from Pax Christ USA
October 30, 2019
The Missing Peace in the Catholic Church
I am a Catholic and I want to be part of a peace church. I want the pope to declare that every parish built in the next one hundred years must be consecrated in the name of a peacemaker or a peace-related image or event. I want to join St. Maximilian the Resister Catholic Community, chant the mid-day psalms at Santa Maria de la Paz Catholic Church, and go to vespers at Franz Jägerstätter Parish. I want my children’s children and their children to participate in the Thomas Berry or Sr. Dorothy Stang Ecojustice group at their high school, join the Dorothy Day Catholic Peace Fellowship at the university or organize The Ben Salmon Peace & Justice Festival. I’d like to go to Christmas Eve Midnight Mass at Christ the Peacemaker Cathedral or participate in the Triduum at St. Oscar Romero Catholic Church. I dream of the day when people will associate Catholics with a commitment to peacemaking as readily as they do the Brethren, the Mennonites, and the Quakers.
We live in a time and place when the banners that hang from the lampposts that line the boulevards of our towns no longer are adorned with Season Greetings but with the names of young men and women in the military. When I drive by and see names like Sullivan, Rodriguez, Fortelli, Polanski, or Nguyen, I think, “Probably a Catholic kid.” And I wonder, before they signed up, did they even for a moment ask, “How do the business of soldiering and the deeds of war that are every soldier’s duty square with my Catholic faith and the gospel of Jesus?” I wonder if they heard anything around their kitchen table or in an 8th grade religion class or on a Confirmation retreat or in a Sunday homily about the non-violent gospel of Jesus that gave them pause before, in blind faith, they signed their lives away.
I wonder if any of their parents, aunts or uncles, catechists, teachers, youth ministers, godparents or pastors ever told them that before they pledge allegiance to a flag or a political party or military branch or embrace a particular brand of American fealty, all Catholics who “put on Christ” in baptism have pledged first an allegiance to a person and a way of life that trump, challenge, and expose as idolatrous even the noblest human made agendas, programs, or military operations that ask from us a faithfulness of which God alone is worthy? I wonder, did they ever consider that the way of Jesus flies in the face of the way of war, or did they, I fear, never hear anything substantive or alluring or personally implicating about Jesus’ peaceable kingdom and the courageous call and heroic commitment to the gospel of nonviolence to which Catholic Christians are answerable? The gospels are clear: the Jesus to whom Christians are called to align their lives is the Prince of Peace foretold in Isaiah 9:6 who preached “Blessed are the peacemakers,” taught “love your enemies,” cautioned the mob ready to stone a woman to death for her wrongdoing, “He who has not sinned can cast the first stone,” and reprimanded Peter to put his sword back in its sheath after cutting off the Roman guard’s ear. Why then are so many Catholics seemingly oblivious to or dismissive of the demands the gospel makes on us to be makers of peace? Why are so many Catholics who receive the God-blessed but world-broken body of Christ in the Eucharist so unaware of the nonviolent message of Jesus and the claims it makes on us?
The sad fact is that many young Catholic men and women are more willing and eager to be soldiers for Uncle Sam than to be saints of shalom for Jesus. Even sadder is the likely reason for this: the powers and principalities of a certain type of Americanism have done a better job of passionately and persuasively preaching their gospel than the presiders and preachers in Catholic Churches, schools, and homes have done in preaching the gospel of Jesus. If we dare to be honest, is it unfair to say that, up to now, Catholic leaders, pastoral ministers, and laity in the United States have failed to promote a Christic vision of peace and to create and offer an opportunity for peacemaking to our young adults that is as captivating, life-changing, and communally substantive as that being preached and peddled by the military establishment? Whether at the table of God’s word or at the dinner table, whether by what is said or by what is left unsaid by ecclesial leaders, parents, and elders of these young persons, too often it is conformity to the dominant culture, to the American social, economic, and military system that is proclaimed not the reign of God as reflected in Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount. It comes down to this, according to the late Jesuit Daniel Berrigan: do we identify ourselves as Americans who happen to be Catholic Christians or as Catholic Christians who happen to be Americans?
At the end of every Eucharistic Liturgy, the presider sends forth the assembly with these words: “Go in peace to love and serve the Lord.” The Hebrew word, of course, is SHALOM, and it refers not to individual tranquility and a stress-free life but to “a restoration of the right [relationships] . . . among people . . . and within all of creation.” (The Challenge of Peace , no. 32). What does it mean today to go to Mass and to be sent forth into a world of violence and war as ambassadors of Christ who is the Prince of Peace? Is anything more required of us because we are Catholic followers of Jesus than of our neighbors who are good people, but might not be followers of Christ? Are not the provocative words of Dan Berrigan written so many years and wars ago not still evocative and challenging today? He wrote:
We have assumed the name of peacemakers, but we have been, by and large, unwilling to pay any significant price. And because we want peace with half a heart and half a life and will, the war, of course, continues, because the waging of war, by its nature, is total—but the waging of peace, by our own cowardice, is partial . . . . There are no makers of peace because the making of peace is at least as costly as the making of war—at least as exigent, at least as disruptive, at least as liable to bring disgrace and prison and death in its wake (“The Word as Liberation” in No Bars to Manhood, 1970, pgs. 48, 49).
For those who are Christians first, the peace of Christ is not just a Pollyannaish hoax, a mere metaphor, a naïve agenda of liberals, an option on a multiple choice quiz. It is the real deal, the command of Christ, the required work of all Catholics and the hope of God for all people and all the earth. The missing piece in Catholic evangelism and catechesis is peace. The glaring deficiency in the Catholic mindset and lifestyle is the “full, active, and conscious” awareness that peacemaking is a constitutive dimension of being an apprentice to Jesus. When the commitment to being makers and keepers of peace is applied not merely to war and military maneuvers but to the irreverence, injustice, cruelty, and violence that have become too prevalent in personal relationships, home life, lunch rooms, work environments, politics, and the environment, then we will move closer to enacting the beatitudinal spirituality of Jesus and participating in the audacity of divine love. When the commitment to nonviolence and the way of peace become as automatically connected to the Catholic way of life as are the Hail Mary, the rosary, and the pope, then the Catholic people of God will offer the world fewer soldiers who believe war is glamorous, the path to heroism, and the way to peace and offer instead more disciples who dare to believe that living peace is a non-negotiable dimension of the Christ-life and the way to embody the dream of God “on earth as it is in heaven.”
Dan Miller, Ph.D. is a spiritual director, retreat leader, teacher, and writer. He lives and works in southern California where he leads The Human & the Holy spiritual formation community and hangs out with his three grown adult children.
COMMENTS (that appeared on the Pax Christi USA site in response to Dan’s Essay.)
• Mary Ellen Quinn
Thank you Dan! You are speaking my heart, my passion, my mission and my hope! I am a Catholic and embrace Pax Christi as my faith community as I cannot find the nonviolent Jesus in parish life. You have articulated a vision for our church and our communities that would have an enormous impact on our world.
•Jack Gilroy
Dear Mary Ellen Quinn, Pax Christi has endorsed the movement to promote Ben Salmon to Sainthood. He would be the American response to Austrian Franz Jagerstatter whose life will be exposed world wide this coming December when the story of his life opens in theaters around the world–look for A Hidden Life, and please encourage others to sign on our letter to Cardinal Cupich to put Ben Salmon on the track for sainthood.www.bensalmon.org click on Sainthood and add your name and comment.
•Jack Gilroy
Thanks, Dan. What eloquent, thoughtful and truthful comments. Please go to our website to find the person you left out, the American Franz Jagerstatter– Ben Salmon. Go too http://www.bensalmon.org, scroll down to see the short video, There Is No Just War…or if you want to help Catholics move the Sainthood of Ben Salmon, just read the letter to Cardinal Cupich asking him to advance the process of a truly saintly man who refused to train to kill…leave your name and please leave a one line message as well…
Ben Salmon resisted and refused to be part of the killing field in WWI…contrary to his family, community , church and government.
Help us hold up our American hero this Armistice Day by signing onto Ben’s Sainthood…www.bensalmon.org
Peace of the Nonviolent Christ
Jack Gilroy
http://www.bensalmon.org
• Daniel J. Miller
How ironic (and perhaps misguided), Jack, as I actually had Ben Salmon in my first draft and then switched to Jagerstatter most likely because the movie THE HIDDEN LIFE will soon be released. Yes, Ben Salmon the unknown and unheralded AMERICAN peacemaker. Thanks. [I have since reinserted Ben Salmon]
• John M. Jerpe
Thank you Dan. I am a member of Pax Christi and have published a book on Amazon entitled “THE AMERICANIZED GOSPEL; How Hypernationalism Distorts Our Catholoic Faith.” I hope you’ll agree it addresses your issue and that you’ll enjoy it.
• Tim Fogarty
There are other Quakers like I am who have fled the war glorification of our natal Constantinian Catholic Church whose local “heroes” pictured in the naves of this Constantinian Church are all wearing military uniforms. No civilians, much less any pacifists. My heroes don’t kill people they don’t know, who have never hurt them personally.
• Mike Walsh
Wonderfully said, as always.
• Janet Hanson
Amen.
My son went through a Catholic High School and couldn’t wait to quit attending mass. There was, for him, no compelling connection to any big ideas that set him on fire. I always said that the social gospel made a “guest appearance” during Catholic Schools Week, when the kids would get photographed doing volunteer work.
The social gospel and the notion of peace is an idea that sets me on fire. And yet, it is hard to know what to do with the “fire” sometimes. The world is in so much disarray. I listened to a recent interview of two of the Kings Bay Plowshares members by Chris Hedges. They talked about taking months to prepare for the Kings Bay action, prayerful and meditative action.
Probably the peace and justice movement, which has no endorsement by the seats of power, will always remain at the perimeter of things. Which is said to be the zone that Jesus operated in. Thank you for this thought provoking writing.
• Jennifer Suet Lim
St. Augustine left us a pragmatic and sensible framework for thinking about peace and what makes just and unjust wars. The Augustinian just war theory does not advocate total pacifism. His writings are included among the great thinkers in medieval political philosophy at college-level curriculum.
For all the lives at stake, which includes the civilians in the Middle East, the lives of American service members and many others, the least we could do would be to apply the principles of jus bellum to shed light on America’s military engagement in the Middle East — for example, was there right authority, right intention, reasonable hope, proportionality, and last resort. How do you pass a proportionality test when so many civilian lives (and service members) has been lost?
• Fr. Bernard Survil
Pax Christi Greensburg is circulating Dan Miller’s observation to our bishop, priests and deacons with this addition: Proposal: Split the Nov 17, 2019 National Collection for the AMS 50/50: Half for the chaplains of the warriors: The AMS. Half for the chaplains of the nonviolent peacemakers: http://www.paxchristiusa.org/
I invite PCUSA members to make the same suggestion to the leadership in their diocese.
Bernie Survil Ph: 724-523-0291
• Jack Gilroy
Isn’t it time to push aside the attempt by Medieval Age Church Doctors to find loopholes in the teaching of the nonviolent Jesus? There is no dogmatic order to have Catholic Church collections to aid the military system. Individual Catholic Church pastors can simply refuse to take the collection. Or could take an antimilitarism collection and give it to peacemaker groups like Pax Christi, Pace e Bene, or Friends of Franz & Ben.
Jack Gilroy
http://www.bensalmon.org
• Pingback: The Missing Piece | in Catholics Against Militarism November
catholicsagainstmilitarism.com
The Missing Piece
is peace, says Dan Miller.
This is a great essay about the current state of affairs in the Church.
The sad fact is that many young Catholic men and women are more willing and eager to be soldiers for Uncle Sam than to be saints of shalom for Jesus. Even sadder is the likely reason for this: the powers and principalities of a certain type of Americanism have done a better job of passionately and persuasively preaching their gospel than the presiders and preachers in Catholic Churches, schools, and homes have done in preaching the gospel of Jesus.
This entry was posted in Militarism and Christianity, War and Peace on November 13, 2019 by Cammy.
• Phil
You would have to separate Jesus from the Godhead, because God did approve of battles. Christ did not call anyone to a military kind of battle, nor did he kick anyone’s butt that we have mention of, but he did break the things of the money changers at the temple with the kind of weapon with which he would later be scourged. He was really spreading the message of inner peace, which only he could really bring, and adoption into his family. I think, if we found his peace, and not through weapons or the faulty secular ways of the world with a Christian veneer, we would see more love and understanding (which would include a healthy grasp of our own sinful nature for a quicker forgiveness and productive talks).