitive to the poor and world peace.”