I’ve been enjoying the recycling of stories from the 70s over at Commonweal. So many Catholics of my generation (Millenials and Xers and Yers) know too little about the rich peace tradition of the Catholic Church right here in the United States and its legacy. Here is Gordon Zahn on The Future of the Catholic Peace Movement from 1973.
Gordon Zahn (1918-2007)
The following reflection was written by Rev. Emmanuel Charles McCarthy.
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The story of St. Maximilian Kolbe is fairly well known. He was a Franciscan priest with an intense spiritual relationship with Jesus’ mother, Mary, who founded a monastery in Nagasaki that survived completely intact the August 9, 1945 atomic bombing of that city, and who on August 14, 1941, at Auschwitz, freely offered to lay down his life for a Jewish man with a family, Franciszek Gajowniczek, who had been selected to be killed in retaliation for the escape of some prisoners. The man and his family were at Maximilian Kolbe’s canonization by John Paul II in 1982.
St. Maximilian Kolbe in this act of nonviolent, dying to self-love at Auschwitz on behalf of that man is an excellent witness to defending others in a Way utterly consistent with the Way of Jesus and with the Will of the Father of all as revealed by Jesus. His is a witness to Christlike, nonviolent, self-sacrificial love (agape) of a neighbor, even if one does not even know him or her personally. So, St. Maximilian Kolbe has been officially designated by the Church as a Martyr of Charity.
Charity is the English translation of the Latin word, caritas, which is the Latin translation of the Greek word agape, which in the New Testament is used 318 times out of the 338 times that love appears as a noun, verb or adjective. (The other 18 times the Greek word for love that is employed is philia, as in the city of brotherly love, Philadelphia.) The word martyr derives from the Greek word for witness, martys.
In its original meaning, the word martyr, meaning witness, was used in the secular sphere as well as in the New Testament. The process of bearing witness was not necessarily intended to lead to the death of the witness, although this could be a consequence. During the early Christiancenturies, the term acquired the extended meaning of a believer in Jesus Christ, who is called to witness to his or her belief, and on account of this witness, may have to suffer and/or die. In Christianity a martyr, in accordance with the meaning of the original Greek martys in the New Testament, is one who gives testimony, usually written, verbal or incarnational. In particular, the testimony is that the Gospel is theWord of God, is true and is worthy in every way of total trust.
Eusebius, the first Church historian (c.337), wrote of these first three centuries of Christians: “They were so eager to imitate Christ … they gladly yielded the title of martyr to Christ, the true Martyr.” The early Christians who first began to use the term martyr in its new sense, saw Jesus as the first and greatest martyr, on account of His crucifixion in fidelity to the Word of God. For them He was seen as the archetypal martyr. A Christian witness, whether written, spoken or lived, is a witness to Jesus as the Messiah of Israel and Savior of all humanity, whether or not death follows. But, regardless whether death ensues, the Christian witness follows the example of Jesusin offering up his or her life in nonviolent, suffering love of God through loving others, as well as, in order to communicate to others the truth and trustworthinessof God as revealed in the Person, words and deeds of the Nonviolent Jesus of the Gospels.
One of the aspects of Maximilian Kolbe’s Christlike martyrdom in Christ, with Christ and for Christ and for those whom Christ came to save is that he did not know if it was going to work or make any difference for the man. Nazis starting, with their leader, did not have much of a track record for keeping their word or telling the truth. Kolbe was told the man would be spared if he took his place. But he certainly knew the odds that the SS, who ran Auschwitz, would be faithful to a promise were not promising, as well as, the odds of the man for whom he was giving his life could survive in such place until the war was over. Maximilian Kolbe, like the Nonviolent, merciful Jesus of Nazareth on the cross at Golgotha, had no human assurance that what he was doing would make any difference at all. All he knew was, what St. Edith Stein knew almost exactly a year later when confronted with Jewish children bedraggled, dirty, terrified and confused because they were separated from their parents, she began to wash them, comb their hair and comfort them. “Here is a human being,” they both would have said to themselves, “ who needs help and love and I have the power to offer some help and love in a way that is in totals conformity with the will of the Father of all as revealed by Jesus Christ. So, Maximilian Kolbe and Edith Stein did just that without the slightest earthly guarantee that the Christlike love they gave in the midst of the madness of war would make the slightest difference or be known to any one but God.
From the perspective of seventy years after their choices, we know the difference those Christlike acts have made. A Christian never has to worry about being a socially responsible person towards other or meeting his or her obligation to defend others from evil, if he or she is as creative and courageous following the Way of the Word of God Incarnate, as were St. Maximilian Kolbe and St. Edith Stein. As Dorothy Day often said, “It is our faith that the good deed will ultimately produce good results.” Human beings never define good. Only God is good and therefore only God knows what is good. Therefore what the good, but invisible, God says in His visible image, Jesus Christ, is good. Anything that contradicts that good is evil.
If St. Maximilian Kolbe could have saved a hundred lives or ten thousand lives by an act of nonviolent self-sacrificial love for others, without knowledge that it would alter anything, but simply because a person or people needed that act of Christlike love, solidarity and hope now, needed that witness to the truth and trustworthiness of Jesus now, would he have done it?
There was a time when one man on earth had an opportunity to possibly prevent a war from starting, that has since killed and maimed millions upon millions of people. The choice he had to make was to go to the country that was about to be invaded by a military juggernaut a thousand time more powerful that that of the country to be invaded, and sit with the poor people of that country and say to the invading country, “If you want to kill these brothers and sisters of mine, you’ll have to kill me along with them.” He didn’t, and the carnage of that war goes on in full force to this very hour.
Christlike, nonviolent, agapic creativity, courage, truthfulness and fidelity in presenting the spoken Word, the written Word and the lived Word is what the Church needs now from its popes, cardinals, bishops priests, ministers and pastors. It does not need any more of the travesty of expanding that deceitful illusion of Jesus’ moral teaching, Catholic Just War Theory, into where it had never gone before, namely, into the wide open spaces of selectively chosen cross-border interventionist “humanitarian” military slaughter to stop selectively defined and interpreted crimes against humanity. Continuing to pass-off such thinking as morally compatible with the teachings of Jesus simply opens the doors wide for government-corporate empire builders, like the Project for a New American Century, to recruit Christians to murderously steamroll their agenda across the face of the earth. The works of war, regardless of the grandiose reasons given for choosing them, are never the works of Christlike love, which are the exclusive means by which God saves the individual and all humanity. And, such love is the power that vanquishes all other power, believe it or not. There are many things in this world that cannot be done with Christlike love, and therefore cannot be done by Christians. The intentional destruction of human beings, regardless of how lofty the cause, is one of them. It is in the Christian’s and Christian community’s resolute commitment to that truth, that hitherto unseen possibilities reveal themselves.
Nevertheless, as the late Rev. John L. McKenzie succinctly focuses the issue, “The thing about following Jesus is that you don’t do the right thing because it works; you do it because it’s the right thing. If it doesn’t work, nothing works because the wrong thing doesn’t work either. I think we have proven that.”
An article from a 1965 issue of Commonweal.
“Where the witness of the five men does help is in their insistence upon moral judgment. Nothing, absolutely nothing, not the government, not circumstances, not “credibility” nor the necessity of “honoring our commitments” nor “national interest” can release the individual from making a conscientious judgment on the particular events occurring in Vietnam. Every responsible citizen, and in particular every draftable male, must make this judgment today. Nor can he even make it once and for all; should circumstances change, he must be ready to reverse his position tomorrow.”
“I have a priest friend who is preparing a former soldier for reception into the Church, he served in both Iraq and Afghanistan, he saw and did things that deeply wounded him and bears the scars of guilt. We spoke about how to deal with his guilt. Like many ex-soldiers, I suspect he has tried drink, drugs or even psychotherapy, most priests, myself included, might give a penance of a few Rosaries but really rely on allowing him to talk, in my experience this rarely works. Pre-Trent, and possibly in Orthodoxy he would have given a penance that involved a prayer of exorcism of some sort followed by some kind of real penance, public humiliation, an arduous pilgrimage or time in monastery, vigils or fasting. Outward actions, signs and symbols bring about an inward change in our attitudes, our minds and hearts often follow our bodies.
I remember being told of the Compostella Camino after the WWII being revived by former soldiers, sometimes sometimes barefoot, sometimes carrying rucksacks filled with rocks doing penance for wartime sins.”
http://marymagdalen.blogspot.
com/2014/06/actions-signs-and- symbols.html
***The following was written by Rev. Emmanuel Charles McCarthy***
Friends,
100 years ago today, on June 28,1914, an Orthodox Christian man, Gavrilo Princip, shot and killed a Catholic Christian man, Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo. This lit the fuse that the arms dealers, called ‘the merchants of death’ after the war, had been trying to light for some time. A feverish frenzy of mutual homicidal violence and destruction, on a scale never before seen, began to engulf Europe. World War I had commenced.
Approximately 65 million combatants fought in Word War I, each of whom was the precious and beloved child of some mother or father, each of whom was deceived by the rulers of their states and their Churches to believe that what they were embarking upon was a holy war for God and country. Bishops, priests and minister on all sides blessed, in the name of Jesus, their choice to do their manly duty in spreading the heinous conflagration of World War I.
Central Powers: 22,850,000
Germany – 11,000,000
Austria-Hungary – 7,800,000
Ottoman Empire – 2,850,000
Bulgaria – 1,200,000
Allied Powers: 42,632,000
Russia – 12,000,000
British Empire – 8,904,000
France – 8,410,000
Italy – 5,615,000
United States – 4,744,000
Japan – 800,000
Romania – 740,000
Serbia – 707,000
Belgium – 267,000
Greece – 230,000
Portugal – 65,000
Montenegro – 50,000
With the exception of the Ottoman Empire all the nations on both sides in this campaign of mass human slaughter and destruction were ruled by Christians and had majority Christian populations.
These were the Christians who in 1914-1918 were “our heroes.” They are all now dead. Each is now where he wanted to put the enemy a hundred years ago—in the grave. So, where are they now besides the grave? Heaven? Hell? Are they now? Who cares now? Who will ever care? But “our heroes” of today, 2014, will never be forgotten! They will forever live in glory in the hearts and minds of future generations. What claptrap! This is just the ancient deceitful patriotic and military propaganda ploy used to snookers young people into laying down their lives, their sanity, their health, their time, their family, the truth taught by Jesus and their consciences for the “state,” and to abandon themselves to the whims and wishes and interests and orders of the local economic, military and political titans.
Starting on this date, a hundred years ago, sixty-five million human beings, mostly Baptized Christians, fell for this lie and went the way of achieving everlasting glory by killing, terrorizing, torturing and maiming tens upon tens of millions of their fellow human beings and fellow Christians—with Jesus as their spiritual support person. These Christian went from glory to glory via homicidal violence in the Verdun, at the Somme, in Ypres, to name but a few stops on the glory road “our heroes” traveled between 1914-1918.
Of course such a road to glory would have been considered asinine by any sane follower of Jesus, if the states and the institutional Churches had not unrelentingly worked together to craft from the cradle the minds and souls of children, through the glorification of militarism, into the lie that the road to glory lay not in unconditional fidelity to the Way of the Nonviolent King of Glory, Jesus, but rather in unconditional obedience to the way to glory as taught by the entrenched sociopaths at the top of the economic, political, military and church institutions of their individual tribes. Such brain washing was so successful because the Churches’ leaders cooperated fully in hardwiring into children the absurdity that the way to glory as taught by the local big shots was the same way to glory as the Way of Jesus. And, as Voltaire with prophetic clarity observed hundreds of years earlier, “Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities.” As history makes clear, holy atrocities, Christlike atrocities, as a way to everlasting glory were the bread and butter of WW I. But, there is nothing new here! Atrocities root in absurdities is Constantinian Christianity has engaged in since it came on stage as a faux witness to Jesus and His Way seventeen hundred years ago.
Below is a photo of the grave of Gavrilo Princip at St. Mark’s Orthodox Serbian Cemetery in Sarajevo. As noted above he is the man who fired the first shot in the deranged orgy of homicidal violence that left fourteen million human beings dead and thirty-seven million human beings maimed in a four years period. The cenotaph at the grave was erected in 1914 by the Orthodox Community of St. Mark’s to honor Gavrilo Princip and his fellow assassins, most of whom were executed in 1914. The marker at the gravesite reads, Heroes of Vidovdan. Vidovdan is a Serbian Orthodox religious holiday in honor of St. Vitus, whose feast day is June 28.
Such are the glories of Constantinian Christianity Orthodox style. But Catholic and Protestant Christianity matched in infidelity and in blood the glories of Orthodox Christianity during World War I. The most famous Protestant preacher in the United States at the time was Billy Sunday. He pretty much summed up Protestant infidelity to the Jesus of the Gospels and His Teaching during WW I by exciting crowds of Christians to a fever pitch with such evocative sound bites as, “I tell you brothers and sisters, it is [Kaiser] Bill against Woodrow, Germany against America, Hell against Heaven.”
The American Catholic Church leadership jumped in to do its part in plowing under the road to glory approved and taught by Jesus. On April 18, 1917, Cardinal Gibbons, the Archbishop of Baltimore, wrote in a letter to President Woodrow Wilson, which is signed not only by him but also by all the other U.S. Archbishops. It reads, “We are all true Americans … Inspired by the holy sentiments of truest patriotic fervor and zeal, we stand ready, we and all the flock committed to our keeping, to cooperate in everyway possible with our President and our national government, to the end that the great and holy cause of liberty may triumph. Our people, as ever, will rise as one man to serve the nation.” Cardinal Gibbons, on the threshold of the U.S. entrance into the demented hellhole of WWI in 1917, continually and sternly told Catholics that when war is declared “the duty of a citizen [is] absolute and unreserved obedience to his country’s call.”
In England during WW I the notion of a Christian duty to fight in homicidal warfare was nearly universal among the Anglican clergy. Those expressing Christian pacifism as a possible alternative were virtually nonexistent during the war. In fact, academic history is unable to find a single man who had taken Anglican Orders who denounced the war for the reasons traditionally put forth by those who believed that Jesus was nonviolent and commanded a Way of Nonviolent love of friends and enemies for His disciples. However, the theology that it was a Christian duty to fight for God and King was all but universal among Anglican clergy and their congregations.
In 1915 the Anglican Bishop of London, Arthur Winnington-Ingram, called for the men of England to “band in a great crusade -we cannot deny it- to kill Germans. To kill them, not for the sake of killing, but to save the world; to kill the good as well as the bad; to kill the young men as well as the old, to kill those who have showed kindness to our wounded as well as those fiends who crucified the Canadian sergeant, who superintended the Armenian massacres, who sank the Lusitania… and to kill them lest the civilization of the world should itself be killed.” His Excellency went further, giving the war a crusading touch the equal of Billy Sunday’s, by adding, “As I have said a thousand times, I look upon it as a war for purity, I look upon everyone who dies in it as a martyr.”
In France belief that Germany was an amoral nation unified not only French Catholics, but also the nation as a whole, and it gave the country a moral obligation to win the war. Modris Eksteins wrote “French clergymen dressed Jesus in khaki and had him firing machine guns. The war became one not of justice but of righteousness. To kill Germans was to purge the world of the Antichrist…and to herald the New Jerusalem.”
In Germany the pulpits and the Christians were inebriated on the same drug of self righteous, homicidal Constantinian Christian violence as were their enemies in France, England, Russia and the United States.
Adolf Hitler at a rally in the Munich Odeonsplatz to celebrate the declaration of war, August 2, 1914. It is the great deception of evil that it convinces people that once they choose it, they can control it.
How blind must the blindness have been of those Christian prelates of distinction—and of no distinction—who believed they could serve two masters, Jesus and a nation engaged in a glorious homicidal orgy? How terrible that they used their office to pied-pipered millions of mothers’ son down the garden path to physical, mental, moral and spiritual destruction—and all in the name of Jesus.
In summing up why he wrote his most recent book, The Great and Holy War: World War I a Religious Crusade, Philip Jenkins says,
“The most important thing is to understand what shapes the world’s modern religious history. This story is important for any efforts at interreligious dialogue and understanding. Westerners today often assume that Islam is some dark militaristic doomsday cult because of its willingness to support armed violence, but just a hundred years ago, Christian nations were doing very much the same thing. We don’t have to go back to the Crusades to find eerie parallels among Christians to the jihadi mind set.”
I would add that Christianity today does not even have to go as far back as World War I to find such parallels. Today’s newspaper, secular or Christian, will reveal both a latent and active Christian jihadi mindset among ecclesiastics and laity, for those who have eyes to see and a mind to understand.
In fairness, before concluding this reflection on WW I, it should be specifically noted that Pope Benedict XV (1914-1923) subordinated everything to the moral and evangelical condemnation of war. In language that other Popes have reserved for the Mafia, Benedict XV said to the heads of nations and the world at large, “The rulers of the peoples should be satisfied with the ruin already wrought.” To everyone he proclaimed, “You are children of the same Father in Heaven.” In a public Mass at St. Peter’s in July of 1916 at which five thousand children received their First Holy Communion, Benedict XV said to the children and to the world, “You know, my children, how for two long years men who were once innocent and affectionate like you, and are so no longer, have been tearing each other apart and killing each other… May God spare you and your household and the entire world from this.” But alas, what he said and what he called for, “Peace without victory,” the economic, political and military elites on all side, as well as, all clergy on all sides utterly ignored, even his own Catholic bishops and priests.
Your blessing priest, make haste!
For we have no time to waste;
We must be dying, dying, dying,
Our Emperor’s greatness glorifying!
-Bertolt Brecht (Germany, 1917)
“To see what is in front of one’s nose needs a constant struggle,” writes George Orwell. One would think that the carnage and agony of World War I, produced and suffered by mostly Christians, would awaken the leadership of the Churches to the fact that it is preposterous and monstrous for them to maintain that war, and the acts that war requires, are consistent with the teaching of Jesus, with the Will and Way of God as reveled by Jesus in the Gospels, with following Jesus, with fidelity to Jesus, with loving Jesus. But, it didn’t and it hasn’t! Why does this depravity, of Churches justifying their communicants participating in war as a way of following Jesus, still find a welcoming abode in the institutional Churches and in the hearts of their leaders? This is a mystery, a mystery only a scintilla short of the mystery of evil itself.
On June 28, 1914, a Christian man killed another Christian man and woman. His Church honors him as a hero for his homicidal deed on behalf of the local Christians. Nothing new here! Christians and Churches have done the same things ten of millions of times during the last seventeen centuries. Open the newspaper for June 28, 2014, and you will find one or many reports of the same charade of glory and faithful discipleship.
I will leave the second last word in this reflection on the hundredth anniversary of the culturally accepted date for the beginning of World War I to Jonathan Dyson, who lived a hundred years before World War I in England. He was a Quaker, who wrote a few well thought out monographs on Christian pacifism and the way of peace. The following is from his An Inquiry into the Accordancy of War:
“It is the will of God that war be eventually abolished and Christianity is the means by which this is to occur. Christianity with its present principle and obligations is to produce universal peace. It is because we violate the principle of religion, because we are not what they require us to be, that wars continue.”
The last word belongs to the Word, Jesus:
As He drew near and saw the city, he wept over it, saying, “If only this day you knew what makes for peace” (Lk 19:41-42)
“On War and Apocalypse,” First Things magazine, Rene Girard, 2009.
“Christ allows us to face this reality without sinking into madness. The apocalypse does not announce the end of the world; it creates hope. If we suddenly see reality, we do not experience the absolute despair of an unthinking modernity but rediscover a world where things have meaning. Hope is possible only if we dare to think about the danger at hand, but this requires opposing both nihilists, for whom everything is only language, and pragmatic realists, who reject the idea that intelligence can attain truth: heads of state, bankers, and soldiers who claim to be saving us when in fact they are plunging us deeper into devastation each day.“
Here is a great book review at The Christian Century on the book The Great and Holy War: How World War I Became a Religious Crusade.
Philip Jenkins builds upon this specialized historiography as it treats the Great War as a global religious conflict. His vividly written synthesis belongs at the top of reading lists on the conflict.
Not only does Jenkins provide detailed accounts of interactions between religion and militarism, religion and combat, and religion and trauma on all sides of the war, he also demonstrates that the world torn apart by the Great War was a world of many shared religious concerns and vocabularies, a world that needed the extreme fission that religion accomplishes in order to launch and sustain such a brutal conflict.
Congratulations to the Rutgers and Minnesota students who clearly understand that “those who do not remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”
In 2006, I attended a protest against Condoleezza Rice’s appearance as a commencement speaker at Boston College at the height of the Iraq War. BC, allegedly a Catholic college, honored her even though Pope John Paul II (now Saint John Paul II) and the Vatican he headed had explicitly condemned the invasion and war she helped to plan. Vatican foreign minister Archbishop Jean-Louis Tauran said it would be a “crime against peace.”
Vatican Strongly Opposes Iraq War
“This crime against the peace was a brand new charge, never before seen in international law. American prosecutors, led by Justice Jackson, had a more sweeping view of justice in mind. They saw the supreme crime at Nuremberg not in any specific act of Nazi mass killing, nor in the construction of the death camps like Auschwitz. For American prosecutors, the supreme crime was a completely new criminal charge: waging aggressive war, or the crime against peace.”
— from “The Ghosts of Nuremberg” by Michael Gaddy