For many years Fr Niall O’Brien has been a promoter of active non-violence. He has a few suggestions for those who ask “What can I do?”.
Africa is going down like the Titanic. In front of our very eyes. People are calling from the sinking ship, life boats are overloaded. Voices come from the waves. Hardly ever before in human history did we see so clearly and know so much about a tragedy beyond words. And yet we remain for the most part lost in our own world squabbling and complaining about our problems which to anyone in Africa must appear tiny compared with the gigantic blood-red waves which engulf them.
Two hundred wars
The world had about two hundred wars in the twentieth century. To us the First and Second World Wars come to mind but we easily forget about the rest of the world and those two hundred wars – not to mention the famines, plagues, AIDS epidemics, floods, and totalitarian governments willing to do unspeakable things to various minorities in their own countries. When the little town of Guernica in Northern Spain was bombed by the Germans in 1937, Pablo Picasso produced his famous painting ‘Guernica’ and the whole world saw at a glance the horror of that attack. We need more Picassos who can in some way shock us into ‘seeing’ the sea of suffering which engulfs so much of our planet today. As long as these wars did not touch our shores they existed only as passing TV images somewhere out there.
Throughout the ages Christians like Vincent De Paul, Don Bosco, Abbe Pierre, Mother Teresa, Dorothy Day, responded to the human devastation around them with heroic initiatives. The teaching of the Second Vatican Council (1962-65) that “the joys and hopes, the griefs and anxieties” of the human race were “the joys and hopes, griefs and anxieties of the followers of Christ …” helped give rise to a whole generation of carefully planned and funded Christian organizations to face this pain: I am thinking of Trocaire in Ireland, SCIAF in Scotland, Cafod in England… one can go on and on. These organizations were set up specifically to respond to the suffering in the Third World. They founded tens of thousands of individual hands-on social programs of every description all over the world.
Drop in support
But now there are some disturbing facts. In spite of our increased wealth young people are giving less today to any of these organizations or even to their more secular counterparts – and certainly are offering themselves less as unpaid volunteers for the work. This is precisely at a time when conditions in the Third World have deteriorated dramatically and wealth in the West has grown.
What will a future generation say of us who are so judgmental about the failures of previous generations? Today we know far more about what is going on in the Congo, Chechnya or the Middle East and have far greater possibilities of checking out the truth than our predecessors ever had. We have enormous financial and technical resources and still, for instance, nothing was done to stop the mass-destruction of half a million people in Rwanda or the slaughter of so many in Central America.
War, often promoted by outside financial greed, is the main cause of suffering in many of these poverty stricken places. Someone described war as the ultimate poverty. In war you loose everything. We are paralyzed with horror by the abduction and murder of children here at home. Yet in the armed conflicts that are presently taking place two thousand children are killed or injured every single day.
The Christian response
If a massive amount of the world’s suffering stems from war and the preparation for war – which devours a yearly budget of around 900,000 million euro surely bringing peace should be our first priority in the search for a solution.
Christ’s words, “Blessed are the peacemakers” seem innocuous enough but if you examine the gospel you will find that bringing peace and working for peace is at its core. It is also at the heart of our own calling as Christians.
Committed Christians often ask, ‘Well, what can I do?” First I would like to emphasize that we need to be convinced as Christians that peacemaking really is at the core of our calling. St Paul speaks of the ‘gospel of peace’. A central teaching of the Gospel, the one which makes it different from all of the other holy writings of ancient times is ‘Love your enemy.’ Yet Christians have been experts in finding ways around it and justifying war on one basis or another.
Peace is more than the absence of war
Peace is not just the absence of war or tension. Peacemaking involves scanning the horizon for those things that are the seeds of war and then undertaking deliberate preemptive work to remove them. Peacemaking means support for those unsung people who work at the various peace processes throughout the world. It demands an awareness of what is going on in the world around us and a commitment to confront the conditions and issues which produce war and oppression. It means taking time to study issues like the effect on children of sanctions in Iraq (which according to a visiting group of Nobel Prize winners cause up to 4,500 deaths every month); the reasons why Palestinians are prepared to blow themselves up; or the involvement of multinational companies in Africa’s wars. Peacemaking means educating ourselves, taking stands on issues and continually praying for peace.
I have a friend in Italy who is a convinced Communist. Her husband risked his life against Mussolini at a time when some devout Christians were cooperating with him for all they were worth. We don’t agree on some things but I am always stirred by the way she analyses world conditions and political decisions from the point of view of the underdog. She votes accordingly. I find that this political awareness is frequently absent among some otherwise devout Christians. Yet, this political awareness is an essential if we are to work for peace. This is not easy because the issues are usually complex. On a peace issue we may find ourselves standing beside someone with whom we do not agree on some other issue. But we have to set priorities. Some things are more evil than others. War is the ultimate evil. In war you can bomb a hospital of pregnant women and justify it as the collateral damage of a just war. In war rape becomes an ordinary weapon as we saw only recently in Chechnya and the Balkans. In war you poison the fields and the wells and in future wars God only knows what. War is when you say anything goes. Sometimes freedom fighters, in the most justified of uprisings, look back in horror at what they did.
Active non-violence
What is the alternative, you ask? The short answer is active non-violence. As one who has studied and tried to promote non-violence over the years I am sometimes daunted by the ignorance of ordinary Christians about the possibility and effectiveness of non-violence as an alternative to war.
Let me just say this: “Boy, do they prepare for war!” All those weapons, technology and research, all that discipline and money. And we expect nonviolence to work without preparation. God will provide! Not without our involvement!
Non-violence is not a magic wand, but a disciplined way of life. It is an art that demands much study and training. An example of what it can achieve was the fall of President Marcos in the Philippines (1986). Those of us who lived through his oppression were familiar with his death squads, with their massacres and “disappearances”. A friend once said to me: “maybe non-violence would work in India with Gandhi and the British – who were sort of gentlemen – but certainly not here in the Philippines.” Not long afterwards the Marcos supporters watched with amazement as his regime crumbled before crowds armed with flowers, sandwiches, statues and prayers.
And then there was the candlelight revolution in Leipzig and the velvet revolution in Prague which were certainly influenced by what happened in Manila. These led to the fall of the Berlin Wall and the dissolution of the Soviet Union without the Armageddon scenario which many feared and some hoped for. These achievements are small compared with the huge possibilities which non-violence offers. In a sense active non-violence is a continent which we have only just discovered.
Where to begin?
As I conclude this article you may be saying: “Great to hear about these worldwide possibilities. But I am just little me.” I mentioned above the importance of beginning with an awareness of the issues. Secondly we can go nowhere unless we have learned something about forgiveness. Pope John Paul made the remark recently: no reconciliation without forgiveness. Yes there is need for justice and there is need for closure, but the story is not complete without forgiveness. Indeed, for a Christian forgiveness is a non-negotiable.
Some time ago I edited a prayer book and when I came to the part on confession I put in at the beginning the question: Before thinking of confession have you yourself forgiven? I suddenly realized that I had never seen that as a requirement for confession before. Yet it is in every line of the Gospel, it is the lifeblood of the Christian story. Start with your own life. Learn to forgive, disarm your own heart. Then begin to think of ways to bring the Gospel of Peace to your own house, to your neighbourhood and to the wider world.
This article first appeared in Far East (Jan/Feb 2003), a publication of the Missionary Society of St Columban.
