Fr Reid gives the last rites to David Howes, one of two soldiers killed by IRA after driving into a republican funeral in 1988, at a time of extreme tensions and ongoing violence.
Read more about Fr. Reid in the Belfast Telegraph or watch the BBC documentary 14 days (below).
Christ the King Chapel in Zamboanga. Photo from http://asiafoundation.org
“We have not heard of any Muslim helping build a chapel before,” Villaflores said.
But before the Christians could say anything to the Muslims, they went to work, sawing lumber, driving in nails and doing other things to rebuild the chapel.
Click here for the full story.
What Catholics Missed in The Hunger Games, an article by a CAM co-founder
“The respect Collins paid her young readers in writing this trilogy was to see
them as not only conscious, but socially conscious, and potentially
curious about or concerned with that central human problem called war. It was
interesting to see that Christian adults saw very little about the central human
problem of war in this wildly popular film that was, in the words of its Roman
Catholic author, written about war, and after a decade of living under a
government that is perpetually waging war.”
Napalm / Vietnam War
The following was written by Emmanuel Charles McCarthy:
December 7, 1941, A Day of Infamy. Indeed!
One day President Roosevelt told me that he was asking publicly for suggestions about what the war should be called. I said at once, “The Unnecessary War.” There never was a war easier to stop than that which has just wrecked what was left of the world from its previous struggle [World War I].
—Winston Churchill, The Gathering Storm, (1948), p.iv
Thomas Dewey, who was running against Franklin Roosevelt, concluded after being briefed on the inquiry that F.D.R. had known in advance about the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor and failed to stop it. Privately fuming that Roosevelt was a ”traitor” who ”ought to be impeached,” he was prepared to denounce the president publicly when General George Marshall sent an aide to plead with him not to raise this divisive issue. Nevertheless, Dewey’s running mate, John Bricker, told voters that the president was hiding his complicity in the ”disgraceful” episode.
—Michael Bechloss, New York Times. (5/ 26/02).
On August 18, 1941, Winston Churchill met with his cabinet at 10 Downing Street. In this 1941 meeting, Churchill told his cabinet, according to the official minutes: “The President [Roosevelt] had said he would wage war but not declare it. “Everything was to be done to force an incident.”
In January 1941 then U.S. Ambassador to Japan wrote in his diary: “There is a lot of talk around town to the effect that the Japanese, in case of a break with the United States, are planning to go all out in a surprise mass attack on Pearl Harbor. Of course I informed my government.”
On February 5, 1941, Rear Admiral Richmond Kelly Turner wrote to Secretary of War Henry Stimson to warn of “the possibility of a surprise attack at Pearl Harbor.”
On November 15th, 1941 Army Chief of Staff George Marshall briefed the media on something we do not remember as “the Marshall Plan.” In fact we don’t remember it at all. “We are preparing an offensive war against Japan,” Marshall said, asking the journalists to keep it a secret, which they dutifully did.
It is now well known that U.S. cryptologists had sufficiently broken the Japanese secret military and non-military codes so as to be well aware of the forthcoming attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941. Naval Captain Joseph Rochefort, co-founder of the Navy’s communication intelligence section, who was instrumental in failing to communicate to the commanding General and Admiral at Pearl Harbor the deciphered information about the what was coming, would after the war say about withholding information from General Short and Admirable Kimmell and thereby allowing the “sneak” attack on Pearl Harbor which killed 2500 U.S. men and women, mostly military personnel, “It was a pretty cheap price to pay for unifying the country.”
On Monday December 1st, six days before the attack on Pearl Harbor actually came Secretary of War Stimson wrote, “The question was how we should maneuver the Japanese into the position of firing the first shot without allowing too much danger to ourselves. It was a difficult proposition.” Was it? One obvious answer was to keep the fleet in Pearl Harbor and keep the sailors stationed there in the dark and bemoan their deaths after the attack from comfortable offices in Washington, D.C. In fact, that was the solution our suit-and-tied heroes went with. From their perspective, “It was a pretty cheap price to pay for unifying the country.
On February 6-8 the DeBartolo Performing Arts Center at the University of Notre Dame will hold the annual ScreenPeace Film Festival, which will present 5 critically acclaimed films that highlight a range of compelling issues related to peace and justice. Tickets, which are free, will be available in mid-January.
This film covers the explosive crossroads of Ali’s life. When Cassius Clay becomes Muhammad Ali, his conversion to Islam and refusal to serve in the Vietnam War leave him banned from boxing and facing a five-year prison sentence. From Kartemquin Films and Academy Award-nominated director Bill Siegel, “The Trials of Muhammad Ali” examines how one of the most celebrated sports champions of the 20th century risked his fame and fortune to follow his faith and conscience. Watch Trailer.
Wadjda
Wadjda, a 10-year-old girl in Saudi Arabia, is fun-loving and always pushing the boundaries. After a fight with her friend Abdullah, Wadjda sees a beautiful green bicycle for sale. She wants the bicycle desperately so she can beat Abdullah in a race. But her mother won’t allow it, fearing repercussions from a society that sees bicycles as dangerous to a girl’s virtue. Wadjda decides to raise the money herself by entering a competition for memorizing and reciting Koranic verses. It won’t be easy, especially for a troublemaker like Wadjda, but she is determined to fight for her dreams. Watch Trailer.
NO
In 1988, Chilean military dictator Augusto Pinochet, due to international pressure, is forced to call a plebiscite on his presidency. The country will vote YES or NO to Pinochet extending his rule for another eight years. Opposition leaders for the NO persuade a brash young advertising executive, Rene Saavedra (Gael Garcia Bernal), to spearhead their campaign. Against all odds, with scant resources and under scrutiny by the despot‘s minions, Saavedra and his team devise an audacious plan to win the election and set Chile free. Watch Trailer.
The Square
The Egyptian Revolution has been an ongoing rollercoaster over the past two and a half years. Through the news, we only get a glimpse of the bloodiest battle, an election, or a million man march. At the beginning of July 2013, we witnessed the second president deposed within the space of three years. “The Square” is an immersive experience, transporting the viewer deeply into the intense emotional drama and personal stories behind the news. It is the inspirational story of young people claiming their rights, struggling through multiple forces, in the fight to create a society of conscience. Watch Trailer.
The Act of Killing
Anwar Congo and his friends dance their way through musical numbers, twist arms in film gangster scenes, and gallop across prairies as cowboys. Their foray into filmmaking is celebrated in the media, even though Anwar Congo and his friends are mass murderers. When the government of Indonesia was overthrown in 1965, Anwar and his friends helped the army kill more than a million alleged communists, ethnic Chinese, and intellectuals in less than a year. Anwar and his friends have written their own triumphant history, becoming role models for millions of young paramilitaries. Watch Trailer.
The ScreenPeace Film Festival is presented in partnership with the DeBartolo Performing Arts Center, University of Notre Dame.
In the King of Prussia (1983) – IMDb: WATCH IT HERE!!!
Dramatization of the trial of Christian anti-war activists, known collectively as the “Plowshares Eight”. In September 1980, they broke into a General Electric weapons plant in King of Prussia, Pennsylvania, and in an act of protest against nuclear proliferation, poured vials of their own blood onto secret missle plans, burned other files, and damaged nosecones intended for nuclear missles. The direct-to-video production is intercut with clips from actual news coverage of the trial. The “Plowshares Eight” portray themselves in the production, and after taping was complete, reported to court for their imprisonment.
On April 13, 2013, the Thomas Merton Center, Pittsburgh, Pa, honored Martin Sheen for his continued peace activism, from nuclear disarmament to closing the School Of The Americas at Ft. Benning, GA, now know as WHINSEC or Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation. Molly Rush and Mary Jo Guercio presented the award. Martin Sheen played the judge in IN THE KING OF PRUSSIA: THE TRIAL OF THE PLOWSHARES 8 one of which was Molly Rush, co-founder of the peace and justice center.
▶ THOMAS MERTON AWARD RECEPTION HONORING MARTIN SHEEN – YouTube
This is a great article about faith-based antiwar activists in Australia via War on Trial, The Sydney Morning Herald, Nov. 16, 2013:
“The pair had undertaken what is known internationally as a ‘plowshare,’ a radical form of left-wing Catholic activism in which protesters break into military facilities and damage weapons. Their inspiration comes from a passage in the Book of Isaiah: ‘And they shall beat their swords into plowshares, and their spears into pruning hooks: nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war any more.’
Clearly guilty, the pair both pleaded not guilty in order to take the matter to court. They wanted to put the military arsenal in the dock and the notion of war on trial in front of a jury – a tradition in the Plowshares movement. ‘There have been some spectacular successes – the juries have gone against all the evidence to say ‘not guilty’, ’ says Dunstan now. ‘Those charged have argued in court that the crime was a moral necessity, that the war had to stop, the government wasn’t going to do anything about it and this was the only means left to us.’
Law, who fellow activists admit was a difficult man to work with, set out to do a plowshare after being inspired by three Christian plowshare activists in New Zealand. In 2008, the trio had broken into the Waihopai spy station and deflated two US radar domes with sickles; they were subsequently found not guilty by a jury. “Bryan wanted to do it here; he wanted to embody the prophesy of Isaiah,” says Dunstan, a devout Buddhist.
The fact that a Christian and Buddhist faced trial over a high-profile act of civil disobedience is indicative of the state of Australia’s peace movement. While the scene is made up of all sorts – socialists, greens, communists, unions, aid groups and students, all sharing opposition to war, nuclear weapons and military bases – in recent years it is largely faith-based activists who have been undertaking the more noticeable acts of non-violent civil disobedience, known as “the arrestables” in protest parlance.
James Douglass writes an article, “A President for Peace,” in America Magazine about how he became involved in researching the life and death of John Fitzgerald Kennedy for his book: JFK and the Unspeakable: Why He Died and Why It Matters.
“Hope?
How does one discover hope from the murder of a president who was turning from war to peace? By confronting the Unspeakable in our history, we can see a redemptive light in the darkness.”
Lee Harvey Oswald being taken from theater where he was hiding, November 22, 1963
