J. Edward Guinan (6 March 1936 – 26 December 2014) was a former stock trader who became a Paulist priest and founded Washington, D.C.'s Community for Creative Non-Violence in 1970.

[10] He bought a Jaguar racing coupe, and said he enjoyed driving it to lavish company getaways in Acapulco and Mexico City.

[11] However, he also began volunteering in a ghetto behind Nob Hill several nights a week with a young Paulist priest friend, and "came to the conclusion that I'd rather respond directly to human suffering than perpetuate the wealth of the already wealthy..."[8] He discerned a spiritual call to join the Paulist Fathers and left the financial world, giving his Jaguar and all his wealth away.

[8] He moved to Washington, DC to attend St. Paul's College, the Paulist major seminary, from 1966 to 1971, while completing studies in philosophy and theology.

[16][17] Various student-run underground and campus papers nationwide began taking notice, even encouraging young people to travel to Washington to hear him.

He had contacted Martin Luther King Jr. to volunteer for the Poor People's Campaign and the march on the national mall on June 19, 1968, and he served as lieutenant.

[8] In the spring of 1972, Guinan's religious congregation allowed him to host peace activists at Mount Paul, the Paulist Fathers Minor Seminary and novitiate in Oak Ridge, New Jersey.

[19] They dubbed the conference Oakridge not just for the location, but as a nod to the hub of US nuclear arms buildup activity in the United States, Oak Ridge Tennessee.

[25] In 1969 he asked the Paulist Council to grant him the freedom to create a community on the principles of "common goods, shared responsibility and service-oriented – to live poorly, simply, to make ourselves available to others and see if it works.

[27] It was an interfaith enterprise, however, with Jewish, Baptist, and secular members alongside Catholics among the original founding group, and not officially connected to any church.

Guinan and the group drafted a statement of purpose, "To resist the violent; to gather the gentle; to help free compassion and mercy and truth from the stockades of our empire.

"[5] With the help of House Speaker Tip O'Neill (D-Mass) and Marion Barry, the mayor of Washington, DC, in 1984 the group moved into a vacant federal building at 425 D Street NW, where it remains.

The venue was busy and popular, but they were also threatened with eviction in 1973 for attracting the wrong element to the building, making headlines: "We have come to feed the hungry, and we intend to insist on that right.

[31] On October 8, 1973, when Henry Kissinger received the Pacem in Terris award from the Center for the Study of Democratic Institutions, an incensed Guinan led a group of protesters to the event.

An attendee said that those present included "Hans Morgenthau, J. William Fulbright, George Will, Edwin Reischauer, Rexford Tugwell, Nelson Rockefeller, Henry Jackson, George McGovern, Stanley Hoffman, David Horowitz, Hubert Humphrey, Theodore Hesburgh, John Kenneth Galbraith, Elizabeth Mann Borgese, Clark Clifford, John Patton Davies, Sam Ervin, Frank Church, Leslie Gelb, David Halberstam, Marshall Shulman, Francis Fritzgerald, Jonas Salk, and Edmund Muskie," and also a number of celebrities such as Joanne Woodward and Paul Newman.

"[34] In 1975 he and another CCNV activist, Michael Murphy, were found not guilty by a jury after they entered a grocery store, broke apart a loaf of French bread and shared it with other customers while TV news cameras rolled, "decrying unconscionable profiteering amid mass hunger.

A group of Catholic businesspeople raised money to buy the Chase mansion in Washington, DC's Kalorama neighborhood, where Embassy Row is located.

[40] They adopted two resolutions, (1) to support the United Farm Workers of America in their "struggle for justice" during the ongoing lettuce and grape boycotts, and (2) countering the military's intention to form Reserve Officers' Training Corps (ROTC) groups on college campuses, with a focus on establishing peace programs rather than expending energy to fight ROTC.

[43] Pax Christi USA differed from similar groups such as Catholic Peace Fellowship (Jim Forest) because, according to Guinan, it had "consultative status with the United Nations.

"[46] For 25 years from 1985 until he retired in 2010, Guinan was executive director of Wellspring Ministries, a nonprofit incorporated to serve adults living with developmental disabilities.

[50] He did not ask anyone in the self-determination movement, but instead drafted a statehood proposal that Asch and Musgrove wrote, "required a four-step process: an up-or-down vote on the question of statehood, the election of forty-five delegates to a constitutional convention, the submission of a constitution to the voters for ratification, and, finally, an application to Congress for admission to the Union as the fifty-first state.

[53] Editor, Flesh and Spirit: A Religious View of Bicentennial America, Gamaliel Press, 1976 While he was still a Paulist priest, Guinan met Kathleen Thorsby, who had come to Washington, D.C., for the "Peace Summer" discussed above.

The couple received the WETA Hometown Hero award as DC citizens creating "positive change for underprivileged people.