“The pandemic has resulted in previously unimaginable restrictions on individual liberty.” — Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito
All American Catholics should watch this speech. Amoral “rule by experts” is a hallmark of the American empire, whether we are talking about pandemics and lockdowns, homosexual marriage and transgenderism, or militarism and warmaking.
Here are some supplemental materials that go with the podcast, Episode 38: The Nonviolent Eucharist with Fr. McCarthy. Please share with your priest or bishop.
************************************************************************READ FIRST: The Nonviolent Eucharist: A Pastoral Approach, by Rev. Emmanuel Charles McCarthy
What would Christianity or the Church mean for the Christian if Jesus’ Way or teachings were made subject to, or were measured for correctness by whether Plato, Hugh Hefner, or the local emperor happen to agree with them? Since for the Christian Jesus is the Word of God, the Son of God, the Son of Man, the Self-revelation of God: “The one who sees me sees the Father” (JN 14:9), since for the Christian He is “the Way and the Truth and the Life” (JN 14:6), it is senseless to maintain that the Christian life can ultimately be modeled on anyone or anything except Jesus. Even the saints must be measured against Jesus and His teachings to determine what in their lives is worthy of Christian honor and what is not.
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READ SECOND: The Nonviolent Eucharist: A Scholarly Approach
The Nonviolent Love of Jesus for both friends and enemies is historically at the heart of His passion and death. It must therefore be communicated as being ineradicably at the heart of the Eucharist…The passion narrative is about the Lamb of God, who goes to His death rejecting violence, loving enemies, returning good for evil, praying for His persecutors-yet conquers and reigns eternal…The sacrifice of Christ is not about salvation through mere physiological pain. It is about salvation through the Nonviolent Suffering Love of Jesus toward all and for all, even lethal enemies. It is about revealing the true nature of Divine love, the true and authentic Face of God. As the United States Catholic Bishops teach in their Pastoral, The Challenge of Peace (1983):
In all of his suffering, as in all of his life and ministry, Jesus refused to defend himself with force or with violence. He endured violence and cruelty so that Gods love might be fully manifest and the world might be reconciled to the One from whom it had become estranged.
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These resources can also be found at the following websites:
https://www.centerforchristiannonviolence.org/resources/the-nonviolent-eucharist
http://www.emmanuelcharlesmccarthy.org/?s=nonviolent+eucharist
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Outside the courthouse for the first day of the trial of the Kings Bay Plowshares activists. We interviewed three of them on the podcast back in August: Martha Hennessy, Carmen Trotta and Clare Grady.
Below are some speeches they gave last night at the eve of the trial. Both of these videos have been taken from the Kings Bay Plowshares Facebook page and were posted by Steve Dear.
From the peeps over at the Mises Institute: https://mises.org/library/anarcho-pacifism-leo-tolstoy
This talk was given at the “Eucharistic Holy Hour for World Peace Through the Mother of All Peoples” in Amsterdam on June 1st, 2019 at the RAI Convention Center, sponsored by the Archdiocese of Haarlem-Amsterdam, Netherlands.
Here is Jim Douglass’s “Letter to the American People,” which is good to read today on the 50th Anniversary of the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. He was one of only three journalists who attended the whole four week trial in 1999, which found that MLK was murdered as the result of a conspiracy that involved the U.S. government.
“What I experienced in that courtroom ranged from inspiration at the courage of the Kings, their lawyer-investigator William F. Pepper, and the witnesses, to amazement at the government’s carefully interwoven plot to kill Dr. King. The seriousness with which U.S. intelligence agencies planned the murder of Martin Luther King Jr. speaks eloquently of the threat Kingian nonviolence represented to the powers that be in the spring of 1968…Thirty-two years after Memphis, we know that the government that now honors Dr. King with a national holiday also killed him. As will once again become evident when the Justice Department releases the findings of its ‘limited re-investigation’ into King’s death, the government (as a footsoldier of corporate power) is continuing its cover-up – just as it continues to do in the closely related murders of John and Robert Kennedy and Malcolm X.”
JFK and the Unspeakable: Why He Died and Why It Matters
Jim Douglass
For the speech: click here Martin Luther King, Jr. Who is your God_-1
Friends,
I delivered at 6 P.M. at the Lorraine Motel in Memphis, TN on April 4, 1993, the twenty-fifth anniversary of the murder of Martin Luther King, Jr. at 6 P.M. at the Lorraine Motel on April 4, 1968. The talk was an attempt to reverse what had become a prominent trend when discussing Martin Luther King, Jr. over the previous decade, namely, the systematic minimizing, downplaying, ignoring and disparaging of the absolute centrality of nonviolence in his life and work. It was as if, even those devoted to him and his work, as well as those who desired him to be a patron saint of their peace and justice cause, wanted no part of the essential dimension that nonviolence held in all his programs and pursuits of peace and justice. In this amnesia inducing process, Dr. King’s historical memory was beginning to mirror the historical memory of Jesus, that is, he was becoming a person with a multitude of admirers and fans, most of whom wanted no part the nonviolent love of friends and enemies that was axial to his whole existence. However, Martin Luther King, Jr. without his total and unreserved commitment to nonviolence to the very end of his life is not Martin Luther King, Jr., any more than Jesus is Jesus without His total and unreserved commitment to nonviolence to the very end of His life.
My address at the Lorraine Motel on April 4, 1968, seemingly had no effect in stopping the systematic presentation of Dr. King with little or no reference to the all encompassing place nonviolence actually held in his life and in his social justice efforts. Yet, here are the words of Martin himself:
“In recent months several people have said to me: ‘Since violence is the new cry, isn’t there a danger you will lose touch with the people and be out of step with the times if you don’t change your views on nonviolence?’ My answer is always the same. Occasionally in life one develops a conviction so precious and meaningful that he will stand on it till the end. That is what I have found in nonviolence. I’m committed to nonviolence absolutely. I am just not going to kill anybody, whether it’s in Vietnam or here…The stage of history is replete with the chants and choruses of the conquerors who came killing in pursuit of peace.”
A violence endorsing Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. is as absurd as a violence endorsing Jesus. Fundamental human integrity, decency and honesty insist that a truth for which Martin and Jesus daily and ultimately laid down their lives should not be calculatingly bracketed out of the memory of their lives by those who are the institutional gatekeepers for preserving the remembrance of them. But if the gatekeepers of their memory are self-serving deceivers via deliberate omission, then the individual person must speak clearly the truth, that nonviolence was pivotal to and irremovable from each of their lives. He or she may not have the bull horns that an institution has at it disposal. But he or she has power. The power of saying that 1+1= 2 to those who are trying to double cross humanity by saying 1+1= 5. They have the power of truth.
Take a moment and consider the attached reflection on Martin Luther King, Jr. from twenty-five years ago on this day. It might be helpful in clarifying the place of nonviolence in some life and death matters that are universal to humanity—including you and me.
-Emmanuel Charles McCarthy