LewRockwell » Fr. Emmanuel McCarthy

Voting Is Violence

Fr. Emmanuel McCarthy — Mon, 05 Nov 2012 06:00:00 +0000

Previously by Rev. Emmanuel Charles McCarthy: Myth, Morality, and Osama bin Laden

Voting in governmental election is participation in violence. That is not political ideology, that is just fact. Voting in governmental elections is participation in violence because that is what governmental elections are about at their root. A governmental election is one method of legitimating the use of violence of one human being against another. The divine right of kings or the right of primogeniture would be others. All such mechanisms — elections, divine right of king, the right of primogeniture, drawing straws — are rooted in cultural fantasies that are nurtured from the cradle. The fantasies consist of hardwiring the children within a particular geography to the idea that because a person receives the majority of votes, is a king, is the first born, got the longest straw, he has the legal and moral right to employ the organized violence apparatus of the human arrangement called the state, e.g., the military, the police, the FBI, the CIA, etc., in order to cause people suffering and/or to kill people.

The state may be many other things, but at root it is a compulsory political organization that has acquired and maintains a monopoly of violence that is called legitimate within a certain geographical area. Since violence is the sine qua non for a state's existence, the person who is lucky enough — because he was the fastest sperm to get to an egg in a cluster of seventy million other sperms inside a woman called a queen, or because he was clever enough to boondoggled more people to put an "X" beside his name than the other guys, or because he was fortuitous enough to have drawn the longest straw — is then mythically, mystically, morally and legally endowed with the power and authority to bring suffering and death down upon people at home and abroad. He or she maybe an idiot or a genius, mentally ill or mentally stable, he or she may be under the controlled of a regent or a mother, bankers or corporations, but all that is irrelevant. The office legitimizes all of this person's imposition of suffering and death on others — and nothing else matters. Therefore by hook or by crook get the office!

Once one has the office, and is vested in the myth and the mystique and the moral validation that go with it, he or she cannot only torment, torture and kill other people, he or she can make the laws that validate the agony and slaughter he or she is pouring down on others. Hitler did nothing illegal, which is why U.S., England, France and Russia had to create the trumped-up ex post facto law — so called crimes against humanity — to convict and kill Hitler's cabinet and military officers. Hitler saw to it that everything he did was legal by simply creating the laws he needed to legalize what he wanted to do. A contemporary local example of this process would be the Patriot Act in the United States.

President William Clinton kills 400,000 children under twelve years of age in Iraq, his Secretary of State, Madeleine Albright, says on national television that this most grotesque form of child abuse "was worth it." Yet, neither one is in prison nor in the electric chair. Why?

No one is born with the right to kill 400,000 children. Yet, President Clinton, and to a lesser extent King Herod, killed children with abandon. From whence comes their right to do this. Clinton's right to kill children came from being elected President. Herod's right came from his being the son of a King. That is it! Human beings endowing human beings with the right to kill human beings is what the divine right of kings, drawing straws or elections are all about. If either Obama or Romney were not going to be endowed, if elected President, with the same right to use violence against their fellow human beings that Clinton and Herod had would anyone beyond their family, friends and acquaintances care a jot about what these two guys had to say?

And of course, for the person, who is vested by the local moral mythology with legitimate kill power, to prevail on the local religious grandees — who do like to sit in the first place at head tables and whose real estate-financial institutions are also subject the local Ozymandias of the moment — to bless and supply the appropriate theology to religiously legitimate what the idiot king or the "best-of-the-brightest" is doing, or to ignore it, is child's play.

It is here that Nonviolent Jesus of the Gospels, the Incarnation of God, who teaches a Way of Nonviolent Love of friends and enemies creates a krisis, a time of judgment, a moment of decision with eternal significance for those who believe in Him. Do they follow the local, humanly created moral mythology and participate in the election of the communities designated killer or do they follow the Nonviolent Jesus of the Gospels and the will of the Father of all as revealed by Him, and disassociate themselves in every way from the pomp, and snares and deceits of violence and enmity?

Given the choice would Jesus have voted for Herod or Pilate or neither? In governmental elections is there ever anyone to vote for but Herod or Pilate? Since the make-believe lesser of two evils standard is still evil, why not just write-in "Lucifer" as your vote?

The Best of Fr. Emmanuel Charles McCarthy

Lies Made To Foment Hatred and War

Fr. Emmanuel McCarthy — Thu, 12 May 2011 05:00:00 +0000

Previously by Rev. Emmanuel Charles McCarthy: The Attack on Human Dignity

The “killing” of Osama bin Laden is just the last chapter in a long running serial story entitled Osama bin Laden and 911. Like Gene Roddenberry's Star Trek story, once Osama bin Laden and 911 hit the TV screen a decade ago it generated episode after episode, sequel after sequel for ten years. But finally, like Captain Kirk — after at least nine lives and fifty ever more preposterous escapes — Osama had to be killed and sent to wherever it is that literary characters go after their usefulness expires. But just as Star Trek was morphed into mythic dimensions after the last scene played out, so now after the curtain has come down on the Osama bin Laden and 911 tale, it too is being moved along from momentary politically useful fiction (lies) to perpetually useful political myth with all the paraphernalia that accompanies such a transition in contemporary times. A big budget movie is said to be already in the works, tentative title, The Seals Seal the Deal. Clooney is suppose to have the lead with a direct descendant of Rin-Tin-Tin playing "War Dog," the heroic canine who was choppered in with the Seals to take down Osama.

But a myth is not a myth if you know it is a myth. So if there is no factual evidence to support a particular myth as being rooted in reality, everything must be done to quash every syllable that might suggest that the myth is just a yarn made up by some human beings for some purpose. Hence since 911 every major media outlet in the US has not permitted any other narrative on 911 to be broadcast except the story of Osama bin Laden and 911, even though there is a Niagara of scientific evidence and documentary evidence that renders that story to be the reality equivalent of Superman II.

And like all myths the closing scene has to be strictly in concert with the opening scene. So no storyline on the death of Osama bin Laden is permitted on the national media’s broadcast systems, except that which is 100% in full cognitive and emotional accordance with the opening chapter and all the subsequent chapters of the official Osama bin Laden and 911 story. Scientific evidence to the contrary notwithstanding Osama bin Laden destroyed three buildings with two planes with freefall-footprint demolition precision. Case closed. Even the evidence from before and at and after the time of 911, that bin Laden was on life-supporting dialysis three times a week for kidney disease long before 911 and that he had been diagnoses with incurable Marfan Syndrome before 911 — both of which require exceptional degrees of medical expertise and technology to be of any use even for a shot term extension of a life — is bracketed out of perception and discussion. It can no more get a nanosecond on the six major media outlets that account for 85% of what Americans hear or read, than can those thousands of scientists and engineers who can demonstrate that by the laws of nature, to say nothing of straight forward human observation, the three World Trade Center mega-buildings could not have been destroyed as the government and media relentlessly claim in their Osama bin Laden and 911 narrative blitzkrieg of the American psyche.

And, so we have 100% of the so-called major media news reporters, new commentators, news analysts playing the same role that so-called sports announcers, commentators and analysts play when, with great energy and the appearance of thoughtfulness, they announce, comment on and analyze a professional wrestling match as if it were a real adversarial fight — when in fact all professional wrestling matches on mass media in the US are pre-planned and choreographed theater with a storyline, orchestration and predetermined ending. The nonstop serious commentary and analysis is actually part of the created theatrical fantasy, for without it the spectacle of a 380 pound man calling himself “The Gorgeous One” and a 420 pound man calling himself “The Mad Dog Avenger” hitting each other continuously for a half hour without drawing a drop of blood would be "rolling in the aisles" ludicrous! The announcers, commentators and analysts discuss with gravitas, expertise and in exhausting detail all aspect and possible interpretations of the wrestling match and of the "fighters": their physiques, their lives, their techniques for winning, their won-lost wrestling histories. All that is, except one. These “epic battles” between giants that are being given such extensive, serious and detailed examination are as phony, bogus, make believe and pretend as “Albania as a nuclear threat to the US” was in the film Wag the Dog.

So what are the human consequences of perpetrating a myth that is a lie in a society. First, it is dangerous to ignore a violence justifying, emotionally ridden myth. The myth once accepted cognitively and emotionally generates its own theology and/or philosophy of right and wrong. Ancient religious text — even if on normal reading they communicate the opposite of the myth — are twisted to fit into it. This religious acceptance bestows on the myth even further power to alter consciousness and motivate people to act in a particular direction. “Native Americans are savages,” “blacks are subhuman,” Manifest Destiny, Ersatz Israel, lebensraum are all myths without any basis in fact that have resulted in the self-righteous murdering and maiming of hundreds of millions of human beings. None of these preposterous myths arose accidentally out of nothingness. They were all humanly concocted by and planted in the consciousness and consciences of individuals and communities before they ever erupted into anticipated and unanticipated mass murder, albeit mass murder experienced as justified, as right, as doing the will of God.

The myth of Osama bin Laden and 911 is now in full throttle mode. Soon we can expect a song entitled “The Tale of a War Dog” by Willie Nelson to top the music charts. The saga of Osama bin Laden and 911 is expanding and hourly being sown ever more deeply in the minds and souls of people, especially young people, via technology never before available to the economic, political and military elites for such mind manipulating projects. Here is today’s example:

Note: Kuma War is a free online war game that models its missions on real-world war events that are reported in the media. New missions have been released every month since 2004 and the kill Osama bin Laden mission will be the last episode in the 107 part series, according to the corporation that produced and freely distributed this long running, hands-on, interactive video “game” series. Kuma Games in announcing that episode #107 would be the last, said “it provides a neat end to the storyline.”

P.S. The ever mutating Christian Just War Theory is part of the problem in a world where contrived, emotionally charged, violent, self righteous myths are culturally and politically hardwired into consciousness and conscience. The moral chameleonism called CJWT has a universal historical record of fitting in perfectly with any of them — or not fitting in — depending which side of the human carnage operation one is on.

There is absolutely no way out of this murderous moral sinkhole except the unequivocal, unambiguous and unmodified proclamation by the Christian Churches, Church leaders and Church communicants of the Nonviolent Jesus of the Gospels as the Nonviolent Messiah of Israel, the Nonviolent Lord, the Nonviolent God and the Nonviolent Savior of the world, along with the proclamation of the power and wisdom and truth of His Way of Nonviolent Love (Agape) of friends and enemies as God's Way of being and God's Way conquering evil. There is one Way and only one Way for all humanity to exit this viper’s tangle. It is not the way of Bush, Obama, Cheney, Emanuel, Hillary, Condi, Rush, Chris, etc. It is the Way of Jesus. You can give your brief life to make it happen, but you cannot take an other’s life to make it happen — there in lies the essence of both the problem and the solution. Believe it or not. The time allotted to you to choose is passing. Believe it or not.

Fr. Emmanuel Charles McCarthy is a priest of the Eastern Rite (Byzantine-Melkite) of the Catholic Church. Formerly a lawyer and a university educator, he is the founder and the original director of The Program for the Study and Practice of Nonviolent Conflict Resolution at the University of Notre Dame. He is also co-founder, along with Dorothy Day and others of Pax Christi-USA. He has conducted retreats and spoken at conferences throughout the world on the issue of the relationship of faith and violence and the nonviolence of the Jesus. He was the keynote speaker at the Lorraine Motel in Memphis, Tennessee for the 25th anniversary memorial of the assassination of Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. there. He is author of several books, including these: All Things Flee Thee because Thou Fleest Me: A Cry to the Churches and their Leaders to Return to the Nonviolent Jesus and His Nonviolent Way; Christian Just War Theory: The logic of Deceit; August 9: The Stations of the Cross of Nonviolent Love. He has also authored innumerable articles on the subject of violence, religion and the nonviolent love of friends and enemies taught by Jesus by word and deed. His audio/video series, BEHOLD THE LAMB, is almost universally considered to be the most spiritually profound presentation on the matter of Gospel Nonviolent Love available in this format. BEHOLD THE LAMB is now available on mp3CD through his website, either at the cost of $5.00 for a disc or it can be acquired directly by an mp3 downloaded from the website for no cost. Rev. Emmanuel Charles McCarthy was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize for his life’s work on behalf of peace within people and among people. He may be reached and his work may be accessed at the Center for Christian Non-Violence.

The Best of Fr. Emmanuel Charles McCarthy

The Attack on Human Dignity

Fr. Emmanuel McCarthy — Sat, 20 Nov 2010 06:00:00 +0000

Previously by Rev. Emmanuel Charles McCarthy: Blessed Are the Peacemakers, NottheWarmakers

The human being is made in the image and likeness of God. He or she has the Spark of the Divine “within” him or her. He or she is the primal and primary Temple of God on earth. Each person therefore deserves from the other and gives to the other not just respect, but reverence. The destruction of a fellow human — whether it be in mind, soul, body or spirit — is therefore the desecration of the Great Temple on earth, the place in time and space where the Living God chose foremost to reside.

The sublimity, dignity and transcendental value of each human being make it a grave violation of the Presence of God and of God-given human dignity to treat a person as a thing, a widget in some one’s grand illusion, a means to be used, manipulated, abused, lied to, and/or crushed to serve another’s agenda. Violate is derived from the same Latin word as violence, violare. To violate a reality is to do violence to that reality. To violate a reality is to treat it in a way that is not in accordance with its nature, e.g., to treat a sentient human being as if he or she were a non-sentient rock violates the reality of the human being. To treat a human being who is the living Temple of God on earth and who is infinitely loved and valued by this same God, as a tool, as a thing, as a person of no real significance beyond my utilitarian need for him or her in some grandiose plan I have concocted, rather than with the reverence, love and value that he or she intrinsically and forever possesses, as a son or daughter of my God and his or her God, of my Father and his or her Father, of the One God, is to violate him or her, to do violence to them. And, a violation of a person’s intrinsic, God bestowed human dignity and transcendent value is evil regardless of how normalized it has become, how culturally acceptable it has become, how "holy" it has become or how legal it has become.

In most case most of the nefarious processes by which government does what it does are utterly hidden from the eyes of the public, who are only given a contrived packet of PR lies leading up to and after the fact of implementation. This is what is meant in the well-known line attributed to Bismarck — well known because everyone inherently recognizes its truth, even though most live in personal and communal denial of it — Laws, like sausages, cease to inspire respect in proportion as we know how they are made.

This brings us to Michael Chertoff, the guy who as an assistant DA rounded-up 1200 Arabs and others without legal warrant or cause immediately after September 11, who was co-author of the Patriot Act, who was then made a Federal Court of Appeals Judge, who soon after found legal flaws with the conviction of the six Mossad operatives known as “the Dancing Israelis,” and therefore released them on bail, never to be seen again, who was then made the Head of Homeland Security, who almost immediately began hawking the idea of full body scanners at airports while Head of Homeland Security and who has never stopped hawking them to this day, because his company, The Chertoff Group, has as a big-time client one of the two largest manufacturer — $160,000,000 dollars through 2009 — of Full Body Scanners, Rapiscan, Inc. So now it is the law of the land that if you, your spouse, or your child wants to fly to your parent’s home for Thanksgiving or Christmas, you must either summit to being irradiated and stripped searched by a scanner for others to observe or else be groped, including genital, breast and buttocks groping. Why? Airport security demands it! And as sure as the Lord made little green apples, it will only be a short time before government-building security will demand it, and then private building security will demand it, and bus station security will demand it, etc. What a bonanza of government money the future holds for the Chertoff Group. And, what a boondoggle!

The airport with the best and safest security in the world is generally considered to be Ben Gurion Airport in Tel Aviv, Israel. One of the prime designers of Tel Aviv’s security system was Rafi Sela. Last April he told the Canadian Parliament that the Full Body Scanners are useless for security purposes and that is the reason there are none and never have been any at Ben Gurion Airport. He told the Parliament that they were a waste of money and that someone who understood Full Body Scanners could pass through them with enough explosives to blow up a Boeing 747 (The Vancouver Sun, April 23, 2010). So much for Michael Chertoff’s years of hustling the Full Body Scanners with what he had to know from Israeli security experts were lies about their security value.

Finally, look at what Michael Chertoff and whoever he is an operative for have put into place as law. And then ask yourself, of what is the following short video a carbon copy?

Whoever has the power to spit on the dignity of a human being and does it, by shaming and humiliating him or her, by treating him or her as a disposable or inconvenient thing who can be violated to keep the plan rolling along or to keep the pay check coming in, poisons his or her own life, the life of the other and the life of the society. Demeaning the human dignity of another human being is sadism, Satanism and psychopathic, regardless from where in the chain of its execution one participates in it.

The Best of Fr. Emmanuel Charles McCarthy

Blessed Are the Peacemakers

Fr. Emmanuel McCarthy — Tue, 04 Nov 2008 06:00:00 +0000

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Render Unto Caesar
by Archbishop Charles Chaput

Render unto Caesar is a book written by a Roman Catholic Bishop, who can only speak truth or falsehood as a person who is indelibly marked as a Baptized and Confirmed Christian and Bishop. He wrote this book out of and within a Christian ethos in general and a Catholic mind-set in particular, and therefore it is herein evaluated for good or for ill on that basis.

Charles Chaput, the very conservative Catholic Bishop of Denver and a very nice fellow personally, steers clear of any serious analysis of the primal issue in Church-state relations, that either poisons or empowers everything else. He does not seriously address in Render unto Caesar the foundational problem of the morality of Christians using violence in all forms against other human beings, and even each other, under the guise of the word "state." In other words he assumes as Gospel truth, and accepts, the Constantinian definition of the content of Christian love — a definition and content that is patently inconsistent with the definition and content Jesus gave the word love by His words and deed. Specifically, Charles Chaput’s definition of Christian love includes killing and maiming people. Jesus’ does not. His understanding of Christian love cannot be found in original Christianity. It comes into its own about 300 years later with Constantine.

Beyond this, no more really needs be said about the book. If one accepts Chaput’s understanding of Christian love, he or she may still have quibbles and squabbles, or maybe even fist-pounding arguments, with him about what he writes on this page or that, regarding the implications and applications of his understanding of that love. But, if one accepts Jesus’ definition of love, he or she will find an entire book one cannot accept, because it is the Constantinian understanding of love that underlies all thought in it.

Take for example the book’s introductory quotation from the philosopher Henri Bergson: The motive power of democracy is love. I agree. In fact on April 4,1971, I gave a public address of some length, subsequently published, entitled, "Direct Democracy and Agape," on this very subject. In it I referenced the word love exclusively to Christlike love, specifically quoting in full 1 Corinthian 13 to be certain that people would be clear about what I was saying. Since love is a word with an almost indefinite number of meanings attached to it in English, I felt truthful communication required this explicit clarification. In Render unto Caesar the meaning of the word love slips and slides like a drunken sailor all over the lot. Sometime what is being said appears to be Christlike love, or at least a logical deduction from it. Then on the next page it is clearly Constantinian love. The confusing and commingling of these understandings of love, understandings that exclude each other because of the logical Principle of Non-Contradiction* are the piedi d’argilla on which Render unto Caesar makes its stand for everything it presents as moral truth in conformity with the teachings of Jesus.

*["X" and "not X" cannot both be true; between "X" and "not X" there is no middle ground.]

Now, the saddest thing about Archbishop Charles Chaput’s book, Render unto Caesar, is that 98% of the Christian Churches and Christian leaders, from Moscow to Manhattan, from the Pope to Putin, agree with him and think as he does in relation to the teachings of Jesus and their relationship to the "state." They believe that the piedi d’argilla on which this book stands are rock solid, namely, that Christlike love includes Christians getting a hold on the levers of the state’s power of violence. As previously noted, they only disagree with Bishop Chaput, and among themselves, on some of the details of the execution of violence — on which human beings and on behalf of what causes Christ would approve killing, maiming, torturing, destroying and desecrating other people under the auspices of the "state." But, at root they all — Charles Stanley, John Hagee, Alexei Ridiger, James Dobson, Reverend Ike, Dimitrios Arhondonis, Hans Kung, Charles Chaput, Rowan Williams and tens of millions of other Christian pastors and preachers — are in complete agreement, getting the states power of violence in the hands of good [by their particular standards, not Gospel standards] Christians is faithful discipleship on the part of the Church and on the part of those Christians who pursue this end.

An icon of Jesus as a soldier firing a machine gun at another human being is understood across the board to be a preposterous image of Jesus. It is an image imparting a grave and destructive false witness. But, what of the image of Jesus as Prime Minister of Israel, Premier of Russia, President of the United States, or Head of State, Head of Government and Commander-in-Chief of the military of the Vatican City-State? Are these authentic images of Jesus or are they equally false images imparting a grave and destructive false witness to Christians and non-Christian alike? Indeed, does not each of these images absolutely require the other? Does not the Christian soldier killing and maiming people with a clear conscience require that the Prime Minister, et al., permitting him or her to kill? And, does not the Christian Prime Minister, et al., require the soldier with the machine gun ready to pull the trigger on the PM’s command? To have an image of a Prime Minister, et al. without including in it a soldier at the ready to destroy human beings upon a given order from the PM is like having an image of a Mafia Godfather without his "enforcers" and triggermen. Both images are arrant nonsense because of what they leave out. As the old song goes, "You can’t have one without the other!"

So, is the Christian who orders the trigger pulled any more or any less a faithful follower of Jesus and His Way, a true images of and witness to Jesus and His Way of love (Jn 13:34, 15:12, Catechism of the Catholic Church # 1970, 2822) than the Christian soldier who upon orders pulls the machine gun trigger thereby cutting another human being to pieces? Practically all PMs and their "enforcers" in Western civilization over the last 1700 years have been and are Baptized Christians!

The piedi d’argilla of Charles Chaput’s book is the piedi d’argilla of just about every Church and pastor today, and for most of Church history. From House Churches, to Pentecostal Churches, to Glass Cathedrals, to Rock Basilicas — First World, Second World, Third World and Fourth World — nearly all Churches and Church leaders and Church members have been trying to be Pilgrim Churches and Pilgrim people while standing and walking on these ever corroding and corrupting feet of clay, that is, on a presentation and enfleshment of the truth and love that Jesus taught, that is not the truth and love that Jesus taught.

Nothing in the teachings of Jesus says or even suggest, that for His disciples violence becomes acceptable when done as part of a crowd — whether the crowd names itself a state, a corporation, a Church, an army or any combination thereof. Render unto Caesar as noted above steers clear of this primal issue and simply assumes that it is a settled matter that followers of Jesus can be faithful followers of Jesus and kill and maim people, or order the killing and maiming of people, e.g., war, abortion, capital punishment, etc. if it is done under the auspices of the "state." As mentioned above an icon of Jesus firing a machine gun is universally experienced as preposterous because of what it says on the pages of the Gospels about who He was, what He taught and how He lived. Does the Baptized follower of Jesus, who is expressly commanded by Him to "Love one another as I have loved you," have available to him or her — morally, spiritually and ontologically — a body and a soul that have the authority to render to Caesar in an act of homicidal violence?

Render unto Caesar is a book by a Christian and a Bishop about love, politics and Jesus. But, it is not a book about the love that Jesus teaches in the Gospels nor is it a book about the politics of Jesus. It is a book that says one can achieve Christ’s ends by using unChristlike means. To believe this disconnect between ends chosen and the means chosen to achieve them "requires a peculiar kind of self-hypnosis, or moral confusion, or worse," to use Charles Chaput’s own words from another context. God is not mocked, we reap what we sow. It makes no difference if we re-name corn "wheat," or re-name violence "Christlike love." Nor, does it make any difference for how long we have been re-naming corn "wheat" and violence "Christlike love." It is equally irrelevant what personages of distinction re-named corn "wheat," and violence "Christlike love." What we will get in reality for sowing corn and violence is a harvest of corn and violence, and their fruits!

Render unto Caesar is a book, that if it had courageously disciplined itself to proclaiming that love, and that love only, that Jesus taught, that is, a nonviolent love of friends and enemies in imitation of Him and in fidelity to His teaching, could have been an authentic prescription for Christianity being that salubrious mustard seed which planetary humanity so desperately longs for and needs for its healing and peace. Instead it is a prescription for more of the same old addictive poison that for over a millennia and a half the Churches have been pouring into the minds and hearts and bodies and blood of Christians and non-Christians — the poison of the cross of nonviolent love turned upside down and made into a sword, and then sold to humanity in a bottle with the label "Christlike love!"

Fr. Emmanuel Charles McCarthy Archives

Pentagon Mammon

Fr. Emmanuel McCarthy — Mon, 28 Apr 2008 05:00:00 +0000

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The spiritual battlefield is the mind.
~ Mahatma Gandhi

Are the human beings in this picture from Iraq committing murder or being complicit in the act(s) of murder? I am not asking whether they, individually, are committing the sin of murder but whether they are doing the objective evil of murder by killing human beings in an objectively unjust, preemptive war on Iraq? Is this priest in the name of Jesus morally endorsing the evil of murder, i.e., the unjustified taking of human life? Would the Christians who run Commonweal magazine be using up their page space to impart the thoughts and emotions this picture is intended to elicit, if it were not for the lucre that comes with it, the money that is perceived to be needed for the magazine’s or its staff’s survival?

Does not this one picture speak 10,000 words of generalized, superficial moral justification for the Pentagon and what those who control it today are about? Does it not speak 100,000 words of erroneous interpretation of the person and the teachings of the Nonviolent Jesus of the Gospels? From the Pentagon’s point of view does this advertisement have as it primary objective the recruiting of Catholic military chaplains? "No!" There are innumerably better and cheaper avenues to advertise to Catholic priests for ministry openings in the military than the Commonweal subscriber list! The Pentagon’s primary purpose in financing this ad through the Catholic Military Archdiocese is to morally validate for Christians the evil of war and Christian participation in that evil, and by logical extension to morally validate its own existence. Nothing says to the everyday person that a follower of Jesus Christ can kill people upon the orders of the local Grand Pooh-Bah like a picture in a well-known Catholic liberal magazine of a Catholic priest wearing a stole, with soldiers in combat fatigues carrying automatic weapons in their hands, praying to Jesus.

But here, in this present reflection, I wish to address the ostensible purpose for this and similar advertisements, namely, the military’s recruitment of clergy, as well as the moral probity of Catholic and other Christian journals welcoming such ads. America magazine has been taking such expensively placed advertisements for years, and often has had two or three such advertisements in the same issue. I guess the Christians at Commonweal felt they needed their share of this bottomless pot of Pentagon gold to compete or to maintain their standard of living. I am sure the same also was the incentive for the little elementary school weekly readers accepting military ads for publication — although to the best of my knowledge the Pentagon has not started recruiting chaplains in these grammar school publications yet.

I suppose this is as it has always been in Constantinian Christianity, whether it be in its conservative or its liberal incarnations. Big money — in order to get "Jesus’ approval" for what it needs Him to approve of to enhance its earthly well-being, success, survival and status — generates and propagates interpretations of Jesus and His teachings that are in its interest, regardless of what the words on the pages of the Gospels objectively communicate, e.g., "Love your enemies," "Put up your sword." It thereby creates a "sensus fidei" regarding moral theories acceptable in the Church — just as Camels creates a cognitive and emotional consensus in the secular world on how good its cigarettes are, objective empirical reality notwithstanding.

Should not Commonweal, America, etc. that take Pentagon cash in order to allow it access to their mailing lists under the auspices of recruiting Catholic chaplains for the military, at least put an asterisk with their advertisements indicating that, as a matter of policy, Catholic military chaplains do not teach the Catholic men and women coming into the military either the Catholic ethical stance of nonviolence or the standards of Catholic just/unjust war theory! That’s right! The only way that a Catholic man or woman in the military will ever find out about either of the two aspects of the Catholic moral stance related to war is if he or she personally goes to a chaplain and asks the priest face-to-face. Knowledge of neither stance related to killing and maiming human beings is given up-front, accurately and gratuitously by the Catholic Military Chaplaincy to each and every Catholic who enters the military.

Parenthetically but not insignificantly, my experience has led me to believe that very, very few Catholic military chaplains have been educated in the theology, history and spirituality of Gospel Nonviolence to a degree that would give them the pastoral ability to effectively teach or counsel in this area, which is an acceptable moral option in the Catholic Church. Maybe, as reason would seem to demand, future priests for the military are given a full slate of courses in this area at military chaplaincy school, since violence is what those in their spiritual care are involved in daily in some manner. Catholic seminaries in the U.S. almost universally teach the subject of Gospel Nonviolence superficially and anecdotally, if at all, rather than seriously and systematically. Hence few, if any, Catholic priests going into the military would have the requisite knowledge to give well-informed spiritual guidance to a Catholic man or woman struggling in conscience with the dissonance between the Nonviolent Jesus of the Gospel and his Way of Nonviolent Love of friends and enemies and participation in the realities of the mass homicide that is called war. For almost forty years I have heard stories from veterans whose experience on a personal level with a military chaplain(s), when struggling with the Nonviolent Jesus of the Gospel and His Nonviolent Way — after exposure to the pernicious dimension war — was woeful, to hostile, to pastorally destructive.

However, neither Gospel Nonviolence nor Catholic Just/Unjust War Theory is taught as a matter of policy and/or practice by the military’s priests to Catholics entering the U.S. Military. I would submit that to intentionally proclaim the Gospel in great detail, except as it relates to the great moral problems that a bishop’s or priest’s people have to deal with, is to fail to proclaim the Gospel properly. Indeed it approaches a sacrilegious misuse one’s position as bishop, priest or minister to intentionally withhold segments of the Gospel and Church teaching that are vitally pertinent to a person’s situation in life at a particular moment in time. A Christian chaplain to the Prostitutes Union of Nevada (all groups should have a Christian chaplain if they want one because Christ came to save sinners, not the righteous) who told the men and women in that organization not to lie, not to steal, not to do drugs, to go to church on Sunday and love their neighbor, but never informed his congregation about the incompatibility of lust with the teaching and Way of the Jesus would be a spiritual and moral scoundrel making a good living by misrepresenting, as those who hired him want him to misrepresent, the teachings and Way of Jesus. Now, is lust less intrinsically gravely evil than murder, the unjustified killing of a human being(s)?

Of course, non-culpable ignorance of an evil makes it morally impossible to commit a sin in that area. Doing an act that is evil but that one does not know is evil is not sin, though it still is evil and will produce the bad fruits that evil produces. However, if a pastor’s or a diocese’s or a Church’s position is to intentionally not tell people that certain matters are objectively evil, which in fact are objectively evil, or to intentionally keep from those placed in their spiritual care the standards by which to distinguish good from evil and they thereby intentionally and premeditatively leave these people in a state of non-culpable ignorance so they cannot possibly be held morally responsible by God for the evil they do, then the question arises, why teach Christians that anything is evil? Or, is this strategy of spiritual "benign neglect" employed only when the teaching of what is evil or of what the standards are for discerning good from evil are teachings that if applied by the Christian Community could radically jeopardize the political and economic standing of the institutional Church? For otherwise, Church officials seem to have no problem placing heavy and detailed moral burdens on the shoulders of fellow Christians.

Perhaps then, honesty and basic human integrity demand that Commonweal, America, etc., place a double asterisk with these military priest-recruiting advertisements, since Catholic military chaplains are not allowed to publicly teach — to all Catholics entering the military and to continually publicly teach to all Catholics in the military — on the very moral issue that military personnel are uniquely and immediately involved in, namely, killing other human beings, other sons and daughters of the "Father of all." This means that only those priests could entertain becoming military chaplains who possessed a conscience that permitted them to morally interpret a fundamental principle of natural law, "Do good and avoid evil," in such a way that they would be morally certain that they were fulfilling their moral obligation to those immortal souls in their care by not telling them clearly, when they enter the military, the Catholic standards of good and evil that Catholics are morally bound to adhere to, "ad bellum" and "in bello," in order to justly kill another human being.

Maybe even a triple asterisk would be in order for these ads for the purpose of alerting any priest, minister or bishop to the tortuous and/or torturous moral consciousness he or she is going to have to submit to if they become one of the military’s paid chaplains. Leaving metanoia, change of mind, to the Drill Sergeant, while concerning oneself primarily with "strengthening" the souls of those who are daily committed to putting on the mind of the Drill Sergeant rather than the mind of Christ, is a highly "abnormal" Church ministry indeed — unless, of course, the Drill Sergeant and by extension the Pentagon, are about the business of helping young men and women put on the mind of Christ! The daily activities that military recruits are required to go through would not suggest to a reasonable person, however, that such is the case. Consider this reflection by the late Gordon Zahn, PhD, from his book WAR, CONSCIENCE AND DISSENT:

"Military planners operate on the basis of military expediency, and individual soldiers are trained to operate on the basis of unquestioning obedience to their military superiors…In the realm of copybook distinctions it may be a simple matter to divide the bombing of a city into separate acts of willed destruction of a war production plant and unwilled (though fully known and foreseen) destruction of thousands of innocent noncombatants. But it demands too much to believe that the man who loosed the bombs availed himself of such convenient moral schizophrenia — or that he saw any need for doing so. Our intensive military-training programs are designed to free men from the necessity of making such calculations by establishing in them as nearly automatic systems of stimulus-response patterns as possible. As far as the victims of his acts are concerned, our bomber friend had been rigorously trained to think of them either as purely expendable units or in terms of hatred or fear-inducing stereotypes which makes those victims fully deserving of their fate…

The military-training program is crucial here, in that it may be seen as a set of social controls designed to subject the individual trainee to a process of systematic depersonalization in the interest of increased military efficiency. The self-image of the morally responsible person vanishes and is replaced by a new orientation, in which the individual sees himself as an agent of destructive force completely responsive to the decisions and directives of his military superiors. This new "self-image" — and the awareness that his enemy counterpart has undergone the same change — makes it possible for him to assume the role of professional killer and to perform acts which, under other circumstances, he would have found unthinkable.

How else could he bridge the gap between the friendly repairman and the soldier spraying fiery death upon his screaming victims, between the playful collegian and the aviator lowering a blanket of death upon a flame-rimmed city? Certainly not by coldly rational calculations of good and evil effects. The secret lies in conditioning and not in conviction. The depersonalized agent sees no alternative; like Pilate, he washes his hands of all responsibility, leaving that to those who made the decisions and issued the orders. It also helps if he can be conditioned to regard the objects of his kill as similarly depersonalized agents — as the abstraction he knows simply as "enemy" — not as men with bodies that bleed and burn, with families and friends to mourn them, with loves and hopes and fears like his own. Once this level of conditioning is achieved, all things are possible. Men will follow orders to "take no prisoners"; or, having already taken them, to "deliver them to Paris, and be back in ten minutes." It becomes possible for them to liquidate innocent hostages in reprisal for a guerilla raid without suffering too many troubling qualms of conscience. In a very real sense, atrocities are the hallmark of the perfectly accomplished military-training program, for they represent the ultimate of obedience to military discipline.

Fortunately, the "ideal" is rarely achieved, despite the total mobilizing of psychological talent and resources. But it is achieved often enough — or, even when the finished product falls short of that ideal, the partial success is sufficient — to justify firm theological condemnation of that violation of God’s proudest creation which such depersonalization and dehumanization represent.

A very specific example, which again is in no sense hypothetical, may be in order here. A few years ago, a network radio program devoted a Sunday to on-the-scene interviews at one of the nation’s basic training centers. One such interview featured the instructor charged with the task of training the young recruits in the use of the bayonet. He complained that he encountered a great deal of resistance from the trainees, who were naturally repelled by the idea of plunging this weapon into the vitals of a living human being. But he had solved his pedagogical problem in a rather ingenious fashion. Experience had shown that this initial resistance faded away if the men were induced to imitate the roars and snarls of wild beasts as they charged the training dummy. To conclude the interview, a microphone was attached to the dummy so that the listening public might be entertained by the sound of the recruits as they growled and ripped away at their mock victim. This, one assumes, is the much-praised "making of men" that only recently was recommended by one of our leading bishops as the solution to the problem of juvenile delinquency. Perhaps the use of this technique [for solving the juvenile delinquency problem] is not widespread. But, widespread or not, this "making of men into beast" is thoroughly in keeping with the demands of modern war."

So the task for which a priest or minister is recruited by the military is clear. He or she is to be the agent who officially brings the entire symbol system and sacramental system of the Church to the military for purposes of morally endorsing and blessing the mind that the Catholic or Christian "puts on" at the hands of the Drill Sergeant, as being a mind in moral conformity with the mind of Christ. Their spiritual task is to strengthen the soul of the Christian so that he or she can carry on with vigor living and acting out of the mind given to him or her by the Drill Instructor.

As usual, ecumenical etiquette insists that I focus examples pertinent to my critique of the Churches through my own Church, i.e., Catholic. This I have done. However, everything raised here is pertinent to all the mainline and major Evangelical Churches. I assume that the Catholic magazines, Commonweal and America, as well as, all the other Christian journals and their staffs that take such advertising can find a superabundance of Catholic and Christian moral textbooks that will validate their accepting Pentagon mammon for placing ads for recruiting Catholic priests and other ordained Christian ministers to the military’s chaplaincy service. This is certain since the institutional Churches themselves — Catholic, Protestant, Orthodox and Evangelical — as they now operate, have no problem with priests and ministers entering the military service as officers and chaplains. Commonweal, America, and the other Christian publications alluded to above, and their staffs, are therefore morally covered and have a rock-solid defense before "the awesome judgment seat of Christ" for accepting such advertisements.

Or do they?

Fr. Emmanuel Charles McCarthy Archives

Blessed Is the Peacemaker

Fr. Emmanuel McCarthy — Tue, 15 Apr 2008 05:00:00 +0000

DIGG THIS

Homily
Mass of the Resurrection for TomLewis
St. Francis Xavier Church

I have known
Tom for more than twenty-five years. The last time we were together
was almost six months ago when we spent a day reflecting on the
Nonviolent Jesus and the implications of His Way of Nonviolent Love
of friends and enemies. When I heard that Tom had died, I was surprised
by my reaction. My very first thought was of Brother David Darst,
a Christian Brother who was also one of the Catonsville Nine with
Tom.

Over the decades
— since Brother David's death in an automobile accident soon after
being convicted for his participation in the Catonsville, Maryland,
draft file burning — I have often thought about him. But, to have
his name be my first thought after hearing of Tom's death was/is
a mystery to be pondered by me in the time ahead.

Tom
Lewis (second from left) and others burning draft files on May
17, 1968 at Catonsville.

I suppose the
most obvious explanation for it is that Tom and David were one in
the most powerfully symbolic Christian witness of my lifetime, the
"napalming" of draft files outside of the Catonsville
Selective Service Office during the mass murder operation called
the Viet Nam War.

As tens upon
tens of millions of Christians in the United States, including a
sickening number of prelates and personages of distinction, aimlessly
meandered about or hid in the maze of that spiritual pyrite named
Christian Just War Theory, Tom and David and seven other human beings
like us, created a means whereby to proclaim the authentic Word
of God to Churches and to Christians who were in denial of the truth
of the Gospel of Jesus Christ. Their proclamation outshines by a
hundred billion kilowatts anything a Papal Visit, a Billy Graham
Crusade or a Pat Robinson and Mother Angelica national television
network ever did in the name of Jesus Christ to glorify God, His
Way and His Truth.

In an original
work of art (Original here not meaning "novel" but rather
"origin," as in the Word "through whom all things
were made," and who "became flesh."), that required
their own suffering to create — as well as their own freedom, intelligence,
empathic capacities and faith — Tom and his eight co-conspirators
with Christ brought Light into a society, into Churches and into
Christians of all denominations who were living in the darkness
of the shadow cast by the human smoke rising from Gehenna. In a
moment of history reminiscent of another moment in history — the
overturning of the money changers' tables in the Temple by Jesus
— they poured napalm on draft files thereby communicating to anyone
with eyes to see and ears to hear and a mind to understand that
"burning children was inhuman." As one of their court
statements read:

Our apologies
good friends for the fracture of good order, the burning of paper
instead of children, the angering of the orderlies in the front
parlor of the charnel houses. We could not, so help us God do
otherwise, for we are sick at heart. Our hearts give us no rest
for thinking of the Land of Burning Children.

It took faith,
courage and creativity to do what Tom did that May 17 in 1968. Without
experiential access to the daily deluge of evil and suffering that
"the best and the brightest" in government, press, military,
Wall Street, academia and religion were conjuring up and pouring
down upon the expendable people of Viet Nam and the United States
at that time, it is difficult to appreciate the depth of faith,
courage and creativity that were the sine qua non for such
a radical act of anti-government, pro-Christ, prophetic performance
art. Most citizens of the U.S. and certainly most employees of government
in 1968 were still of the mindset of the 1950s, which was captured
perfectly by the late Cardinal Francis Spellman of New York when
he announced his support of the Viet Nam War by quoting Steven Decatur,
"My country right or wrong, but my country." Perhaps
an even better snapshot of the state of the societal and the Church
mind in which Catonsville took place can be seen by a 1966 Life
Magazine pro-Viet Nam War story that contained a photo of a
tough looking U.S. fighter pilot in full gear with a skull painted
on his helmet saying to the interviewer:

We sure are
pleased with those backroom boys at DOW. Their original product
wasn't so hot — if the gooks were quick they could scrape it off.
So the boys started adding polystyrene — now it stuck like s__t
to a blanket. But then, if the gooks jumped underwater it stopped
burning, so the boys from DOW started adding Willie Peter (WP-white
phosphorous) so to make it burn better. It will even burn underwater
now. And just one drop is enough, it'll keep burning right down
to the bone, so they die anyway from phosphorous poisoning.

This was acceptable
thinking for most of the U.S. population at the time, if it thought
at all about the horror the U.S. Government and the plutocracy behind
it were creating for ordinary people 8,000 miles away. In most Churches,
academic institutions and mass media markets the agony of the people
of Viet Nam was at best nothing more than the "stuff"
for an interminable morality debate. Then into this artificial moral
confusion came Tom and his fellow followers of Jesus with that "living
and effective two-edged sword, the Word of God, that penetrates
even between soul and spirit, joints and marrow, and is able to
judge the secret emotions and thoughts of people" (Heb
4:12). And what Truth of God did their illegal napalming
of paper rather than the legal napalming of children bring into
Christian consciences that were supportive of or indifferent to
the mass murder taking place in Viet Nam? It was an unwanted truth
— but self-evident truth — that almost nobody would consider before
Catonsville and few, even today, in the Churches or outside the
Churches are willing to take-in with the acute moral seriousness
it absolutely demands: There is no moral difference between throwing
a thousand children into a fire and throwing fire from an airplane
on a thousand children.

Today the same
fighter pilots, who dropped napalm on children, women and the elderly,
are presented to the people of the U. S. by the government and its
media outlets as war heroes. But, there is no such thing as heroism
in the execution of evil. A mafia hit-man taking great risk in order
to kill the children of an opposing godfather is not a hero. Evil
does not become a scintilla less evil because a person put his or
her life in jeopardy to do it and is subsequently designated a hero.
Murder decorated with a ribbon is still murder — and the burning
to death of children by the thousands in an unjust war is unjust
killing, whose name is murder. Authentic heroism is freely taking
a grave risk in order to try to do good. What Tom did that day almost
forty years ago was an act of heroic mercy, not an act of pseudo-heroic
mercilessness. According to the truth of what is referred to as
the Last Judgment passage in Matthew 25, Tom saw children being
burned to death and tried to help them at a great cost to himself.
He came to the aid of the burning children in the Land of the Burning
Children with the same abandonment of consequences to self that
he would have had in coming to the aid of his own child or to the
aid of the Christ Child in similar circumstances.

In his Catonsville
act of Nonviolent Civil Disobedience and in the dozens of other
actions of Divine Obedience in which Tom took part over the decades,
he was always trying to act out of the Spirit of God whose supreme
attribute is mercy, with the Father who is "rich in mercy"
and who "lets His sun shine on the righteous and the wicked,"
and in obedience to the Son whose conversion command is mercy,
i.e., "I want mercy, not sacrifice." Tom's life
— whether it be in his art, his teaching, his protest, his Catholic
Worker affiliations, or his everyday demeanor — was a life committed
to struggling to be an agent of mercy on behalf of those who are
subjected to the power of the merciless. What a life! What a witness!
What a road on which to return to the Source!

So maybe, the
connection between David Darst and Tom in my mind at that first
instance after hearing of his death is not just that they were both
participants in that most prophetic event at the Catonsville draft
board. Maybe at a deeper level it is what is so succinctly put forward
in today's first reading from the Hymn of the Suffering Servant:
"The Lord called me from birth,/ from my mother's womb he gave
me my name./ He made of me a two-edged sword./…The Lord has spoken/
who formed me as his servant from the womb."

Over the years
in thinking about David being killed in a car crash only three of
weeks after being convicted of acting criminally by burning draft
files, I have often reflected on whether Catonsville is what David
was brought out of nothingness and given the gift of faith in Jesus
as the Way, the Truth and the Life for. It is a Biblical truth that
God is Lord of History, that Jesus is the Alpha and Omega of history.
But how? It seems impossible in terms of human freedom and in terms
of the little we know about reality. Yet, in terms of David's life
and death it feels self-evidently so. So also with Tom. There is
a sense that before he left the womb on St. Patrick's Day in 1940,
indeed before he was conceived in his mother's womb, his destiny
was placed within him. This of course can be passed off as just
the idle daydreaming of one looking at life in the rear-view mirror.
But there is a Biblical basis for it in the notion of "chosen."
"Chosen" by Jesus is not chosen to be a big shot nor is
it chosen for privilege but rather for service, indeed for service
that entails suffering in order to love and thereby complete a task
in God's Plan for bringing salvation "to the ends of the earth."

There is a
meditation by John Henry Newman that begins:

God has created
me
to do some definite service.
God has committed some work to me
which God has not committed to another.
I have my mission.
I may never know it in this life
but I shall be told it in the next.
I am a link in a chain
a bond of connection between persons.
God has not created me for naught.
I shall do good – I shall do God’s work
I shall be an angel of peace
a preacher of truth in my own place
while not intending it,
if I do but keep the commandments.
Therefore I will trust God
whatever I am, I can never be thrown away:
if I am in sickness, my sickness may serve God;
in perplexity, my perplexity may serve God;
If I am in sorrow, my sorrow may serve God.
God does nothing in vain
God knows what God is about.

My friends
may leave me
I may be thrown among strangers
I may feel desolate,
my spirits sink,
my future be hidden from me-still
God knows what God is about.

I have a most
assured sense that whatever the work assigned by the God of love
to Tom in his mother's womb, it has been completed. May we all be
as faithful to the struggle to do the work committed to us by God
as was Tom. Consummatum est.

The witness
of your life, Tom, is now in the hands of God to do with as He will.
Requiescat in pace.

Alleluia! Alleluia!
Alleluia!

April
15, 2008

Fr.
Emmanuel Charles McCarthy is a priest of the Eastern Rite (Byzantine-Melkite)
of the Catholic Church. Formerly a lawyer and a university educator,
he is the founder and the original director of The Program for the
Study and Practice of Nonviolent Conflict Resolution at the University
of Notre Dame. He is also co-founder, along with Dorothy Day and
others of Pax Christi-USA. He has conducted retreats and spoken
at conferences throughout the world on the issue of the relationship
of faith and violence and the nonviolence of the Jesus. He was the
keynote speaker at the Lorraine Motel in Memphis, Tennessee for
the 25th anniversary memorial of the assassination of Rev. Martin
Luther King, Jr. there. He is author of several books, including
these: All Things Flee Thee because Thou Fleest Me: A Cry to
the Churches and their Leaders to Return to the Nonviolent Jesus
and His Nonviolent Way; Christian Just War Theory: The logic of
Deceit; August 9: The Stations of the Cross of Nonviolent Love.
He has also authored innumerable articles on the subject of violence,
religion and the nonviolent love of friends and enemies taught by
Jesus by word and deed. His audio/video series, BEHOLD THE LAMB,
is almost universally considered to be the most spiritually profound
presentation on the matter of Gospel Nonviolent Love available in
this format. BEHOLD THE LAMB is now available on
mp3CD through his website, either at the cost of $5.00 for a
disc or it can be acquired directly by an mp3 downloaded from
the website for no cost. Rev. Emmanuel Charles McCarthy was
nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize for his life’s work on behalf
of peace within people and among people. He may be reached and his
work may be accessed at the Center
for Christian Non-Violence.

For Christian Warmongers

Fr. Emmanuel McCarthy — Sat, 15 Mar 2008 05:00:00 +0000

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As there are
uses and abuses, by commission and omission, of history, theology,
sociology, psychology, etc., in the service of ideology and politics,
so also there are uses and abuses by commission and omission of
religious liturgy for the same purposes. Just in case your Palm
Sunday and Holy Week liturgies do not communicate it clearly, or
just in case your priest, minister, bishop, preacher or pastor do
not tell you it from the pulpit, Palm Sunday and Holy Week are 100%
about the victorious and salvific Nonviolent Coming of God into
His Nonviolent Kingdom through the Nonviolent Messiah Jesus.

The Palm Sunday
narrative of Jesus entering Jerusalem on a donkey is recorded in
all four Gospels, which means it is highly probable that it is based
on an historical event. But, Jesus has journeyed to Jerusalem on
foot from Galilee, why then does He choose to complete His journey
by riding into Jerusalem on a donkey? There is no serious scholarly
doubt that by this gesture He is symbolically referencing Himself
and His mission to Zechariah 9:9–10. There is also no serious scholarly
doubt that the Apostolic communities as evidenced by the Four Evangelists
were well aware of this and understood its importance to the proper
proclamation of the Gospel in general, and in particular to the
center piece of the Gospel, the Passion Narrative. Zechariah 9:9–10
announces:

"Rejoice
heart and soul, daughter of Zion,
shout with gladness, daughter of Jerusalem!
See now your king comes to you;
he is victorious, he is triumphant,
Meek and riding on a donkey,
on a colt, the foal of a donkey.
He will banish chariots from Ephraim
and horses from Jerusalem;
The bow of war will be banished.
he will proclaim peace for the nations.
His kingdom shall stretch from sea to sea,
from the River to the ends of the earth."

It is as certain
that the manner of Jesus' entrance into Jerusalem is meant to be
a direct reference to this prophetic passage in Zechariah, as it
is certain that Jesus' words on the cross, "My God, My God,
why have you forsaken me?", are a direct reference to Psalm
22, which opens with these words. But look at the words of Zechariah
9:9–10: "meek," banishing "chariots and horses."
Chariots and horses are the equivalent in Jesus' time of today's
Stealth bombers and nuclear missiles: the maximal destructive technology
of the hour. Again look at the words, this victorious king of Zechariah
9:9–10 will proclaim "peace" and his kingdom, which shall
stretch "from the River (Jordan) to the ends of the earth,"
will be completely without arms, the instruments of human destruction,
"the bow of war."

This unambiguous
Nonviolent Palm Sunday entrance into Jerusalem is the beginning
of the end of Jesus' journey of Nonviolent Love of friends and enemies
for the salvation of all people. Contrary to popular piety, it is
not be merely a "via dolorosa," a way of suffering.
Identification with Jesus suffering is identification with Jesus
loving. His via dolorosa is a Way of suffering chosen in
order to confront and conquer evil in a sin-drenched world, not
suffering chosen for its own sake or for the sake of placating an
unforgiving, "eye for eye," revengeful, terrorist deity.
Jesus via dolorosa is the choice of the Way of nonviolent
suffering love of friends and enemies made in order to embody and
make visible God's Nonviolent Love for all — even for lethal enemies,
e.g., the healing of the ear of the armed servant of the high priest
who comes to Gethsemane to take Jesus to His death, "Father
forgive them for they know not what they do." The Nonviolent
King, who enters Jerusalem on a donkey in fulfillment of Zechariah
9:9–10, ultimately receives the stature prophesied for Him when
crowned with thorns by those He loves to the end, He mounts His
throne — the Cross of Nonviolent Love — and has, by order of Pilate,
the ruling Roman official of this kingdom of the world at
the time, a sign written in three languages, placed above His head
on His throne: "King of the Jews."

For the Nonviolent
Jesus there is a direct route from His Sermon on the Mount, to His
Nonviolent symbolic announcement of the Coming of the Reign of the
Nonviolent God of Love on Palm Sunday, to His unequivocal incarnation
of that God on Good Friday, to the incontestable validation of the
reality, power and wisdom of that God on Easter Sunday. Take the
Nonviolent Jesus of Nonviolent Love of friends and enemies out of
Palm Sunday, out of Good Friday, out of Easter Sunday and there
is no Palm Sunday, no Good Friday, no Easter Sunday. Nonviolent
Love of friends and enemies is integral to the very meaning and
purpose of those days.

Take the Nonviolent
Love of friends and enemies of Jesus out of Holy Week and there
is no Holy Week. There is no "Holy" in the week, because
God, the Holy One, is love (agape). Without Jesus enfleshment of
Divine Nonviolent Love toward all — friends and enemies, faithful
followers and betrayers — there is just a week of unholy, diabolical
brutality, violence, torture, cruelty, injustice, suffering and
death. Why? Again, only God is Holy and God is agapeic love. Jesus,
the Word (Logos) of God, the Second Person of the Holy Trinity is
the incarnation of Nonviolent Love toward all because God is Nonviolent
Love toward all. The Father and Jesus are one, consubstantial. The
person who sees Jesus sees the Father. Jesus comes to do the Father's
will and only the Father's will. Starting on Palm Sunday, continuing
through Good Friday and on to Easter Sunday, it is the Nonviolent
Love of Jesus, God incarnate, that makes this week Holy — and I
might add, makes it an efficacious moment in the long process of
exposing and conquering evil.

If this were
a week of remembering a Jesus entering Jerusalem in a warrior's
chariot — surrounded with manned war horses and a legion of soldiers
carrying the most advanced killing technology of the time and ready
to immediately kill other human beings on Jesus' command — it would
not be the beginning of a Holy Week. A Jesus telling Peter to "finish
off" the armed servant of the high priest, after Peter slashes
his ear off, would not make for a Holy Week. A week in which Jesus
calls down from the cross curses and retribution on those who are
killing Him would not be a Holy Week. A week that ends with a body
corrupting in a tomb after a life of nonviolent love of friends
and enemies would not be a Holy Week. It is the Nonviolent Love
of friends and enemies enfleshed unto death in the now risen Jesus
— the Word, the Way and the Truth of God who is love — that makes
this week Holy.

The events
and revelations of Holy Week unto the redemption and salvation of
the world are events and revelations ineradicably united with the
Nonviolent Jesus who taught and lived unto death and resurrection
a Way of Nonviolent Love of friends and enemies! This is the Holy
Week and Jesus of history, of the Gospel and of faith and therefore
must be the Holy Week and Jesus of Liturgy and the pulpit. If this
is not the Holy Week and Jesus proclaimed in Liturgy and from the
pulpit during Holy Week — as well as during all other weeks until
time is no more — then an abuse or misuse, culpable or non-culpable,
of Liturgy and of pulpit is taking place.

March
15, 2008

Fr.
Emmanuel Charles McCarthy is a priest of the Eastern Rite (Byzantine-Melkite)
of the Catholic Church. Formerly a lawyer and a university educator,
he is the founder and the original director of The Program for the
Study and Practice of Nonviolent Conflict Resolution at the University
of Notre Dame. He is also co-founder, along with Dorothy Day and
others of Pax Christi-USA. He has conducted retreats and spoken
at conferences throughout the world on the issue of the relationship
of faith and violence and the nonviolence of the Jesus. He was the
keynote speaker at the Lorraine Motel in Memphis, Tennessee for
the 25th anniversary memorial of the assassination of Rev. Martin
Luther King, Jr. there. He is author of several books, including
these: All Things Flee Thee because Thou Fleest Me: A Cry to
the Churches and their Leaders to Return to the Nonviolent Jesus
and His Nonviolent Way; Christian Just War Theory: The logic of
Deceit; August 9: The Stations of the Cross of Nonviolent Love.
He has also authored innumerable articles on the subject of violence,
religion and the nonviolent love of friends and enemies taught by
Jesus by word and deed. His audio/video series, BEHOLD THE LAMB,
is almost universally considered to be the most spiritually profound
presentation on the matter of Gospel Nonviolent Love available in
this format. BEHOLD THE LAMB is now available on
mp3CD through his website, either at the cost of $5.00 for a
disc or it can be acquired directly by an mp3 downloaded from
the website for no cost. Rev. Emmanuel Charles McCarthy was
nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize for his life’s work on behalf
of peace within people and among people. He may be reached and his
work may be accessed at the Center
for Christian Non-Violence.

The Man Who Said No to Hitler

Fr. Emmanuel McCarthy — Mon, 15 Oct 2007 05:00:00 +0000

DIGG THIS

War will
exist until that distant day when the conscientious objector enjoys
the same reputation and prestige that the warrior does today.

~ John F. Kennedy

The
life of Franz Jägerstätter was the ordinary life of an
Austrian farmer in the village of St. Radegund. He was a devout
Catholic, a daily communicant who prayed the rosary while doing
farm chores. Sexton of his parish church, he was married and had
three children. But, on August 9, 1943 Franz Jägerstätter's
life became other than ordinary, when he was legally killed by the
German Military for refusing to kill for the German Military.

At
the hour of his death few people knew him and no one who did know
him supported him in his refusal to engage in homicide for the Führer.
Legions of Christians of all ranks told him to do his duty and go
to war like the other Christian men. His bishop, pastor and spiritual
advisors endeavored to persuade him that his conscientious objection
was a wrong and futile course, even possibly sinful and contrary
to Church teaching. He was looked upon as the embarrassing, if not
mentally unstable, polar opposite of the heroic Aryan warrior. However,
with a courage that, even on an exclusively human plane, was noble,
heart-rending and eminently inspiring, he gently stood firm and
said, "No," to joining the German military. So it can
be said with certitude, that when the blade of the guillotine fell
at Brandenburg Prison near Berlin at 4 p.m. on August 9, 1943, Franz
Jägerstätter was totally alone, almost totally unknown
and destined to be totally forgotten.

However,
as a manifestation of how the mystery and power of God's plan for
the redemption of all people through Jesus Christ inexorably advances
in history, on this coming October 26th throughout the world millions
of people will stop, think about and be touched by this man. They
may disagree among themselves about historical details of his life
but no one will doubt that the finger of God was operative here
— and operative not just for the salvation of Franz Jägerstätter
but also for the good of the Church and through the Church for the
good of all people. For on October 26, 2007, the Catholic Church
will formally Beatify Franz Jägerstätter as a martyr of
the Christian faith. His Beatification will close forever for all
Catholics, and hopefully for all Christians, any thought that they
can obey the laws of a nation or the orders of an agent of a state
if what is required to obey is doing that which is not in conformity
with the Will of God as revealed by Jesus, the Word (Logos) of God
"made flesh." The Beatification of this "destined
to be forgotten" man will be the incarnational and liturgical
underlining in blood-red of one of the most ignored tenets of Gospel
morality and one of the most ignored text of the Catechism of the
Catholic Church (2242):

The
citizen is obliged in conscience not to follow the directions
of civil authorities when they are contrary to the demands of
the moral order, the fundamental rights of persons or the Gospel.
Refusing obedience to civil authorities, when their demands are
contrary to those of an upright conscience, finds its justification
in the distinction between serving God and serving the political
community. "Render therefore to Caesar the things that are
Caesar's, and to God the things that are God's" (Mt 22:21).
"We must obey God rather than man" (Ac 5:29).

The
story of how a simple man, a "nobody" by the standards
of the "somebodies" of this world, went from being a criminal
who was executed by his government for declining to partake in a
nation's war, to being a person who was officially discussed at
the Second Vatican Council, to being a figure known at every point
of the compass, to being a person Beatified by the Catholic Church
deserves the attention of everyone who struggles to understand how
humanity can be extricated from this valley of tragedy and tears
in which human life is ensnared. Franz Jägerstätter's
witness should be especially pondered by those who believe that
fidelity to the Word (Logos) of God as revealed in Jesus is "not
enough" to make an essential difference in the human situation,
and by those who believe that Christianity must proclaim a "realistic
gospel" of evil renamed, rationalized and accepted as good,
if it is to be effective in this world. So, here on the threshold
of Franz Jägerstätter's Beatification, I hope to make
visible the prophetic purpose and meaning of his life and death.
I hope to illuminate the salvific communication from God for which
he was the chosen instrument — the chosen instrument who nevertheless
had to choose to see and to act.

Years
ago I viewed a public service advertisement on television, which
I suspect many others have seen. It was produced by a rehabilitation
group for alcoholics. Its intention was to open the eyes of people
whose families had become dysfunctional because they were denying
a fact that was self-evident to the whole world, namely, that someone
in the family was an alcoholic and that the unwillingness on the
part of the alcoholic and his family to acknowledge this was gravely
distorting, indeed ravaging, domestic life.

In
the ad a family is relaxing in its living room. The father reclines
in an easy chair perusing the newspaper. The mother sits on the
couch sewing. A little girl watches TV. All of a sudden an elephant
enters the living room and begins to upset things with almost every
move. By the time the ad concludes, the family's world has been
turned upside-down. The father's easy chair is tipped over, he is
sprawled on the floor, his glasses are broken but he continues to
try to read the newspaper. The mother lies on the couch underneath
a busted lamp struggling to re-thread a needle and the little girl
peeks around the elephant in order to watch a now crushed television
set. Yet, in spite of this shattering breakdown in community life,
no one is willing to acknowledge and speak the plain truth: "There
is an elephant in the room and it is ruining everything."

All
continue to remain oblivious to the obvious. Like people myopically
concerned with making the beds correctly in a burning house, everyone's
attention is entirely absorbed by incidental tasks, which would
be proper and right except for one terrible self-evident truth:
there is an elephant in the room. The obstinate ignoring of this
fact transforms these otherwise acceptable activities into destructive,
death-dealing pseudo-escape routes from truth and reality. Said
spiritually, good loses its goodness when it is permitted to become
the agency by which evil is left unnamed, and hence allowed to engulf
an ever-greater area of life.

It
is not exaggeration to assert that the greatest scandal and distortion
of Christianity — Catholic, Orthodox, Protestant, Evangelical —
over the last 1,700 years has been its enormous participation in
and justifications of homicidal violence and enmity as consistent
with following the Nonviolent Jesus of the Gospels and His Way of
Nonviolent Love of friends and enemies. Yet, it is a scandal and
a distortion that almost no Christian or Church will publicly admit
exists. Decade after decade, century after century for 1,700 years
the Churches' ecclesiastical structures, sacramental systems and
theological faculties have been handed over by Church leaders to
the local nationalisms, ethnocentrisms and militarisms for support
of the evil of war. The amount of "Jesus approved" misery
and cruelty that Christians have wreaked upon each other, as well
as upon non-Christians, is beyond human computation or comprehension.
But "somehow," generation after generation, a leadership
arises in the various Churches and a laity is nurtured through the
various Churches that do not care to perceive the spiritual, theological
or moral preposterousness of receiving Holy Communion at a pre-battle
Eucharist at 9 a.m., in preparation for savaging human beings, including
fellow Christians, at 11 a.m.

Regardless
of how blatant the inconsistency has become between the reality
of war and Jesus and His teachings, few Christians, since the time
of Constantine, have stood up and said, "There is an elephantine
evil, a monstrous untruth operating in the Church and it is ruining
everything." Consider this verbatim excerpt, as recorded in
an on-site documentary film, of a Marine Sergeant instructing his
trainees:

Sergeant:
What is a mine? A mine is no more or less than an explosive or
chemical substance that is designed or made to destroy and kill
the enemy. You want to rip out his eyeballs. You want to tear
apart his love machine. You want to destroy him, privates. You
don't want nothin' left of him. You want to send him home in a
trash bag to his mommy.

Trainees
in unison scream: Yeah! Yeah!

This
is not abnormal talk in the world of military training and war.
The normal in that world, all over the world, is the intentional
nurturing of human beings into states of unempathethic cruelty and
false conscience. Military training is a conversion process but
it is not a conversion process that has as its goal "putting
on the mind of Christ." It is rather a nurturing process that
has as its end getting human beings to put on a mind that is as
far removed from the mind of Christ as heaven is from hell. If as
General Sherman says "War is hell" — and it is — it is
hell because military training has hard-wired hellish myths, attitudes,
beliefs, values and behavior patterns into recruits that make them
able and willing to spread hell on earth. As the mother of a Marine
convicted of killing civilians in Iraq said to the press after the
scapegoat conviction of her son: "I gave them a good boy and
they gave me back a murderer." Yet, Christian Churches and
their leaders — minus a tiny number of denominations who believe
that Jesus cannot be followed by engaging in human slaughter — have
for 1700 years, right up to this very hour, been blind to the blatant
contradiction between the way of war and the Way of Jesus, as well
as, blind to the enormity of the wickedness that is unleashed by
proclaiming that these are morally compatible or complementary options.
Concomitantly, Church leaders have been jadedly nonchalant about
the gutting that is done to individual souls and to the Church by
participation in and justification of this flagrantly un-Christ-like,
diabolical conversion process known as military training — and the
inevitable and infernal consequences that necessarily ensue from
it.

Why
Churches — leaders and members — resolutely refuse to look at and
acknowledge the Himalayan discordance between what Jesus taught
about violence and enmity and what they are chronically teaching
and justifying about violence and enmity in His name is an enigma
demanding investigation. Seen from the perspective of social pathology,
it appears to be a process whereby a group and its leaders persuade
themselves, contrary to overwhelming evidence, to believe what they
know is not the truth. It is a people convincing itself by contorted
and tortuous methods of rationalization that the heinous is the
Christ-like — or at least not incompatible with the Way of Jesus.
It is individuals with group support and leadership encouragement
telling each other that there is nothing to be seen — factually,
morally and spiritually — when they know very well there is something
unbearably distressing to be seen factually, morally and spiritually.
It is the alcoholic and his or her family tenaciously avoiding the
unwanted truth that "There is an elephant in the room and it
is ruining everything," by dogmatically maintaining that there
is "No problem."

Franz
Jägerstätter's schooling ended when he was fourteen. He
could not articulate a formal theology of Gospel nonviolence nor
could he articulate a formal just war theology. How could he possibly
be expected to, when even today most Christians are taught little
or nothing — or outright falsehoods about both? Yet after two periods
of military training, he permanently turned away from the only war
and military operation he ever encountered; one which had the enthusiastic
endorsement of his fellow Austrian and German Christians. He made
this decision on the basis that participation would be a betrayal
of his Lord and could seriously jeopardize his eternal destiny.

While
prelates of distinction and theologians of renown were ceaselessly
and publicly intoning, "Heil Hitler," Jägerstätter
was literally saying, "Pfui Hitler." While self-designated
Christian "realists" were expounding their theories on
why it was necessary to cooperate with evil in order to save the
Church and the world, Jägerstätter was observing:

Are
we Christians today perhaps wiser than Christ Himself? Does anyone
really think that this massive bloodletting can possibly save
European Christianity from defeat — or bring it to a new flowering?
Did our good Saviour, whom we should always try to imitate, go
forth with His apostles against the heathens as German Christians
are doing today?

While
sophisticated religious propagandists for the government and military
were telling people that St. Paul teaches in Romans 13, that Christians
are "to obey authorities," Jägerstätter was
responding "but only to the extent that they do not order anything
evil, for we must obey God rather than men." In short almost
alone among the Christians of Austria and Germany, he pointed out
that there was an elephant in the Church!

The
actual movements of mind and heart that empowered Franz Jägerstätter
to see the obvious can never be known with certainty this side of
eternity. As would be expected, his consciousness and conscience
evolved as the crisis intensified and as the imperative to choose
became more pressing. While there is hearsay and circumstantial
evidence of various degrees of credibility concerning his internal
religious development, as well as much sheer speculation, he in
fact left only a few letters and reflections. However, from these
we can garner glimpses of what was going on inside of him during
his via dolorosa and of where he had arrived by its end.
For example, in his prison statement, composed shortly before he
was to be legally murdered, he wrote:

Just
as those who believe in National Socialism tell themselves that
their struggle is for survival, so must we, too, convince ourselves
that our struggle is for the eternal Kingdom. But with this difference:
we need no rifles or pistols for our battle, but instead, spiritual
weapons — and the foremost among these is prayer.

He
concludes this prison statement with these most soul-revealing words:

Let
us love our enemies, bless those who curse us, pray for those
who persecute us. For love will conquer and will endure for all
eternity. And happy are they who live and die in God's love.

All
Austrians and Germans, of course, would have heard the same Gospel
that Jägerstätter heard, but it seems from what his neighbors
report that he read it and re-read it, pondered it and prayed over
it as few of them did. Via this grace-saturated search for the truth
of God and God's Will through Jesus, culturally manufactured Gospel-blinders
dropped from his eyes. The elephant of evil became so visible that
he was compelled to speak the truth he saw and, if necessary, follow
Jesus to a criminal's death for acting on it. He simply could not
continue to make-believe that he didn't know what he did know.

Franz
Jägerstätter, then, is not only a Christian martyr, he
is also a chosen prophet of the The Holy One, Blessed be He. The
Hebrew prophets are not fortune tellers nor are they persons who
simply speak their own minds and conjectures. They explicitly speak
the universally applicable Word (Logos) of God to concrete situations.
By God's grace they vividly see what others profess not to see,
namely, rebellion against God in the here and now. The authentic
prophet warns of the inevitable and disastrous outcome that will
result, if present choice patterns remain unaltered. He puts on-notice
those who have been given eyes to see and minds to understand, that
it is now absolutely necessary to use those eyes and minds to see,
name and turn from an evil, which is being marketed in pseudo-Divine
packaging. In short, prophets in the Biblical sense are the ones
sent by God to try to open the eyes of the minds and the hearts
of a people who adamantly refuse to look and see that "There
is an elephant in the room and it is ruining everything."

For
Israel, the Church or the world, the consequence for dismissing
a prophet is devastation beyond all calculation, where the prayer
of people becomes "Lord, let the mountains fall on us."
The fruit of heeding a prophet, however, is life in a fullness that
cannot be conceived beforehand.

The
critical question then is this: Is Franz Jägerstätter
a true prophet or is he a false prophet? Is he a communicator of
God's Will, Way and warning to the Churches and to the world, or
is he a deluded instrument of a religious mirage? The method of
discerning this matter would be to prayerfully ponder three particulars:
First, Franz Jägerstätter's life, e.g., by way of Gordon
Zahn's book, In
Solitary Witness, or via the film The Refusal; Second,
the realities of military training and war; Third, the Jesus of
the Gospels and His Way. It might also be helpful in this day and
age of well-paid and highly funded, professional-religious propagandists
to take with eternal life and death seriousness what the Biblical
scholar, the late Rev. John L. McKenzie, presents as criteria by
which one distinguishes the true from the false prophet:

The
false prophet may be sincere, but, he is nonetheless false. Because
he lacks the prophetic insight into the moral will of Yahweh and
the reality of sin, the false prophet sees no evil where it is…(H)e
has no conception of the sweeping and rigorous justice with which
Yahweh governs. He speaks less than the truth and perverts sound
religious belief to merely national and personal good.

For
my part, I accept Jägerstätter as authentically prophetic.
Like the prophet John the Baptist he is legally beheaded for not
giving evil a religious license to masquerade as good. But, is he
a prophet only to the village of St. Radegund or to Austria during
World War II? Or, is God speaking today to the entire Church — Catholic,
Orthodox, Protestant, Evangelical — and to the world through Franz
Jägerstätter? From the eyes of God's anawim — the
brutalized and ruined victims of the present-day Masters of the
World — are there military and political phenomena currently taking
place that are every bit as monstrously heinous as anything which
Franz Jägerstätter refused to be conscripted into, every
bit as anti-Gospel as anything which he spoke against out of fidelity
to Jesus and His Way? And how about from the eyes of the average
bishop, priest, minister or Christian?

It
is incontestable that the elephant of justified Christian homicidal
violence and enmity entered the Church in the Fourth Century. Since
then it has become a permanent fixture in almost all the Churches
— First World, Second World, Third World and Fourth World. It is
equally incontrovertible that despite its monstrous, incongruous,
cruel and polluting presence within the Churches of Christianity,
it remains all but morally invisible to eyes clouded by the nurtured
deceits of nationalisms, ethnocentrisms, militarisms and the delusions
of power, prestige and prerogative — all camouflaged in religious
verbiage and display. Franz Jägerstätter's witness and
martyrdom are then a graceful, continuing down to this hour, prophetic
communication from God to all of Christianity, and indeed to the
world. His is a transparently clear witness and prophetic communicator,
to each Christian and to each Church — and to humanity — to simply
say, "No," to that which is not in conformity with the
Will and Way of God as revealed by Jesus. This communication to
the Church throughout the world today is as urgently needed as it
was to the Church in Germany in 1943 or to the Church in Rome in
416.

However,
before bishops, priests, ministers, pastors and Christians in general
will be able to say that heroic, "No," they will, like
Franz Jägerstätter, have to first choose to see. They
will have to choose to see with the eyes of their hearts, as well
as with the eyes of their minds. They will have to choose to see
that the death-dealing elephant of justified violence and enmity
has entered the Church and has been elevated by Church leaders and
Christians to an ethical status equal to or superior to Jesus and
His Way. They will have to choose to see that this Christian equivalent
of the Hebrews' golden calf has ruined and is ruining almost everything
that, the Father through Jesus, wants to do for all His infinitely
loved sons and daughters — each and every one of whom He drew out
of nothingness for the gift of Eternal Life with Him.

October
15, 2007

Fr.
Emmanuel Charles McCarthy is a priest of the Eastern Rite (Byzantine-Melkite)
of the Catholic Church. Formerly a lawyer and a university educator,
he is the founder and the original director of The Program for the
Study and Practice of Nonviolent Conflict Resolution at the University
of Notre Dame. He is also co-founder, along with Dorothy Day and
others of Pax Christi-USA. He has conducted retreats and spoken
at conferences throughout the world on the issue of the relationship
of faith and violence and the nonviolence of the Jesus. He was the
keynote speaker at the Lorraine Motel in Memphis, Tennessee for
the 25th anniversary memorial of the assassination of Rev. Martin
Luther King, Jr. there. He is author of several books, including
these: All Things Flee Thee because Thou Fleest Me: A Cry to
the Churches and their Leaders to Return to the Nonviolent Jesus
and His Nonviolent Way; Christian Just War Theory: The logic of
Deceit; August 9: The Stations of the Cross of Nonviolent Love.
He has also authored innumerable articles on the subject of violence,
religion and the nonviolent love of friends and enemies taught by
Jesus by word and deed. His audio/video series, BEHOLD THE LAMB,
is almost universally considered to be the most spiritually profound
presentation on the matter of Gospel Nonviolent Love available in
this format. BEHOLD THE LAMB is now available on
mp3CD through his website, either at the cost of $5.00 for a
disc or it can be acquired directly by an mp3 downloaded from
the website for no cost. Rev. Emmanuel Charles McCarthy was
nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize for his life’s work on behalf
of peace within people and among people. He may be reached and his
work may be accessed at the Center
for Christian Non-Violence.

Preemptive Truth

Fr. Emmanuel McCarthy — Mon, 07 May 2007 05:00:00 +0000

DIGG THIS

Like
one who…
Made such a sinner of his memory,
To credit his own life.

~ William Shakespeare
The
Tempest

The above Doonesbury
comic strip of October 19, 2002, puts the lie to ecclesiastical,
civil, commercial and media hierarchs and drum majors who try to
defend their moral rectitude in relation to their support of the
invasion of Iraq by saying, "If I had only known the truth,
I never would have supported this war." By October 19, 2002
what they insist they did not know until years later was public
knowledge — to the point that mainstream comic strips and cartoonists
could satirize the obviousness of the lies being employed to justify
turning Iraq into a killing field?

After the "overwhelming
atrocity" of the Vietnam War, I watched bishops, priests, ministers,
theologians, politicians, celebrities, academics, columnists, university
administrators, former students, TV talking-political-heads, labor
union leaders and members, judges, prosecutors, police officers,
FBI agents, ordinary people in the pews or in bleachers, as well
as institutions — who were politically and/or morally supportive
of that war or cleverly and silently indifferent to its carnage
— re-write their personal and institutional histories. This revisionist
project was undertaken to make it appear they were "really
against that awful thing" but did not feel that speaking out
publicly in opposition to it was right, since they didn't have all
the facts at the time because of government lies that confused them
or kept them completely in the dark. At the time, I had close encounters
of the intense kind with a few of these faux neo-adversaries of
the Vietnam War. I therefore know as a fact from personal interaction
with them what they really thought, what they really did and cooperated
with, and how they and their interests handsomely profited from
their choice to support or to remain silent.

This should
not be permitted to happen with the present "overwhelming atrocity."
Being dead wrong on the morality of an act of organized mass murder
should disenfranchise a person from even being considered as a candidate
to lead people in the Church, the Synagogue, the Mosque or the State
in matters of serious moral import. If a person cannot morally see
murder when it is mass murder, or worse, if he or she sees it and
justifies it or ignores it, they should be spiritually and humanly
disqualified from telling other people what to do and from being
given access to means of coercion (physical, psychological or spiritual)
by which to force other people to do what they want them to do.

But, unless
there is an active and persevering concern to keep those who, out
of culpable ignorance or moral inadequacy led others down a primrose
path to destruction on a grand scale, then in the not too distant
future one can expect to see something like Condoleezza Rice standing
beside her counterpart Henry Kissinger, Secretary of State and War
Criminal by the standards of the Charter of Nuremberg, and receiving
the Nobel Peace Prize. As of the time I am writing this, this may
sound absurd. But, as of the time of the 1972 "Christmas Bombings"
of Hanoi, there was not a sane or insane person on the planet who
could conceive the thought that Henry Kissinger, who authored the
plan to drop 40,000 tons of explosives on the City of Hanoi between
December 18 and December 30 of that year, would one day be a Nobel
Peace Prize Laureate. And much the same happened in my own Church
(Catholic) where those who saw the evil of the killing and the destruction
in Vietnam and who spoke up were by-passed and rendered nugatory
in the earthly Church for the rest of their natural lives, while
those who were gung-ho supporters or tacitly and silently complicit
were raised to positions of stature and influence in the Church.
Indeed, in an extraordinary series of ironies (I am not at all sure
that irony is the precise word needed here), one wholehearted supporter
of the war — in "the land of the burning children" (Daniel
Berrigan's phrase for Vietnam during the war) — was made Chairman
of the U.S. Bishops' Right to Life Committee whose purpose is to
protect innocent life. Another Catholic supporter of the mass murder
of Vietnamese was made an Archbishop and has become one of the preeminent
Catholic voices proclaiming that what Catholics are doing in Iraq
is in conformity with the will of God as revealed by Jesus. He has
also been assigned the responsibility of evaluating for the Church
whether Catholic Seminaries in the U.S. are teaching seminarians
what they should be teaching them.

I suspect this
same sorrowful story of the shabby quality of Christian pastoral
leadership in relationship to the Vietnam War and the War in Iraq
can be recounted in all the mainline and Evangelical Churches of
the U.S. Now, however, the sad but seemingly incontrovertible fact
is that the wheels are already in motion, at least in the U.S. Catholic
Church and more than likely in all the others, to move those, who
have morally supported this present unjust war, into the primary
positions of ecclesiastical authority and power in the future. (One
Catholic Bishop, who publicly told the people of his diocese just
before the War on Iraq began that they did not have to follow what
the Pope said about this war being unjust by Catholic Just War Standards,
has already been promoted from being the Bishop of a small diocese
to being an Archbishop of a major archdiocese.) The crumbs of war
given out for supporting a war effort are not just a few new colorful
ribbons on a general's uniform for being part of an operation that
successfully killed large numbers of human beings, nor are they
simply the unconscionable monetary profits that only the chaos of
a war economy can make available. For those who know how to play
the game, war has a big barrel of the widest variety of earthy crumbs
to offer to the go-along-get-along person in every position of upper
echelon leadership in every organization within the warring society.
All that is asked is that he or she not be too morally, intellectually,
or empathically persnickety about what they are going along with
and what they are getting along with.

Soon the chorus
of faux neo-adversaries to the War on Iraq will fill the airways
and auditoriums, the magazines and the newspapers that their constituencies
read, with their version of the ancient self-exculpating refrain:
"The government lied. This administration didn't tell us (me)
the truth regarding the reasons for going to war or what was going
on during the war." Well, "Duh!" Was the two-thousand-year-old
maxim of human wisdom that has been translated into practically
every language in the world, "The first casualty of war is
truth," unknown to these people, whether they be politicians,
press or prelates? To this day I hear and read of ex-leaders of
Church and State saying in relation to their patriotic and moral
support of the Vietnam War, "The government lied to me. If
I knew then what I know now I would not have supported it."
Well, at least by 1966 anyone in power in Church or State, who wanted
to know, could have known the evil that was occurring in Vietnam
under U.S. auspices. In 1966 among many, many other public revelations
in books, magazines, newspapers and on TV, a highly publicized war
crimes trial of Lyndon Johnson took place in Europe, which laid
out in detail abominations happening in Vietnam and the fact that
it was in blatant contravention of the Nuremberg Charter and International
Law. By 1966 thousands of people were demonstrating in the streets,
universities and elsewhere. Archbishop Fulton J. Sheen, the most
noted and respected Catholic Bishop in the U.S. and an anti-communist
conservative of the first rank, said the war was unjust according
to Catholic Just War Norms and that immediate withdrawal was morally
mandated. For people in positions of power and authority in Church,
Synagogue, Mosque or State in 1968, 69, 70, 71, 72, 73 and after,
to be morally justifying and supporting the Vietnam War and subsequently
pleading they were lied to by the government as the reason for their
support is disingenuous.

But, it is
about to happen again — except it will be more morally phony this
time than then. Remember, on February 15, 2003 — a month before
the U.S.-led invasion began on March 19, 2003 — millions of people
in 80 countries and in more than 600 urban communities around the
world publicly demonstrated to denounce preparations for this unjust
war and to expose the reasons being given for the invasion as outright
falsehoods. The chief weapons inspector for the U.N., Hans Blix,
was all over the television telling the world that no weapons of
mass destruction had been found, let alone WMDs capable of imminent
deployment. It borders on the radically improbable that by March
19, 2003 any leader who had the brains, experience and savvy to
rise to the position of being head of a major organization, whether
it be a religious one, a governmental one or a commercial one, could
believe that the reasons given by the Bush administration for going
to war were genuinely valid. Yet, religious, governmental and commercial
leadership generally did not protest the coming mass murder of the
innocent. Why? The reasons are multiple but all have to do with
personal and institutional self-interests overriding all other concerns
— even the unjustified destruction and maiming of hundreds of thousands
of human beings.

So whether
it is in your Church or your government, don't let the leadership
play you for the fool, by portraying themselves as political rubes,
who are "shocked, just shocked" because they were taken-in
by the unscrupulous political operatives in the Bush administration
who lied to them about the administration's war. Don't let them
tell you behind serious and somber faces that they would have declared
the war unjust (Church) or voted against it (State) if they had
only known at the time that there were no WMDs that were being readied
for imminent deployment. Such people, whether in Church or in government
— but most especially in Church — do not deserve to be put in or
to be retained in positions of power, authority and moral leadership.
They will probably graciously, implicitly respond, if requested
to resign their offices because of gross moral negligence or worse,
as George Bush and Richard Cheney graciously, implicitly respond
when caught in murderous lies: "We've got the power and you
can't take it from us, so get lost!" So be it.

However you
will have maintained your human and Christian integrity by not becoming
part of their bloody moral sham of "If only I had known…";
a sham that is a cloaking devise for hiding human beings, whose
moral standards allow them to approve and/or to ignore mass murder
when it is in their interests to do so. Need I say that in the Catholic,
Orthodox and Protestant Churches, it has been the laity's willingness
to silently acquiesce in their leaders manifesting such a lax conscience
that has been an essential piece in the process that has permitted
Constantinian Christianity, with all its blatant contradictions
of the teachings of Jesus, to survive for 1700 years. Silence, every
bit as much as speech, is a choice of the will. Therefore, it also
can be untruthful, unloving, unChristlike and evil.

May
7, 2007

Fr.
Emmanuel Charles McCarthy is a priest of the Eastern Rite (Byzantine-Melkite)
of the Catholic Church. Formerly a lawyer and a university educator,
he is the founder and the original director of The Program for the
Study and Practice of Nonviolent Conflict Resolution at the University
of Notre Dame. He is also co-founder, along with Dorothy Day and
others of Pax Christi-USA. He has conducted retreats and spoken
at conferences throughout the world on the issue of the relationship
of faith and violence and the nonviolence of the Jesus. He was the
keynote speaker at the Lorraine Motel in Memphis, Tennessee for
the 25th anniversary memorial of the assassination of Rev. Martin
Luther King, Jr. there. He is author of several books, including
these: All Things Flee Thee because Thou Fleest Me: A Cry to
the Churches and their Leaders to Return to the Nonviolent Jesus
and His Nonviolent Way; Christian Just War Theory: The logic of
Deceit; August 9: The Stations of the Cross of Nonviolent Love.
He has also authored innumerable articles on the subject of violence,
religion and the nonviolent love of friends and enemies taught by
Jesus by word and deed. His audio/video series, BEHOLD THE LAMB,
is almost universally considered to be the most spiritually profound
presentation on the matter of Gospel Nonviolent Love available in
this format. BEHOLD THE LAMB is now available on
mp3CD through his website, either at the cost of $5.00 for a
disc or it can be acquired directly by an mp3 downloaded from
the website for no cost. Rev. Emmanuel Charles McCarthy was
nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize for his life’s work on behalf
of peace within people and among people. He may be reached and his
work may be accessed at the Center
for Christian Non-Violence.

Revolution – Without Making Noise

Fr. Emmanuel McCarthy — Fri, 20 Apr 2007 05:00:00 +0000

DIGG THIS

Many of you
may have already read the
address given on the Sunday before the beginning of Lent — the
time set aside for repentance and changes of mind and heart — by
Pope Benedict XVI. If not, let me exhort you to read it and ponder
it — and then distribute it. This is one superbly crafted statement
on the importance, indeed the centrality, of Jesus' teaching of
nonviolent love of friends and enemies, and on this being "the
nucleus of the Christian revolution" and hence axial to a correct
understanding of the Gospel. For those who spend the time with it
that it deserves, it will be an illumination of a truth hidden or
obscured, perhaps since their Baptism.

Remember this
Pope is considered by the consensus of his academic colleagues,
regardless of their individual Christian denomination, an eminent
theological scholar. There are no shallow or throwaway lines in
this address. Consider his words on how nonviolent Christlike love
of friends and enemies operates: "The revolution of love…which
changes the world without making noise." At one level this
could be read, and properly so, that the Gospel revolution of Christlike
nonviolence and love of enemies changes the world without the noise
of war or violent revolution — both of which are always suffused
with the noise of weapons, the noise of the herd, the noise of hate,
the noise of revenge, the noise of self-righteousness, the noise
of propaganda, the noise that drowns out dialogue, the noise that
overrides conscience, the noise that represses empathy, the noise
that is not human language as the carrier of truth but is rather
loutish blarings as the carrier of the spirit of destruction and
desolation. Such a reading of what the Pope said would be reasonable.

But, "The
revolution of love…which changes the world without making noise,"
reaches infinitely beyond this interpretation. It proceeds to the
very core of the revolution Jesus Christ started and offers us the
opportunity to participate in and continue, that is, the revolution
that Pope Benedict says "is not afraid to confront evil with
the weapons of love and truth alone." In the context of Benedict's
address the words, "The revolution of love…which changes
the world without making noise," is a direct and immediate
reference to the counter-violence, revolutionary Hymn of the Suffering
Servant, the ebed Yahweh — the summit of salvific nonviolent
love in Hebrew Scripture. Its opening stanza is

Here is my
servant whom I uphold,
my chosen one with whom I am pleased,
Upon whom I have put my spirit;
he shall bring forth righteousness to the nations,
Not crying out, nor shouting,
not making his voice heard in the streets.

A bruised
reed he shall not break,
and a smoldering wick he shall not quench,
Until he established righteousness on earth;
the coastlands will wait for his teaching.

Isaiah
42:1–4

To underline
and elaborate on what I am saying, let me here present excerpts
on the Hymn of the Suffering Servant (Isaiah 42:1–4; 49:1–6; 50:4–9;
52:13–53:12) and on its relation to the New Testament from the writings
of another world renowned Catholic intellectual, the Biblical scholar,
the late Rev. John L. McKenzie:

"The
number of allusions to this passage (Suffering Servant) in the
New Testament is difficult to count. But they are enough to establish
the thesis that this passage had a central position in the proclamation
of Jesus. The early Church attributed the proclamation of this
theme to Jesus himself and no convincing reason has been urged
to show that it should be attributed to another. It is as deeply
embedded in the Gospels as anything else; to repeat what I have
said in other connections, if this theme is not the work of Jesus
himself then we know nothing of his words or his person."

"It
is remarkable that the words at the baptism of Jesus (Mt 3:17;
Mk 1:11; Lk 3:22) are almost an exact quotation of Isaiah 42:1."

"It
remains true that Jesus demands that his disciples identify themselves
with him as the Suffering Servant."

"Jesus
suffered; but there is nothing in the Gospels which indicates
that he liked it."

"Mere
cultivation of pain does not assure identity with Jesus the Suffering
Servant. Mere animal pain does not save. Identity with Jesus suffering
is first of all identity with Jesus loving, to put it in a word.

"As
Suffering Servant Jesus experienced nothing, we have noticed,
which is not part of the human condition. And he thus placed his
achievement within the reach of all people."

"The
Suffering Servant theme is the peak of faith in the Old Testament,
the supreme affirmation of God's power. When we meet the theme
of the Suffering Servant as proclaimed in the New Testament, we
are at the very center of the Christian revolution."

Lest some of
my non-Catholic readers feel a certain discomfort with all this
scholarly focus on the Pope and the writings of a Catholic Biblical
scholar, let me offer some thoughts on the same subject from a Protestant
Biblical scholar every bit the academic equal to Benedict XVI and
John L. McKenzie, namely, Oscar Cullmann:

"We
come straight to the heart of New Testament Christology with the
title Suffering Servant, ebed Yahweh, although scholars have not
usually given it its proper place."

"At
what point in his earthly life did Jesus reach the consciousness
that he had to realize the task of the Suffering Servant? The
key to the solution of this problem is the voice from heaven,
which Jesus hears when he is baptized by John in the Jordan (Mk
1:11 and parallel passages). The saying, u2018Thou art my beloved
Son; with thee I am well pleased,' is a quotation from Isaiah
42:1. In the Old Testament these words are addressed to the Suffering
Servant; indeed they are the introduction to the u2018ebed Yahweh'
hymn. We may consider it certain that the words of the voice from
heaven (to Jesus at his baptism) are a citation of this passage
in Isaiah. He realized at the time of his baptism that he was
the u2018ebed Yahweh,' the Suffering Servant," and from that
time on the way he should go was clear to him. We conclude that
the concept of Jesus as the u2018ebed Yahweh,' the Suffering Servant,
has its origin with Jesus himself."

The purpose
of these quoted scholarly reflections on the Old Testament theme
of the Suffering Servant and how it intersects with the New Testament
proclamation of Jesus is to try to make visible the depth of truth
being presented here by Benedict. It is also to try to insure that
the spiritual and moral momentousness of what he is stating regarding
Gospel nonviolence and love of enemies is not recklessly brushed-off
by Christians with the habitual, unthinking and unserious evasive
flippancy: "Oh that's nice, but that stuff is just so much
spiritual cotton-candy, a bit of uplifting idealistic, unrealistic,
Utopian piety." Let me assure my readers, first, that a full
year's university theology course at the doctoral level could be
built around this address. Secondly, if this is an easily dismissible
piece of sugary theological fluff, it is the first such piece that
the former Cardinal Joseph Ratszinger, 25 year Prefect of the Congregation
of Doctrine and Faith, has presented for public consumption in the
last four decades!

Do give this
address thought and prayer. In a world where violence and enmity
are the tools of choice for bringing in a "better tomorrow
and brighter future," in a world where these tools of choice
have been so technologically honed that a few people can generate,
almost instantaneously, levels of fear, hate, destruction and desolation
that in the past would have required tens or hundreds of thousands
of people years to effect, in a world where the production and sale
of these tools is the most lucrative business on the planet, and
finally in a world where practically all of this is being done with
"God" as its source and/or supporter — is it not time
for Christians and their Churches to teach what Jesus taught and
to struggle to live what Jesus lived in relation to violence and
enmity? Has not the fullness of time arrived for one of the world's
major religions to say an absolute, universal and never-ending,
"No," to divinely justified violence and enmity, because
violence and enmity are de facto in radical opposition to
the Way and the Will and the Reality of God — because they are hostile
to the Holy? Is it not time for Christians and their Churches to
choose as their "way of being, the attitude of one who is convinced
of God's love and power, who is not afraid to confront evil with
the weapons of love and truth alone?" Why should Christian
and their Churches be the first major world religion to universally
witness to this truth about God and His Way by choosing this "way
of being"? Why — because their Founder, Lord and Savior so
witnessed to this truth about God and God's Way by this "way
of being." And — because he explicitly chose them to do likewise.

Please, do
give this presentation by Benedict XVI to your pastor, to the people
of your parish (not only the peace and justice folks), to your students,
to your family, to your friends, etc. Dialogue and pray about its
content with them. If you are not a Catholic and see the Pope as
simply a Christian man, then read, study and ponder what he is saying
here, asking yourself but one question before God: "Is he stating
in this address the truth that Jesus Christ taught by word and by
deed, and that He commanded His disciples to observe?" (Mt
28:20)

April
20, 2007

Fr.
Emmanuel Charles McCarthy is a priest of the Eastern Rite (Byzantine-Melkite)
of the Catholic Church. Formerly a lawyer and a university educator,
he is the founder and the original director of The Program for the
Study and Practice of Nonviolent Conflict Resolution at the University
of Notre Dame. He is also co-founder, along with Dorothy Day and
others of Pax Christi-USA. He has conducted retreats and spoken
at conferences throughout the world on the issue of the relationship
of faith and violence and the nonviolence of the Jesus. He was the
keynote speaker at the Lorraine Motel in Memphis, Tennessee for
the 25th anniversary memorial of the assassination of Rev. Martin
Luther King, Jr. there. He is author of several books, including
these: All Things Flee Thee because Thou Fleest Me: A Cry to
the Churches and their Leaders to Return to the Nonviolent Jesus
and His Nonviolent Way; Christian Just War Theory: The logic of
Deceit; August 9: The Stations of the Cross of Nonviolent Love.
He has also authored innumerable articles on the subject of violence,
religion and the nonviolent love of friends and enemies taught by
Jesus by word and deed. His audio/video series, BEHOLD THE LAMB,
is almost universally considered to be the most spiritually profound
presentation on the matter of Gospel Nonviolent Love available in
this format. BEHOLD THE LAMB is now available on
mp3CD through his website, either at the cost of $5.00 for a
disc or it can be acquired directly by an mp3 downloaded from
the website for no cost. Rev. Emmanuel Charles McCarthy was
nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize for his life’s work on behalf
of peace within people and among people. He may be reached and his
work may be accessed at the Center
for Christian Non-Violence.

A Military Chaplain Repents

Fr. Emmanuel McCarthy — Fri, 13 Apr 2007 05:00:00 +0000

DIGG THIS

In
August of 1945 Rev. George B. Zabelka, a Catholic chaplain with
the U.S. Army Air Force, was stationed on Tinian Island in the South
Pacific. He was assigned to serve the Catholics of the 509th Composite
Group. The 509th Composite Group was the Atomic Bomb Group. He served
as a priest for those who dropped the atomic bombs on Hiroshima
and Nagasaki. After 22 years as a military chaplain he retired as
a Lieutenant Colonel. What follows is an interview with him by Rev.
Emmanuel Charles McCarthy. Rev. George B. Zabelka went to meet his
God on April 11, 1992.

Fr.
McCarthy: Father Zabelka, what is your relationship to the atomic
bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August, 1945?

Fr.
Zabelka: During the summer of 1945, July, August and September,
I was assigned as Catholic chaplain to the 509th Composite Group
on Tinian Island. The 509th was the Atomic Bomb Group.

Q: What
were your duties in relationship to these men?

Zabelka:
The usual. I said Mass on Sunday and during the week. Heard
confessions. Talked with the boys, etc. Nothing significantly different
from what any other chaplain did during the war.

Q:
Did you know that the 509th was preparing to drop an atomic
bomb?

Zabelka:
No. We knew that they were preparing to drop a bomb substantially
different from and more powerful than even the "blockbusters"
used over Europe, but we never called it an atomic bomb and never
really knew what it was before August 6, 1945. Before that time
we just referred to it as the "gimmick" bomb.

Q:
So since you did not know that an atomic bomb was going to be
dropped you had no reason to counsel the men in private or preach
in public about the morality of such a bombing?

Zabelka:
Well, that is true enough; I never did speak against it, nor
could I have spoken against it since I, like practically everyone
else on Tinian, was ignorant of what was being prepared. And I guess
I will go to my God with that as my defense. But on Judgment Day
I think I am going to need to seek more mercy than justice in this
matter.

Q: Why?
God certainly could not have expected you to act on ideas that had
never entered your mind.

Zabelka:
As a Catholic priest my task was to keep my people, wherever
they were, close to the mind and heart of Christ. As a military
chaplain I was to try to see that the boys conducted themselves
according to the teachings of the Catholic Church and Christ on
war. When I look back I am not sure I did either of these things
very well.

Q: Why
do you think that?

Zabelka:
What I do not mean to say is that I feel myself to have been
remiss in any duties that were expected of me as a chaplain. I saw
that the Mass and the sacraments were available as best I could.
I even went out and earned paratrooper wings in order to do my job
better. Nor did I fail to teach and preach what the Church expected
me to teach and preach — and I don't mean by this that I just talked
to the boys about their sexual lives. I and most chaplains were
quite clear and outspoken on such matters as not killing and torturing
prisoners. But there were other areas where things were not said
quite so clearly.

Q: For
example?

Zabelka:
The destruction of civilians in war was always forbidden by
the Church, and if a soldier came to me and asked if he could put
a bullet through a child's head, I would have told him absolutely
not. That would be mortally sinful. But in 1945 Tinian Island was
the largest airfield in the world. Three planes a minute would take
off from it around the clock. Many of these planes went to Japan
with the express purpose of killing not one child or one civilian
but of slaughtering hundreds and thousands of children and civilians
— and I said nothing.

Q: Why
not? You certainly knew civilians were being destroyed by the thousands
in these raids, didn't you?

Zabelka:
Oh, indeed I did know, and I knew with a clarity that few others
could have had.

Q: What
do you mean?

Zabelka:
As a chaplain I often had to enter the world of the boys who
were losing their minds because of something they did in war. I
remember one young man who was engaged in the bombings of the cities
of Japan. He was in the hospital on Tinian Island on the verge of
a complete mental collapse.

He
told me that he had been on a low-level bombing mission, flying
right down one of the main streets of the city, when straight ahead
of him appeared a little boy, in the middle of the street, looking
up at the plane in a childlike wonder. The man knew that in a few
seconds the child would be burned to death by napalm which had already
been released.

Yes, I knew
civilians were being destroyed, and knew it perhaps in a way others
didn't. Yet I never preached a single sermon against killing civilians
to men who were doing it.

Q: Again,
why not?

Zabelka:
Because I was "brainwashed"! It never entered my mind
to publicly protest the consequences of these massive air raids.
I was told it was necessary; told openly by the military and told
implicitly by my Church's leadership. To the best of my knowledge
no American cardinals or bishops were opposing these mass air raids.
Silence in such matters, especially by a public body like the American
bishops, is a stamp of approval.

The
whole structure of the secular, religious, and military society
told me clearly that it was all right to "let the Japs have
it." God was on the side of my country. The Japanese were the
enemy, and I was absolutely certain of my country's and Church's
teaching about enemies; no erudite theological text was necessary
to tell me. The day-in-day-out operation of the state and the Church
between 1940 and 1945 spoke more clearly about Christian attitudes
towards enemies and war than St. Augustine or St. Thomas Aquinas
ever could.

I
was certain that this mass destruction was right, certain to the
point that the question of its morality never seriously entered
my mind. I was "brainwashed" not by force or torture but
by my Church's silence and wholehearted cooperation in thousands
of little ways with the country's war machine. Why, after
I finished chaplaincy school at Harvard I had my military chalice
officially blessed by the then Bishop Cushing of Boston. How much
more clearly could the message be given? Indeed, I was "brainwashed"!

Q:
So you feel that because you did not protest the morality of
the bombing of other cities with their civilian populations, that
somehow you are morally responsible for the dropping of the atomic
bomb?

Zabelka:
The facts are that seventy-five thousand people were burned
to death in one evening of fire bombing over Tokyo. Hundreds of
thousands were destroyed in Dresden, Hamburg, and Coventry by aerial
bombing. The fact that forty-five thousand human beings were killed
by one bomb over Nagasaki was new only to the extent that it was
one bomb that did it.

To
fail to speak to the utter moral corruption of the mass destruction
of civilians was to fail as a Christian and a priest as I see it.
Hiroshima and Nagasaki happened in and to a world and a Christian
Church that had asked for it — that had prepared the moral consciousness
of humanity to do and to justify the unthinkable. I am sure there
are Church documents around someplace bemoaning civilian deaths
in modern war, and I am sure those in power in the church will drag
them out to show that it was giving moral leadership during World
War II to its membership.

Well,
I was there, and I'll tell you that the operational moral atmosphere
in the Church in relation to mass bombing of enemy civilians was
totally indifferent, silent, and corrupt at best — at worst it was
religiously supportive of these activities by blessing those who
did them.

I
say all this not to pass judgment on others, for I do not know their
souls then or now. I say all this as one who was part of the so-called
Christian leadership of the time. So you see, that is why I am not
going to the day of judgment looking for justice in this matter.
Mercy is my salvation.

Q: You
said the atomic bombing of Nagasaki happened to a Church that "had
asked for it." What do you mean by that?

Zabelka:
For the first three centuries, the three centuries closest to
Christ, the Church was a pacifist Church. With Constantine the church
accepted the pagan Roman ethic of a just war and slowly began to
involve its membership in mass slaughter, first for the state and
later for the faith.

Catholics,
Orthodox, and Protestants, whatever other differences they may have
had on theological esoterica, all agreed that Jesus' clear and unambiguous
teaching on the rejection of violence and on love of enemies was
not to be taken seriously. And so each of the major branches of
Christianity by different theological methods modified our Lord's
teaching in these matters until all three were able to do what Jesus
rejected, that is, take an eye for an eye, slaughter, maim, torture.

It
seems a "sign" to me that seventeen hundred years of Christian
terror and slaughter should arrive at August 9, 1945 when Catholics
dropped the A-Bomb on top of the largest and first Catholic city
in Japan. One would have thought that I, as a Catholic priest, would
have spoken out against the atomic bombing of nuns. (Three orders
of Catholic sisters were destroyed in Nagasaki that day.) One would
have thought that I would have suggested that as a minimal standard
of Catholic morality, Catholics shouldn't bomb Catholic children.
I didn't.

I,
like that Catholic pilot of the Nagasaki plane, was heir to a Christianity
that had for seventeen hundred years engaged in revenge, murder,
torture, the pursuit of power and prerogative and violence, all
in the name of our Lord.

I
walked through the ruins of Nagasaki right after the war and visited
the place where once stood the Urakami Cathedral. I picked up a
piece of a censer from the rubble. When I look at it today I pray
God forgives us for how we have distorted Christ's teaching and
destroyed His world by the distortion of that teaching. I was the
Catholic chaplain who was there when this grotesque process, which
began with Constantine, reached its lowest point — so far.

Q:
What do you mean by "so far"?

Zabelka:
Briefly, what I mean is that I do not see that the moral climate
in relation to war inside or outside the Church has dramatically
changed much since 1945. The mainline Christian Churches still teach
something that Christ never taught or even hinted at, namely the
Just War Theory, a theory that to me has been completely discredited
theologically, historically, and psychologically.

So
as I see it, until the various churches within Christianity repent
and begin to proclaim by word and deed what Jesus proclaimed in
relation to violence and enemies, there is no hope for anything
other than ever-escalating violence and destruction.

Until
membership in the Church means that a Christian chooses not to engage
in violence for any reason and instead chooses to love, pray for,
help, and forgive all enemies; until membership in the Church means
that Christians may not be members of any military, American, Polish,
Russian, English, Irish, et al.; until membership in the Church
means that the Christian cannot pay taxes for others to kill others;
and until the Church says these things in a fashion which the simplest
soul could understand — until that time humanity can only look forward
to more dark nights of slaughter on a scale unknown in history.
Unless the Church unswervingly and unambiguously teaches what Jesus
teaches on this matter it will not be the divine leaven in the human
dough that it was meant to be.

"The
choice is between nonviolence or nonexistence," as Martin Luther
King, Jr. said, and he was not, and I am not, speaking figuratively.
It is about time for the Church and its leadership in all denominations
to get down on its knees and repent of this misrepresentation of
Christ's words.

Communion
with Christ cannot be established on disobedience to His clearest
teachings. Jesus authorized none of His followers to substitute
violence for love; not me, not you, not Jimmy Carter, not the pope,
not a Vatican council, nor even an ecumenical council.

Q:
Father Zabelka, what kinds of immediate steps do you think the
church should take in order to become the "divine leaven in
the human dough"?

Zabelka:
Step one should be that Christians the world over should be
taught that Christ's teaching to love their enemies is not optional.
I've been in many parishes in my life, and I have found none where
the congregation explicitly is called upon regularly to pray for
its enemies. I think this is essential.

I
offer you step two at the risk of being considered hopelessly out
of touch with reality. I would like to suggest that there is an
immediate need to call an ecumenical council for the specific purpose
of clearly declaring that war is totally incompatible with Jesus'
teaching and that Christians cannot and will not engage in or pay
for it from this point in history on. This would have the effect
of putting all nations on this planet on notice that from now on
they are going to have to conduct their mutual slaughter without
Christian support — physical, financial, or spiritual.

I
am sure there are other issues which Catholics or Orthodox or Protestants
would like to confront in an ecumenical council instead of facing
up to the hard teachings of Christ in relationship to violence and
enemies. But it seems to me that issues like the meaning of the
primacy of Peter are nowhere near as pressing or as destructive
of Church credibility and God's world as is the problem of continued
Christian participation in and justification of violence and slaughter.
I think the Church's continued failure to speak clearly Jesus' teachings
is daily undermining its credibility and authority in all other
areas.

Q:
Do you think there is the slightest chance that the various
branches of Christianity would come together in an ecumenical council
for the purpose of declaring war and violence totally unacceptable
activities for Christians under all circumstances?

Zabelka:
Remember, I prefaced my suggestion of an ecumenical council
by saying that I risked being considered hopelessly out of touch
with reality. On the other hand, what is impossible for men and
women is quite possible for God if people will only use their freedom
to cooperate a little.

Who
knows what could happen if the Pope, the Patriarch of Constantinople,
and the President of the World Council of Churches called with one
voice for such a council? One thing I am sure of is that our Lord
would be very happy if His Church were again unequivocally teaching
what He unequivocally taught on the subject of violence.

Q:
Fr. Zabelka, why after 39 years did you now decide to return
to Japan and join in a peace pilgrimage that will culminate for
you in Hiroshima on August 6 and Nagasaki on August 9, 1984?

Zabelka:
I am old now. Soon I will go to meet my God. When the invitation
came to join this peace pilgrimage, I felt that God had offered
me "a great grace," as we used to say. So, I accepted.

Q:
What do you mean, God has offered you "a great grace"
by an invitation to join a peace walk?

Zabelka:
I do not mean to quibble about words but I did not experience
the invitation as a request to join a peace walk. The invitation
entered into my soul as "pilgrimage" not "walk."
A pilgrimage is a journey one undertakes to holy places for holy
reasons.

Q:
But what holy places are you going to visit in Japan? My understanding
was that you were going to Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

Zabelka:
Calvary, the place where Christ suffered and died at the hands
of the civil and religious politicians of His day, is the holiest
shrine in Christianity. Hiroshima and Nagasaki are Calvaries. For
here, Christ in the bodies of the "least" was again tortured
and put to death hundreds of thousands of times over by exactly
the same dark and deceitful spirit of organized lovelessness that
roamed Jerusalem two thousand years ago.

Q: But
Calvary is where Christ suffered. He did not suffer in Hiroshima
or Nagasaki.

Zabelka:
God, Christ, lives in every human being. Our Lord tells us that
what is done to the "least" is in fact now done to Him
(Mt 25). I believe that! That is the only kind of God that I could
adore and love, a God who lives in human history and suffers with
people. I could only fear a god that sat as a depersonalized king
above the anguish of humanity. This is part of what the Incarnation
is all about. Christ suffers and dies at Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
Therefore to condone or support war is to condone or support the
call to "Crucify Him." To kill in war is, in fact, to
be a "Christ-killer." I'm sorry I can say nothing
else — if Calvary is a holy place, Hiroshima and Nagasaki are holy
places.

Q: You
said that a pilgrimage must not only be to a holy place but for
holy reasons. What are your reasons?

Zabelka:
Peace! Peace is the fruit of communion with God. It is obvious
to me that I, as well as humanity in general, are not in full communion
with God, that we need to be reconciled with God. Jesus tells us
that the condition now for reconciliation with God is reconciliation
of human beings with each other. The Christian is explicitly called
to be an agent of reconciliation. The first step in the reconciliation
process is repentance for one's sins, for what one has
done to separate people from each other and thereby separate humanity
from God. The reason I am going to Hiroshima and Nagasaki is to
repent and to ask the forgiveness of those living and dead whom
I have damaged by my failure to love Christically.

Q: But
you were not actually on the planes that dropped the atomic bombs
on those cities, were you?

Zabelka:
No, but that is irrelevant moral thinking in the 20th century.
Modern war and oppression are carried out by a long chain of individuals,
each doing his or her job meticulously while simultaneously refusing
to look at the end results of his or her work. There is no state
or corporate evil that is not the result of personal sinfulness.
In August of 1945, I, as a Christian and as a priest, served not
as an agent of reconciliation but as an instrument of retaliation,
revenge and homicide. My explicit and tacit approval of what was
being done on Tinian Island that summer was clearly visible for
anyone to see. Beyond this, I was the last possible official spokesman
for the Church before the fire of hell was let loose on Hiroshima
on the Feast of the Transfiguration 1945 — and I said nothing.
I was the officially designated Catholic priest who by silence
did his priestly patriotic duty and chose nationalism over Catholicism,
Caesar over Christ, as the "Bockscar," manned by Christians
in my care, took off to evaporate the oldest and largest Christian
community in Japan — Nagasaki. No, the fact that I was not physically
on the planes is morally irrelevant. I played an important and necessary
role in this sacrilege — and I played it meticulously. I am as responsible
as the soldier who stuck the spear in the side of Christ on Calvary.
I come to Hiroshima and Nagasaki to repent and to ask forgiveness
from the Japanese people, from my faith community at Nagasaki and
from God.

Q:
Isn't it a bit of rhetorical exaggeration to say you were a
priest that played a role in a sacrilege?

Zabelka:
Not at all. I mean it literally. If someone walks into a church
and destroys the altar and statues, etc., it is called a sacrilege.
A sacrilege is the desecration of what is considered holy. But for
the Christian, the ultimate place of the holy is the human person.
We are the "temples of the Holy Spirit." Therefore, every
act of violence toward a human being is an act of desecration of
the temple of God in this world. War for the Christian is always
sacrilege. There is no such absurdity as a Christian ethic of justified
sacrilege. I am a priest who played a role in a sacrilege and that
must be said by me and others like me without equivocation or else
the future is a nightmare.

Q:
What do you mean that the future is a nightmare unless you and
others like you acknowledge your role in the sacrilege of war?

Zabelka:
Look, I am a Catholic priest. In August of 1945, I did not say
to the boys on Tinian, "You cannot follow Christ and drop those
bombs." But this same failure on the part of priests, pastors
and bishops over the past 1700 years is, I believe, what is significantly
responsible for Hiroshima and Nagasaki and for the seemingly unceasing
"Christian" blood-letting around the globe. It seems to
me that Christians have been slaughtering each other, as well as
non-Christians, for the past 1700 years, in large part because their
priests, pastors and bishops have simply not told them that violence
and homicide are incompatible with the teachings of Jesus. On the
contrary, I would say that the average priest, pastor and bishop
communicates that violence and homicide can be compatible with Jesus.
After all, a machine gun is no more lethal than a broomstick without
the will to kill and the fact is that we so-called Christian "leaders"
by commission and omission, for 1700 years, have been guilty of
supplying a significant piece of the motivational apparatus necessary
to execute the mass slaughter of war. Let's be honest, to justify
an evil is to promote an evil. And let's face it, we priests, pastors
and bishops have been justifying the butchery of war in the name
of Christ for a long time. I might also add here that where more
is required priestly silence is sinful, because silence gives consent
and consent motivates toward the evil.

Q:
What do you think must be done to begin to address this situation,
Father Zabelka?

Zabelka:
Unless the legitimate successors to the apostles proclaim fearlessly
what the apostles proclaimed fearlessly, that is, that Christ's
teachings are teachings of nonviolent love and mercy — and unless
they unequivocally repent of their failure and the failure of their
predecessors to explicitly teach this, then a long night of high-tech
terror, torture and desolation is assured all humanity — first world,
third world, East and West. What has to be done is that we Christian
"leaders" have to admit openly that we have been engaged
in propagating a bloody moral blunder for the last 1700 years: the
Just War Theory.

Q:
Specifically, how does your pilgrimage to Japan for this August
6th and 9th in1984 respond to this need?

Zabelka:
If my priestly silence spoke for the Church in 1945 to the fellows
on Tinian, perhaps my priestly request for forgiveness at Hiroshima
and Nagasaki can speak for the Church in 1984. You see, I want to
expose the lie of "Christian" war. The lie I fell for
and blessed. I want to expose the lie of killing as a Christian
social method, the lie of disposable people, the lie of Christian
liturgy in the service of the homicidal gods of nationalism and
militarism, the lie of nuclear security. I want to expose it by
looking into the faces of the hibaksha and saying, "Brother,
forgive me for bringing you death instead of the fullness of life.
Sister, pardon me for bringing you misery instead of mercy. I and
my Church have sinned against you and God." It is hope in the
Power of that small moment of truth, repentance and reconciliation
that moves me to pilgrimage East by the grace of God.

A
one hour British documentary on Rev. George Zabelka, THE RELUCTANT
PROPHET, is available in a DVD or VHS format from the Center
for Christian Nonviolence.

April
13, 2007

Fr.
Emmanuel Charles McCarthy is a priest of the Eastern Rite (Byzantine-Melkite)
of the Catholic Church. Formerly a lawyer and a university educator,
he is the founder and the original director of The Program for the
Study and Practice of Nonviolent Conflict Resolution at the University
of Notre Dame. He is also co-founder, along with Dorothy Day and
others of Pax Christi-USA. He has conducted retreats and spoken
at conferences throughout the world on the issue of the relationship
of faith and violence and the nonviolence of the Jesus. He was the
keynote speaker at the Lorraine Motel in Memphis, Tennessee for
the 25th anniversary memorial of the assassination of Rev. Martin
Luther King, Jr. there. He is author of several books, including
these: All Things Flee Thee because Thou Fleest Me: A Cry to
the Churches and their Leaders to Return to the Nonviolent Jesus
and His Nonviolent Way; Christian Just War Theory: The logic of
Deceit; August 9: The Stations of the Cross of Nonviolent Love.
He has also authored innumerable articles on the subject of violence,
religion and the nonviolent love of friends and enemies taught by
Jesus by word and deed. His audio/video series, BEHOLD THE LAMB,
is almost universally considered to be the most spiritually profound
presentation on the matter of Gospel Nonviolent Love available in
this format. BEHOLD THE LAMB is now available on
mp3CD through his website, either at the cost of $5.00 for a
disc or it can be acquired directly by an mp3 downloaded from
the website for no cost. Rev. Emmanuel Charles McCarthy was
nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize for his life’s work on behalf
of peace within people and among people. He may be reached and his
work may be accessed at the Center
for Christian Non-Violence.

Quo Vadis, Domine?

Fr. Emmanuel McCarthy — Sat, 06 Jan 2007 06:00:00 +0000

DIGG THIS

Quo Vadis
Domine
is the name of my favorite church in Rome. It lies just outside
the gates of my favorite place in Rome, the Callistus Catacombs.
It is a tiny, old church, easily missed by tourists looking for
"the grandeur that was Rome." It commemorates the time
in the life of Christianity when St. Peter decides to remain in
Rome, rather than go to another city in order to avoid persecution
and death. While the historical environment of that time (54–68
AD) is well known, the precise historical details of Peter's choice
are not. The spiritual drama of Peter's decision, however, has been
illuminated and immortalized by the Nobel Prize Laureate in Literature,
Henryk Sienkiewicz, in his 1905 masterpiece Quo
Vadis.

At the climactic
moment of the novel, Peter is leaving Rome with his friend, Nazarius,
during the height of Nero's persecution of Christians. He meets
the risen Jesus on the outskirts of the city. Jesus, however, is
walking into, not out of, Rome:

The traveling
staff fell out of Peter's hand. His eyes were fixed immovably
ahead. His lips were open, and his face reflected unbelievable
surprise, immense joy, and rapturous exaltation.

Suddenly
he threw himself on his knees, his arms lifted upward and stretched
to the light, and his lips cried out: "Christ! O Christ!"
His head beat against the dust as if he were kissing the feet
of someone only he could see. Then there was silence.

"Quo
vadis, Domine?" his voice asked at last, punctured by his
sobbing. "Where are you going, Lord?"

Nazarius
heard no answer. But a voice of ineffable sweetness and abundant
sorrow rang in Peter's ears, "When you abandon my people,"
he heard, "I must go to Rome to be crucified once more."

The apostle
lay still and silent with his face pressed into the dust. Nazarius
thought he had either died or fainted, but he rose at last, picked
up his pilgrim's staff, and turned again toward the seven hills.

"Quo
vadis, domine?" the boy asked like an echo of the apostle's
cry.

"To
Rome," Peter murmured.

Consistency

Before people
take seriously a proclamation of someone who asks a sacrifice from
them, common sense demands that they see a consistency between the
words and deeds of that person. Imagine if Jesus, after having taught,
"Love your enemies," for three years, rather than saying
to Peter, "Put up your sword," had said, "Peter,
get the other ear!" Would people say of Him that He teaches
"with authority" (Lk 4:32; Mt 7:29; Mk 1:22)? If, on the
cross, instead of praying, "Father forgive them, for they know
not what they do!" Jesus had instead cried out, "Father,
have no mercy on those who have done this to me," would His
teaching, "Love your enemies" be credible?

Jesus was aware
that His teachings about the Way of Eternal Life would forever sound
— and would forever be — hollow if left un-enfleshed. He had to
walk through the furnace of His own truth before He could expect
others to live what He proclaimed to be the will of God. Verbal
witness alone was sterile. "If he does not believe in his own
truth enough to live it, why should I?" would be a normal —
and quite logical — reaction to Jesus, or to anyone else, proclaiming
the Gospel by words alone. As philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche framed
it: "You will never get me to believe in a redeemer until you
act redeemed."

In Quo Vadis,
Peter visits Christians who are soon to be martyred. A Roman soldier,
Vinicius, in love with a Christian woman, clandestinely places himself
among the Christians in order to locate her. At that moment Peter
begins to speak:

[I]t's not
enough to love just one's own kind; God died a man's death on
the cross, he spilled his blood for all mankind, and even the
pagans are turning toward him now…And it's not enough to love
only those who love and treat you well. Christ forgave his executioners.
He removed all blame from the Jews who turned him over to Roman
justice to be crucified and from the Roman soldiers who nailed
him to the cross…"Only love is more powerful than hatred,"
the teacher said simply. "Only love can clean the world of
evil."

By the time
Peter finishes Vinicius is perplexed and disoriented:

[T]hese ideas
were a completely new way of looking at the world and totally
rearranged everything known before. He sensed that if he were
to follow the teaching, he would, for example, have to make a
burnt offering of everything that had made him; he would have
to destroy his thinking, crush all his perceptions, excise every
habit, custom and tradition, erase his whole acquired character
and the driving force of his current nature — burn it all to ashes,
consign it to the winds, and fill the void with an entirely different
soul and a life on a wholly different plane. A philosophy that
taught love for Parthians, Syrians, Greeks, Egyptians, Gauls and
Britons seemed like lunacy; love and forgiveness to an enemy and
kindness in the place of vengeance were simply sheer madness…What
he heard seemed totally divorced from reality as he understood
it, and yet it made his reality so insignificant, it was hardly
worth a passing thought.

Sanctity

Everyone has
heard the pros and cons for following or not following Jesus and
His Way. There is only one rationale, however, that could be universally
conclusively persuasive — that herein dwells the quintessence of
sanctity, herein lies eternal salvation. And, this is precisely
what the Christian faith holds. It is Jesus, and only Jesus, who
is the incarnation of absolute Holiness. In all creation there is
not a clearer manifestation of Holiness than Jesus. Jesus is what
Holiness looks like in time and in eternity because Jesus is the
Eternally Holy "made flesh." Sanctity then is freely laying
down one's life, moment to moment, in order to love the Father and
all His sons and daughters, as Jesus loves the Father and all His
children. Sanctity is following Jesus, the incarnation of the Holy
One. It is in loving one another as Jesus loves us (Jn 15:12; 13:34),
that a person fulfills "the entire Law of the Gospel"
(Catechism
of the Catholic Church, 1970), that a person does the Father's
will "on earth as it is in heaven" (2822). The Way of
sanctity, the Way of nonviolent Christ-like love of friends and
enemies, and the Way of eternal salvation are all indivisibly one
and the same Way — the Way of Jesus.

Heroism

The Way of
sanctity, however, is a heroic Way, because every step on this Way
is a step of love in an atmosphere inundated with the dark matter
of evil. Not a step of love as Caesar defines love, nor as Aristotle
defines love, nor as Hugh Hefner defines love. It is step of love
as Jesus, the God of love (agapé) incarnate, defines love
by His words and deeds. It is a love that has at its heart the cross
— the symbol and the reality of the nonviolent, unlimited, self-sacrificial
love for all human beings, enemies as well as friends. Indeed this
cross-grounded love is the very power and wisdom of God to conquer
evil and death forever. It is a love that, in the words of Vinicius,
is "simply sheer madness." Yet it is a love that renders
every other approach to life "so insignificant, it [is] hardly
worth a passing thought."

In The
Brothers Karamazov, Father Zossima, Dostoevsky's paramount
example of what it means to be a Christian, says that Christ-like
love "in action is a harsh and dreadful thing compared with
love in dreams." To voluntarily enter the dynamic of Christ-like
love for others, friends and enemies, is supreme heroism. It is
the heroism of the cross. It is, as the song says, being "willing
to march into hell for a heavenly cause" — and to march there,
or into any lesser battle, with the cross of Christ-like love as
one's solitary weapon. It is risking responding — to hurt, hate,
cruelty, insult, shame, calumny, fear, violence, injustice and even
the very threat of death — exclusively with that love made visible
by Jesus. It is abandoning oneself to Christ by abandoning all means
that are inconsistent with the means of Christ. It is bearing the
"unbearable burden" of the cross of limitless, nonviolent,
self-sacrificial Christ-like love for both friends and enemies every
second of every day in common affairs and in crisis moments. Why?
Because Holy Love Itself has asked that it be done for the salvation
of the world. To commit one's life to this cross-based love — as
opposed to a violent, partisan sword-based love with the other as
the primary object of sacrifice — in a world saturated in evil,
takes great boldness and courage, great faith and trust. It takes
genuine heroism. But to choose to live in this Way is to imitate
God, to unite with the Holy, to literally participate in the very
Life of the Nonviolent Trinity whose love for each and all is infinite
and everlasting.

Sanctity's
Fragrance or the Harlot's Perfume

Christ-like
love can be very costly but, expensive or not, it is the power of
God given to the Church. Such love has no more need of social status,
coercive power, connections in high places, prestige, badges of
distinction, money, intrigue or prerogative, than a rose has any
need to give a sermon to attract people. When a Church or its leaders
feel that they need social status, coercive power, etc., to draw
or hold people, perhaps what is really needed is an examination
of conscience and consciousness to determine why the attracting
fragrance is no longer being emitted from the rose, or what is being
done that is interfering with people being captivated by it. Human
beings will flee from the suffocating smells emanating from the
perfumes that the perpetually decaying kingdoms of the world offer
as temporary means for masking the unendurable stench of evil and
death, if alternatively the ambrosia of Christ-like love is made
present by the Church. Why? Because human beings are made by Christ-like
love, in the image of Christ-like love and for Christ-like love.
Christ-likeness is what it means to be human. Christ-like love,
the love intrinsic to the Eternal Logos (Word) "through whom
all things were made," is–must be–the fullness of life in
time and in eternity. Nothing could be more inviting and appealing
to a human being than that from which the universe is made, than
that in which the soul participates, than that for which he or she
never-endingly longs, namely, to know they are eternally loved by
the Source of all.

The historically
discredited Christian modus operandi of ceaselessly concocting
sermons, theologies and apologetics that attempt to by-pass the
Divine agapéic rose of Christ-like love, by imbuing the sulfur-based
perfumes of the kingdoms of the world with artificial eternal significance
and Gospel-standing, is tantamount to an erotic harlot continually
pouring new perfumes over old perfumes which have begun to reek.
It is just more of the same old unheroic, spiritually unproductive,
"gong booming, cymbal clashing" Christianity (1 Co 13:1).
It is a Christianity that leaves the course of everyday life, and
history in general, as pagan as ever — if perhaps, slightly less
noticeable for a while. If the opportunity is made available by
the Church, human beings will gracefully and naturally gravitate
to a Community incarnationally committed to the Christ-like love
of all people, friends and enemies — regardless of the cost or the
required heroism involved. This will occur because a rose-scented
spiritual and moral atmosphere would be intuited by the immortal
soul to be heaven on earth, even if the body were nailed to a cross.
Vinicius grasped this instantly.

Benign Concern

Religious elites
who commerce in the scents of the kingdoms of the world will, with
a display of benign concern, often demeaningly insist that "little
people," "ordinary Christians" are not up to the
heroic struggle entailed in trying to love friends and enemies as
Jesus does. "The u2018Sermon on the Mount' and the u2018Sermon of the
Cross' are too much for them," they say. "Let those in
the pews be content with venerating crosses of wood and metal as
holy object with only metaphysical meaning — but with no content
in regards to the moral will of God." To which I respond: Tell
that to the thousands of "little people" whose martyred
bodies lie in the catacombs of Rome! Tell that to the "ordinary
Christians" in the holding cells beneath the Circus Maximus
in the days of Nero or two hundred years later in the days of Diocletian.
In the Gospels it is precisely the "little people" that
Jesus spends most of His time with and to whom He most often issued
His invitation to "Follow Me"–and who follow him. It
is the religious elites in the Gospels who refused to take Him at
His word and who work like the devil to prevent "ordinary people"
from so doing–and from following Him.

Systematically
bracketing out from one's proclamation of the Gospel selected teachings
of Jesus concerning the Will and Way of God, because the "little
people" in general or "ordinary Christians" in particular
are not up to living them, or would rebel against them, is a temptation
from the Evil One that must be resisted. It must be resisted with
particular vigor especially by those who have accepted a position
of Church leadership with its explicit commission from Jesus to
"teach them to obey all that I have commanded you" (Mt
28:20). Pastorally figuring-out how a teaching of Jesus should best
be presented in order to elicit comprehension of it and commitment
to it is one thing. Pre-judging whether Christians can or cannot
live fully a life of Christ-like love — "all that I have commanded
you" — with the help of the grace of God, and employing this
analysis to validate withholding or muting a teaching of Jesus is
quite another. The former task Jesus commits to the leaders of the
His Church. The latter task Jesus allots to no one in His Church.
With the power of the Holy Spirit involved, choosing the path of
Christ-like love, which from the outside may appear impossibly heroic,
can from the inside be experienced as necessary and as natural as
breathing. St. Peter on Pentecost being the first, but by no means
last, example of this.

Heroic Christic
love, then, is not auto-salvation, as it does not depend on its
own strength to conquer the satanic, like a nation would rely on
its organizations of violence to save itself from its political,
economic, cultural, ethnic or religious enemies. It is the power
of the Holy Spirit of the Risen Jesus Christ that makes it both
desirable and possible to overpower in a Christ-like Way the anti-Gospel
currents — psychological, emotional, cognitive and spiritual — that
the kingdoms of the world have set in motion in us and in our lifeworld
long before we were aware of their presence. But, heroic or unheroic,
perseverance in Christ-like love and sanctity must be and can be
the daily and lifetime commitment of the Christian, even if he or
she is just a "little flower" in a forest of giant theological
and ecclesiastical redwoods.

This is all
possible because the Christian rests secure in the faith, that regardless
of how dreadful, fearful or hopeless life may seem to be in its
entirety or in a particular hour, God — whether called upon or not
— is encompassing each one and all as a prodigal Father embraces
a beloved son or daughter. Therefore, regardless of projected fearful
outcomes, the Christian can venture to stay-the-course in trying
to love as Jesus loves, in trying to be holy as Christ is holy,
because he or she is certain of the Good News that "nothing
can separate us from the love of God made visible in Christ Jesus
our Lord" (Rm 8:31-39). Trust in Abba’s total love and protection,
as Jesus trusted in Abba’s total love and protection, is where the
Christian's complete security resides. He or she knows, with invincible
faith and unshakable hope, that the Father will protect him or her
as totally as He protected Jesus, regardless of how fragile or vulnerable
he or she feels at the moment. How else could martyrdom in the Spirit
of the Nonviolent Jesus and in the model of the Protomartyr St.
Stephen be either possible or sane two thousand years ago — or today?

You've nothing
to Fear

Let us return
for an instant to Quo Vadis. It is now only minutes before
the Christians are to be herded into the arena of horror. Sobs,
silence, and desperation alternately punctuate the air. An anguished
widow pleads to God, "Give my son back to me, O Lord."
A Christian father repeats and repeats, "The hangmen raped
my little daughters and Christ let it happen." For another
Christian soon to die, "the hair lifted on his head in terror"
when he thought, "What if Caesar of Rome was mightier than
Jesus of Nazareth?" Peter quietly sits praying among the tormented
faithful. Then he begins speaking, so low at the outset that hardly
anyone hears him:

I tell you
in Christ's name you've nothing to fear! Life waits for you, not
death. Joy without end, not torments. Song waits, not tears and
moaning….

"I tell
you as God's apostle, widow, that your son won't die but will
be born in glory to a new life, and you will be together. I tell
you, father, whose innocent daughters they've soiled, they'll
be as unblemished as the lilies of Hebron when you meet again.
I say in Christ's name to all you mothers who'll be torn away
from your orphaned children, all you who'll lose your fathers,
all who cry for pity, all who'll witness the death of those they
love, all who are sick at heart, unfortunate and fearful, and
I say again to you who must die: You will wake as if from a dream
into eternal light, and the Son of God will shine in your night."

Secularization

Of all the
dangers to the integrity of the Petrine ministry, the episcopal
ministry, presbyteral ministry, indeed to the institutional Church
itself, the greatest is secularization (Latin: saecularis
— worldly, temporal, as opposed to eternal). By secularization is
meant the adoption by the Church, by its leadership and/or its membership,
of the values, attitudes, beliefs, powers, needs, means, and goals
of a secular society, which values, attitudes, beliefs, powers,
needs, means, and goals are hostile to, obfuscate, or are dismissive
of that Christ-like love which is the power of God given to the
Church to lead people along the Way to an eternally-graced union
with Him.

The secularization
of the institutional Church, its leadership and laity, is the axial
betrayal, which leaders and members must confront and confess today,
if the Church is to be renewed and revitalized — if a new time of
authentic evangelization is to commence. Secularization is a process
not decades old but centuries old. It is no longer a creeping aberration
in the institutional Churches; it is a galloping normality throughout
the Churches. It has also become, due to literacy and mass media,
more and more noticeable, scandalizing and off-putting to more and
more people — Christians and non-Christians alike.

The long-standing
pretense can no longer be spiritually sustained that secularization
has served the Church well, or even adequately. Can anyone look
candidly at the twentieth century Church in any of its institutional
forms — Catholic, Protestant, Orthodox, or Evangelical — and honestly
maintain that the pastoral leadership of these Churches or the Churches
themselves have been equal to the attacks that evil has mounted
against Christianity and humanity during the last hundred years?

From 1914–1918,
Church leaders in nation after nation ratify as conforming to the
will of God as revealed by Jesus the diabolical monstrosity of World
War I. This malignancy metastasizes in the same leaders or their
successors, thereby ensuring that they would rationally, theologically
and canonically be able to place the satanic abomination of 1939
to 1945 under Divine patronage. Now that this Century of Cain is
over, it is known that Christians killed more people in war in the
twentieth century than in all the centuries since the time of Constantine
(d. 337). Christians also slaughter other Christians in unprecedented
numbers during the last one hundred years. Practically all of this
homicide is done with the various Churches blessing and morally
justifying those Christians who are doing it. But, in no way is
twentieth century Christianity out of step with the Christianity
of the last seventeen centuries. Volumes of evidence from the recent
and the remote past — for example, the historical fact that more
Christians are killed by the Roman Empire after it becomes a "Christian
state" than when it is a pagan state — can be adduced to verify
that the long-term results of secularizing the Church, beneath the
veneer of public piety and religiosity, has been a spiritual and
pastoral calamity.

When Rome became
Christian in name, the Church became Roman in deed. The persecuted
became the persecutors. In operational practice the Lamb became
the Imperial Lion with all the inversion of values, attitudes and
morality that the reversal of those symbols implies. And, like any
lion that has once tasted the rewards of power and ease of life
that come with living off human bloodletting, its appetite for these
only increases. This appetite has not been satiated to this day
— although it does wax and wane according to the political climate
of the hour. Secularized Christianity with its ethics for the baptized
of justified homicide, violence, dominative power, fear, enmity,
retaliation and revenge in pursuit of earthly agendas has literally
turned the cross of Christ upside down and made it into the sword
of Caesar. Instead of the Church "turning the whole world upside
down" (Ac 17:6–7) by fidelity to the Way of Jesus, the world
has turned the Church of Jesus Christ upside down by secularizing
it to ways and means that are self-evidently at war with the ways
and means of Jesus.

Unless the
past has been perfect, the future should be different from the past.
Charles Chaput, Archbishop of Denver, Colorado, writes, "Much
of the western world may still appear to be Christian, but it is
not — at least not in any real sense of the word u2018Christian.'"
No reasonable observer of the scene could disagree, if by "Christian"
is meant following the Jesus of the Gospels and His Way. But, who
is responsible for this situation? Evasion of truth is preposterous
when eternal salvation is at stake. The Hebrew and Christian Scriptures
are in accord on this: A sin left unnamed regenerates itself incessantly
and with ever-greater intensity. Denial only assures a future that
mirrors the past. So it must be stated unambiguously: responsibility
for the secularization of the Church lies primarily on the heads
of Church leaders, and those who piously strive to be Church leaders
in Churches that justify their own secularized ethos. Well, the
"Ninth Hour" is upon the leadership of the Church. The
cock crows! Jesus Christ is looking "straight at" (Lk
22:61) those He has chosen (Mk 3:13–14) and who have denied Him.
(For to deny the truth of His Way, or to substitute another way
for His Way because one believes His Way is unrealistic, is to deny
Him.) His Eyes are asking his betraying Church and its leaders:
"Are you now sincerely willing to follow Me and enter once
again upon the Way of the Nonviolent Messiah — and to bring with
you those "little ones" I have placed in your care?"

Survival

The taproot
of the spiritually toxic problem of secularization is veiled but
not entirely concealed. Worldly leaders are concerned with the survival
of their societies or institutions. Secular leaders are denounced
or deposed if they fail in promoting the survival of their group
and its interests. If there is one thing, however, the Church never
needs to worry about, it is the survival of the Church. Temporal
survival, which is the primary concern in the realm of the secular,
is a non-concern in the realm of the Church. The Church survives,
period. It survives not by superb administration, financial acuity,
clever public relations gimmicks, coercion, violence, catering to
elites, secrecy, fear, nor by anything else human beings do to assure
the survival of worldly enterprises. The Church survives only because
of this — Christ guarantees its survival. Jesus Christ has never
left the Church. He still lives in the Church and exercises His
headship. There is never any need for anyone, anywhere, or at any
time, to be concerned about the Church's survival. In fact, a billion
Christians going to war "for the survival of the Church"
would be an ignominious spiritual failure in the guise of a brilliant
worldly success. It would be unbelief masquerading as heroic fidelity.
It would be false witness. It would be utterly irrelevant to the
Church's survival. It would be secularization befogging the Christian
mind and suppressing the Christian heart.

"My business
is fidelity; God's business is success," explains Mother Theresa.
This truth has to be deep in the heart of Jesus in Gethsemane, as
well as deep in the heart of St. Peter and those Christians to whom
Peter speaks on their way to the Circus Maximus. Likewise, it must
reside deep in the heart of anyone who wishes to be a faithful Christian
— most especially in the heart of anyone who wishes to be a faithful
Christian leader. Note that Mother Theresa did not say: "My
business is success; God's business is fidelity!"

The Church
requires not one "pragmatic" sin, not one inch of departure
from the Way of Jesus, not one act that is not an act of Christ-like
love in order to successfully complete the mission Jesus committed
to it. The power the Church has been given to fulfill Her mission
is the power of God, and that, Jesus tells us, is the power of love
as He makes it visible in time and space. Concern for an institutional
Church's material dimensions is appropriate provided it stays within
the parameter of Christ-like love. Toward that which is totally
perishable inside or outside the Church, Church leaders and Church
members owe no duty beyond that which can be executed with Christ-like
love. If gaining possession, continuing possession or re-possession
of some worldly thing — or even the whole world — cannot be achieve
within the requirement of Christ-like love, then it cannot be achieved,
and the Church or Christian therefore has no earthly need of it
in order to accomplish fully their divine assignment within the
mystery of salvation in Jesus Christ.

"One
act of pure love," teaches St. John of the Cross, "is
more valuable to the Church than all other acts combined."
St. Paul would concur (1 Cor 13). If a person wants access to a
power superior to this, or to a power antagonistic to this, then
he or she should not be a Christian, let alone a Christian leader.
If a Christian leader or a Christian has succumbed to the temptation
to employ the anti-Gospel powers of the kingdoms of the world (Lk
4:5–7; Mt 4:8,9) to achieve some goal, then the "Ninth Hour"
is upon him or her. If he or she will only have the courage of St.
Peter the Betrayer, to look into the Eyes that are looking "straight
at" him or her, to look straight into those Eyes and see the
Infinitely Benign Eternal Being within them, then the power and
the wisdom of the Nonviolent Jesus will be made clear — as will
His invitation to follow Him and His Way. St. Edith Stein presents
the matter in these compelling words:

Do you see
the eyes of the Crucified looking at you with a searching gaze?
They are asking you a question: Are you, in all seriousness, ready
to enter once again into a covenant with the Crucified? What are
you going to answer?

The Nonviolent
Follower of a Nonviolent Leader

For a sincere
follower of Jesus, the question is always "Quo Vadis,
Domine?", recognizing full well that wherever Jesus
is going, whether it be Golgotha or Rome, He is going there without
the weapons of the kingdoms of the world: no swords, no guns, no
halberds, no cruelty, no enmity, no deceit, no worldly power. Unlike
the founders of other religions, He is always armed solely with
love and absolute trust in the unfailing protection of the Father
almighty, and never with carnal weapons. Only a person who is interested
in so following Jesus, and hence in undertaking the mostly unseen,
but genuinely heroic, daily martyrdom of innumerable micro-acts
of nonviolent Christ-like love toward all who cross his or her path
— friends and enemies — should have any interest in becoming a Christian
leader or a Christian or a catechumen.

Such a commitment
by a Christian demands an ongoing "burn it all to ashes, consigning
it to the winds" abandonment of a secularized, anti-Gospel
self-understanding. A secularized self-understanding has been rigorously
neurologically inscribed — cognitively and affectively — by a personal
and social history of religious as well secular legitimization over
decades of life. To turn away from it and daily pick up the cross
of nonviolent Christ-like love toward all is nothing short of dying
to self — the old self that was given to us without our consent
by one or another of the kingdoms of the world and its religious
support group(s). To follow Jesus, as Vinicius instantly realizes,
it is necessary "to make a burnt offering of everything that
had made him." As the Apostle writes:

I beg you,
in a way that is worthy of thinking beings, think of God's mercy,
my brothers and sisters, and worship Him, offering your living
bodies as a holy sacrifice, truly pleasing to God. Do not model
yourselves on the behavior of the world around you, but let your
behavior change, modeled by your new mind. This is the only way
to discover the will of God and know what is good, what it is
that God wants… (Rm 8:1–3)

This does
not mean, however, that a Christian or Christian leader is condemned
to live chronically on the edge of sadness because he or she, like
Jesus, renounces traveling down the spiritual and moral culs-de-sac
to salvation offered by the totally perishable kingdoms of the world
— culs-de-sac offered as if they were royal roads to eternal
significance and glory, e.g., the ways of violence, enmity and dominative
power. On the contrary the daily sacrifice of the old and deeply
nurtured self-understandings and value systems on the altar of agape,
on the cross of nonviolent love toward all, is made with magnanimity.
Why? Simply because it is required in order to fulfill one’s Christian
responsibility to God and to humanity, as well as, to the destiny
for which he or she was drawn out of nothingness for a time. It
is the concrete deed of Christlike love, as noted earlier, that
is the sine qua non for proclaiming the Gospel with authority
and credibility to an unbelieving and fear-ladened world of wounded
and wounding human beings. An ever more desperate humanity lives
imprisoned in what appears to it to be an irredeemably meaningless,
evil, and mortal existence. It lives in this unspeakable torment,
longing in every cell for the only good news that is really Good
News: that God is Abba, that "Jesus of Nazareth who
was crucified is risen" and that the Way of Eternal Life has
been revealed and opened for all. To proclaim this unsurpassable
Good News with Christ-like authority and credibility is how a follower
of Jesus meets his or her most cherished goal — unreserved co-operation
with Him whose supreme desire is to ensure that all who must die
"will wake as if from a dream into eternal light, and the Son
of God will shine in their night" (Jn 12:31; 1 Tm 2:4; Ti 2:11).

What a love!
What a life! What a grace to be chosen by Christ-God for such a
vocation! What a privilege to be given the opportunity to lead and
assist others in fulfilling their calling from the Holy One. What
a tragedy to mis-use, mis-direct and abuse such a gift in order
to religiously legitimatize as the Way of Jesus secular values,
powers, spirits and behaviors that are eternal dead-ends for one
and all — values, powers, spirits and behaviors that are not only
inconsistent with the Way of Jesus but that are hostile to the Way
of Jesus and His salvific mission.

Quo Vadis?

January
6, 2007

Fr.
Emmanuel Charles McCarthy is a priest of the Eastern Rite (Byzantine-Melkite)
of the Catholic Church. Formerly a lawyer and a university educator,
he is the founder and the original director of The Program for the
Study and Practice of Nonviolent Conflict Resolution at the University
of Notre Dame. He is also co-founder, along with Dorothy Day and
others of Pax Christi-USA. He has conducted retreats and spoken
at conferences throughout the world on the issue of the relationship
of faith and violence and the nonviolence of the Jesus. He was the
keynote speaker at the Lorraine Motel in Memphis, Tennessee for
the 25th anniversary memorial of the assassination of Rev. Martin
Luther King, Jr. there. He is author of several books, including
these: All Things Flee Thee because Thou Fleest Me: A Cry to
the Churches and their Leaders to Return to the Nonviolent Jesus
and His Nonviolent Way; Christian Just War Theory: The logic of
Deceit; August 9: The Stations of the Cross of Nonviolent Love.
He has also authored innumerable articles on the subject of violence,
religion and the nonviolent love of friends and enemies taught by
Jesus by word and deed. His audio/video series, BEHOLD THE LAMB,
is almost universally considered to be the most spiritually profound
presentation on the matter of Gospel Nonviolent Love available in
this format. BEHOLD THE LAMB is now available on
mp3CD through his website, either at the cost of $5.00 for a
disc or it can be acquired directly by an mp3 downloaded from
the website for no cost. Rev. Emmanuel Charles McCarthy was
nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize for his life’s work on behalf
of peace within people and among people. He may be reached and his
work my be accessed at the Center
for Christian Non-Violence.

The Nonviolent Eucharist

Fr. Emmanuel McCarthy — Fri, 15 Dec 2006 06:00:00 +0000

DIGG THIS

Twelve
frightened men, who feel that death is hovering over, crowd around
the Son of Man whose hand is lifted over a piece of bread and
over a cup.

Of what
value is this gesture, of what use can it be?

How futile
it seems when already a mob is arming itself with clubs, when
in a few hours Jesus will be delivered to the courts, ranked among
transgressors, tortured, disfigured, laughed at by His enemies,
pitiable to those who love Him, and shown to be powerless before
all.

However,
this Man, condemned to death does not offer any defense; He does
nothing but bless the bread and wine and, with eyes raised, pronounces
a few words.

~
François Mauriac, The
Mystery of Holy Thursday

Outside of
Jesus Christ, the Eucharist has no Christian meaning. Everything
about it must ultimately be referenced to Him and then through Him
to Abba. The same is true of the Christian life. Jesus is the ultimate
norm of Christian existence; everything must be referenced to Him.
If He is not the final standard against which the Church and the
Christian must measure everything in order to determine if it is
the will of God or not, then who or what is?

The Ultimate
Norm of the Christian Life

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.

New Commandment
Contains the Entire Law of the Gospel

Jesus, Himself,
unequivocally commands precisely this when He says, "I give
you a new commandment: Love one another. As I have loved you, so
you also should love one another" (Jn 13:34). As the one the
Church calls "the greatest saint of modern times," St.
Thérèse of Lisieux, the third woman Doctor of the
Church, writes in her autobiography, The
Story of a Soul:

Among the
countless graces I have received this year, perhaps the greatest
has been that of being able to grasp in all its fullness the meaning
of love…I had striven above all to love God, and in loving Him
I discovered the secret of those other words "Not everyone
who says Lord, Lord shall enter into the kingdom of heaven, but
the one who does the will of my Father." Jesus made me understand
what the will was by the words he used at the Last Supper when
He gave His "new commandment" and told His apostles
"to love one another as He had loved them"…When God
under the old law told His people to love their neighbors as themselves,
He had not yet come down to earth. As God knows how much we love
ourselves, He could not ask us to do more. But when Jesus gave
His apostles a "new commandment, His own commandment,"
He did not ask only that we should love our neighbors as ourselves,
but that we should love them as He loves them and as He will love
them to the end of time. O Jesus, I know you command nothing that
is impossible…O Jesus ever since its gentle flame has consumed
my heart, I have run with delight along the way of your "new
commandment."

The Catechism
of the Catholic Church says, "The entire Law of the Gospel
is contained in the new commandment of Jesus, to love one
another as he has loved us," and that "This commandment
summarizes all the others and expresses His [the Father's] entire
will."

The internationally
esteemed Catholic Biblical scholar, Rev. John L. McKenzie, echoing
the understanding of modern Biblical scholarship, states that "
No reader of the New Testament, simple or sophisticated, can retain
any doubt of Jesus' position toward violence directed to persons,
individual or collective, organized or free enterprise: he rejected
it totally…If Jesus did not reject any type of violence for any
purpose, then we know nothing of him." Now since Jesus' rejection
of violence, as well as, His teaching of love of enemies are beyond
reasonable doubt and therefore morally certain, then that love that
is in the Spirit of Christ, that love that is imitative of Christ,
that love that is Christ-like, that love that is "as I have
loved," that love which "contains the entire Law of the
Gospel," that love "which expresses His entire will"
is a nonviolent love of friends and enemies.

Both Biblical
scholarship and a common sense reading of the Gospel tell us that
this new commandment of Jesus to "love one another as
I have loved you," is not a throwaway line or an arbitrary
insertion of a thought into the Gospel. On the contrary, the new
commandment is so placed in the Gospel as to be presented as
the supreme and solemn summary of all of Jesus' teachings and commands.
The importance of all this for Eucharistic understanding and Eucharistic
unity is this: Jesus' solemn new commandment is given and
proclaimed not on a mountain top nor in the Temple, but, as St.
Thérèse notes, at the Last Supper, the First Eucharist.

At this bitter-sweet
Last Passover Meal, poised between time and eternity and about to
be pressed like an olive by religiously endorsed, rationally justified
and state executed homicidal violence, to which He knows He must
respond with a love that is neither violent nor retaliatory, with
a love that forgives and that seeks to draw good out of evil, He
tells those He has chosen, "I will be with you only a little
while longer. You will look for me and as I told the Jews, where
I go you cannot come; now I say to you, I give you a new commandment:
Love one another. As I have loved you, so you also should love one
another" (Jn 13:33-34).

Liturgical
and Operational Indifference

It is hard
to conceive of a more dramatically powerful context to communicate
the importance of a truth to people for an indefinite future. Imagine
how the world would be today if this new commandment as taught
on the first Holy Thursday and lived unto death on the first Good
Friday was continuously remembered in Catholic, Orthodox, and Protestant
Eucharistic Prayers throughout the ages. For one thing, there would
be no Catholic, Orthodox, or Protestant division of the Church because,
whatever the intellectual or political reasons were that promoted
each division and each division of a division, the one thing that
predates all of them and postdates most of them is a thoroughgoing
liturgical and operational indifference to the new commandment
that Jesus proclaims by word at the First Eucharist and by example
at the Sacrifice of Calvary.

All the major
modern divisions in the Church follow by centuries the Church's
justification of violence and homicide with all the distortion of
perspective and spirit that persistence in such activities brings
to individuals and communities. And, after each division all of
the Churches — minus a few of the u2018Peace Churches' — continue to
teach, to endorse and to employ violence and homicide as part of
their Christian way. This necessitated that in these Churches, or
any subdivision thereof, the Eucharistic liturgy be not too explicit
in remembering the details of the Gospel-given history of the Lord's
Supper, of the Lord's Passion and of the Lord's Death. Less still
could any Church that justifies and participates in violence and
homicide afford to be continually Eucharistically emphatic in remembering
Jesus' new commandment given at the Last Supper, and the
clear relationship between it and the Way He in fact historically
responds to violence and enmity. What one does not underline is
what one does not want to remember.

A Eucharistic
Prayer that Embodies Nonviolent Love

So until this
very day, in the Eucharistic Liturgies of such Churches, a word
or two, "suffered" and/or "death," has normally
been quite enough memory, commemoration, remembrance, or anamnesis
for fulfilling the Lord's Command, "Do this in memory (anamnesis)
of me." Of course, technically the words "suffered"
and/or "death" are theologically correct, but are they
pastorally sufficient for the sanctification of the Christian, the
institutional Church, and the world? What would the condition of
the Church and hence the world be like today if the Eucharistic
Prayers of the Churches of Christianity had read at their most sacred
point, "the institution narrative-anamnesis (remembrance),"
something like the following over the last 1700 years:

…On the
night before He went forth to His eternally memorable and life-giving
death, like a Lamb led to slaughter, rejecting violence, loving
His enemies, and praying for His persecutors, He bestowed upon
His disciples the gift of a New Commandment:

"Love
one another. As I have loved you, so you also should love one
another."

Then
He took bread into His holy hands, and looking up to You, almighty
God, He gave thanks, blessed it, broke it, gave it to His disciples
and said:

"Take
this, all of you, and eat it: this is my body which will be
given up for you."

Likewise,
when the Supper was ended, He took the cup. Again He gave You
thanks and praise, gave the cup to His disciples and said:

"Take
this, all of you, and drink from it: this is the cup of my blood,
the blood of the new and everlasting covenant. It will be shed
for you and for all so that sins may be forgiven."

"Do
this in memory of me."

Obedient,
therefore, to this precept of salvation, we call to mind and reverence
His passion where He lived to the fullest the precepts which He
taught for our sanctification. We remember His suffering at the
hands of a fallen humanity filled with the spirit of violence
and enmity. But, we remember also that He endured this humiliation
with a love free of retaliation, revenge, and retribution. We
recall His execution on the cross. But, we recall also that He
died loving enemies, praying for persecutors, forgiving, and being
superabundantly merciful to those for whom justice would have
demanded justice. Finally, we celebrate the memory of the fruits
of His trustful obedience to thy will, O God: the resurrection
on the third day, the ascension into heaven, the enthronement
at the right hand, the second and glorious coming. Therefore we
offer You your own, from what is your own, in all and for the
sake of all…

The explicit
inclusion of the memory of Jesus' new commandment, Jesus'
rejection of violence, Jesus' love of enemies, Jesus' prayer for
His persecutors, and Jesus' return of good for evil in the Eucharistic
Prayer of the Churches at the sacred point of "institution-anamnesis"
is not a whimsical or arbitrary insertion of haphazard events from
Jesus' life. This is what happens from the Cenacle to Calvary. This
is the memory given to us to revere by the ultimate historical,
theological and pastoral documents on the subject: the four Gospels.

Maundy Thursday
— A Mandate to Love as Christ Loves

The very name
for Holy Thursday, Maundy Thursday, comes from the Latin mandatum,
which means a command, commission, charge, order, injunction. It
is a direct and exclusive reference to the new commandment
given at the Lord's Supper. The inclusion of the new commandment
in the Eucharistic Prayer is not riding one's own theological or
liturgical hobbyhorse into the Church's public prayer life. The
new commandment is there from Day One of the Eucharist and
it is there in maximal solemnity and seriousness.

So also, the
rejection of violence, love of enemies, and prayer for persecutors
is an irrevocable part of the history, Scripture, and authentic
memory of the Sacrifice of Love on Calvary. Refusing the protection
of the sword (Mt 26:52), healing the ear of the armed man who is
to take Him to His death (Lk 22:51) and crying out for God's forgiveness
for those who are destroying Him (Lk 23:34) is the memory the Gospels
give to humanity of the victimization of Christ. To side-step these
authentic Apostolic memories in order to get to a more profound
or holy or "deep" spirituality is sheer folly. One has
to have the humility to accept revelation as God offers it. If one
does not want to prayerfully enter into revelation as presented
by God, then one has no access to revelation; for who but God can
author authentic revelation?

Emaciated
Revelatory Remembrance Subverts Divine Love

Jesus does
not die of a heart attack. He dies when His heart is attacked by
human beings inebriated with the diabolical spirit of justified,
religiously endorsed homicide — and He dies giving a definite, discernible,
and consistent response to that satanic spirit. This reality cannot
be insignificant in discerning the Truth of the revelation God is
trying to communicate to humanity for the good of humanity in Jesus,
for the Truth that Jesus is trying to communicate to His disciples
regarding the nature of that love that is "as He loves."
The Sacrifice of the Cross is not about mere animal pain that is
meant to assuage the lust of a sadistic, bloodthirsty, parochial,
violent god. It is about the revelation of the nature and meaning
and way and power of a Divine Love that saves from an Enemy and
a menace that the darkest phenomena of history can only but hint
at. To consistently dismiss and to structurally ignore major facts
in the God-given revelatory memory is to assure that little of what
God intended to be communicated by this costly revelation will be
communicated by it. So, while use of an isolated word, "suffered"
or "died," in the Eucharistic Prayer is theologically
passable, pastorally speaking it is emaciated revelatory anamnesis
(remembrance). For as Raniero Cantalamessa, O.F.M.Cap., the Preacher
to the Papal Household under John Paul II and Benedict XVI, makes
clear in his book on the Eucharist: The Eucharist is not only
a mystery to consecrate, to receive, to contemplate and adore. It
is also a mystery to imitate. Imitate what? Imitate suffering
and dying? All must suffer and die, there is no choice whether to
follow this road or not. It is a road of necessity not imitation.
Imitate what? Jesus' Way of suffering and dying and living and loving
is what eternally resides in the Eucharist for imitation. But, if
His Way of suffering and dying, living and loving in the face of
even the most formidable of evils — the lethal enemy — is not presented
in the Eucharistic Liturgy, how can it be imitated? Should not the
Christian desire with his or her whole heart to imitate unreservedly
the One whom he or she adores and consumes — the Nonviolent Eucharistic
Jesus?

However, it
does not take much reflection to perceive how detail-devoid Eucharistic
Prayers — that do not mention Jesus' new commandment given
at the Last Supper, that do not mention His rejection of violence,
that do not mention His love of even lethal enemies, that do not
mention His prayer for persecutors, and His struggle to overcome
evil with good — serve a critical function in amalgamating Christianity
into the local national or ethnic violence-ennobling myths, as a
religious legitimist of them. Intentional forgetfulness, structured
inattentiveness, and a cavalier disparaging of Jesus' teachings
of nonviolent love of friends and enemies have always been part
of Christendom's process of religious validation of what He never
taught by evasion of what He explicitly taught. Without this cultivated,
liturgical, Eucharistic blind spot as to the Way He suffered and
died, Jesus could not be drafted as a Divine support person for
the home team's homicide and enmity yesterday, today — or tomorrow.

Amnesia
About Truths in Suffering and Death of Christ

It is possible
today, as it has been possible for 1700 years, for a normal person
to spend a lifetime listening to the Eucharistic Prayers of all
of the mainline Christian Churches and never apprehend that what
is being remembered is a Person — who at the moments being remembered
in the Prayers — rejects violence, forgives enemies, prays for persecutors,
returns good for evil. In other words, in most Christian Churches,
the anamnesis has become an agency for amnesia about truths in the
suffering and death of Christ that if consistently brought to consciousness
at the sacred time of the community's Eucharist would stand in judgment
on a multitude of community activities, past and present.

The Rev. Frederick
R. McManus, Emeritus Professor at The Catholic University of America
and one of the most influential and learned Catholic liturgists
in the Catholic Church in the 20th Century, writing on this issue
says:

The Nonviolent
Eucharist is a valuable and viable proposal to augment Eucharistic
anaphoras with some direct reference to the ministry and teaching
of Jesus concerning peace and love, with concrete mention of the
nonviolence of the Gospel message. The tradition of variety in
the Eucharistic prayer, longstanding in the East and happily introduced
into the Roman liturgy in the light of Vatican II's mandate to
reform the Order of Mass, is ample reason to study this proposal.
The centrality of the mission of peace and nonviolence in the
Gospels needs to be acknowledged in the confession of the great
deeds of God in the Lord Jesus, and the Christian people need
to see this essential dimension of Eucharistic peace in the prayer
which they confirm and ratify with their Amen.

The most renowned
moral theologian of the Catholic Church in the 20th Century, Rev.
Bernard Häring, states emphatically that, "It is not possible
to speak of Christ's sacrifice while ignoring the role of nonviolence."
Yet, this is precisely what most Christian Churches have been doing
in their Eucharistic Prayers since Constantine first employed the
cross as an ensign to lead people into the enmity and homicide called
war.

FACT: Catholics,
Orthodox, and Protestants all believe they have authentic Eucharistic
communion within their own Churches and often the same belief holds
for communion among different Churches. This, however, has not prevented
them from sojourning into slaying their own and other Christians
on a grand scale and then exonerating themselves by some fantastic
contortion of the Gospel.

The Key
to Eucharistic Unity and Christian Unity

Now what I
am about to suggest I am sure could sound more than farfetched,
but I believe it is the pivotal decision for Christic Truth on which
a future of Christian unity and Eucharistic unity wait. At this
time in history, the key to Eucharistic unity and Christian unity
is for Churches — each by whatever process of authority is internal
to it — to compose new Eucharistic Prayers or add a passage to a
present Eucharistic Prayer which vividly, but exactly, calls to
mind the new commandment, and the specifics of the historic
confrontation between evil as manifest in homicidal violence and
enmity, and Jesus' response of Nonviolent Love that took place at
the moment being remembered.

This is not
one among many things the Churches can do for peace and unity —
it is what they must do. The present meagerness of Scriptural and
historical memory, while it does not render the Eucharistic Prayers
invalid, does make them pastorally deceptive by omission. Psychologically
harnessed from the cradle by the myths of nationalisms and ethnocentrisms,
most Christians cannot hear the broad terms "suffered"
and "died" with the content from AD 33, which they are
meant to communicate. Pastoral responsibility before God and pastoral
integrity before the community insist that the fitting and right
textual adjustments be instituted because there is a radical spiritual
danger, based on a long historical record, that the paucis verbis
of the present remembrance in the Eucharistic Prayers of all the
mainline Churches is unwittingly serving those forces which the
Eucharistic Jesus comes to conquer.

It is Archimedes
who states that there is a point outside the world that if he could
locate it, he could move the world from it. The "institution
narrative-anamnesis" of the Eucharistic Prayers of the Churches
is that spiritual Archimedean point — if the truth of Christ's Sacrifice
is allowed the fullness of its historical revelatory reality in
them. It is not magic I speak of here. It is the hidden power of
the Cross that is released when those who are in Christ respond
to the offer of grace through Christ — an offer made through a unique
and unequaled "salvation device" when He says, "Do
this in remembrance of me."

For the leadership
of each Church to authorize text clarifications in its Eucharistic
Prayer would not be magic. For said leadership to explain the changes
to the community would not be magic. For each community to consciously
stand or kneel daily, weekly, or monthly in the presence of such
a Nonviolent Eucharistic Lord would not be magic. All would necessitate
human choice, but choice aimed at cooperating more faithfully with
the incalculably powerful and mysterious reality of the Divine Design
for salvation in Jesus — choice on behalf of a more authentic expression,
experience and encounter with the Saving Presence of Divine Love
as revealed through, with and in the Nonviolent Eucharistic Christ.

New Time
of Christian Agapé

A more truthful
Eucharistic Prayer is the starting point of "the fair beginning
of a nobler time." For certain this is the point from which
to move the world into a New Era of Christic Agapé because,
from this point on, the Christian and the Church will derive their
Life from the Bread of Life of an Agapé Meal that is reverently
respectful of the "last wish" of Jesus — that the love
(agapé) which He showed His disciples be remembered and lived
in the community as the un-breachable standard of all Christian
interaction with the other sons and daughters of the "Father
of all." This is the spiritual Archimedean point because there
is infinitely more Power in that Mysterious Meal in the Upper Room
than meets the eye — if the choice is but made to embrace it by
those means which God bestows on us to embrace it.

What is equally
true is this: there is infinitely more to the new commandment
than meets the mind. As each Church Eucharistically remembers more
lucidly the truth of Jesus' life of Nonviolent Love, His death in
Nonviolent Love, and His resurrection through Nonviolent Love, Jesus'
new commandment will disclose its depth of meaning, purpose,
and power to the Churches of Christianity in a manner that will
gift them with an experience of new reality. Out of this new reality
will come new insight and new spirit — and from this new reality
and new insight and new spirit will come new words, new phraseology,
new language, new thoughts and new acts that will resolve aged and
serious problems of truth. Rising from this new level of Eucharistic
fidelity will come a new convergence of Christic Love and Truth
that will engender an existential unity beyond present imagination.
It is not magic I speak of here. Prayer changes people, and people
change things, but pastors must first give the "Yes" for
a more specific and more pastorally accurate remembrance narrative
in the Eucharistic Prayer. As at Nazareth of old, God, who desires
to renew the face of the earth, holds His breath and awaits His
chosen servant's fiat.

Betrayal
of Baptismal and Eucharistic Unity

In a 1969 article
for the Notre Dame Alumnus, I wrote: "To paraphrase
a student slogan, u2018Suppose someone gave a war and the Christians
refused to kill or harm one another'…It would be a giant step forward
for humanity if the Church would preach as a minimum standard of
morality, the absolute immorality of one follower of Christ killing
another follower of Christ."

In 1969 I lost
on all fronts with this. For the conservatives it was "just
ridiculous"; for the liberals, it was too absolutist; and for
the radicals, it was Christianist and anti-humanist. But, I know
more surely today than I did thirty-six years ago that this is the
truth of the matter. Homicide-justifying Christianity cannot dialogue
itself out of the snare into which it has fallen. It must first
unreservedly desire to be obedient to Jesus' new commandment;
then from this wholehearted desire will issue the grace, insight
and power to do the other tasks committed to the Christian and the
Church. Now, this desire to be faithful to the new commandment
would at least seem to mean that as a dimension of Baptism and Eucharist,
the Christian would always say "No!" if called upon by
anyone, even an "angel of light," to kill other Christians.
He or she would do this in order not to be reduced to a "Judas-Christian"
— a betrayer of one's gift of Baptismal unity in Christ and a betrayer
of one's task of Eucharistic unity in His new commandment.

How could this
not be what the Nonviolent Jesus intended for His disciples by His
new commandment at the Last Supper? How could this not be
what the Nonviolent Jesus intended His followers to teach, nurture,
encourage, foster, energize, and command when bringing people into
Baptismal and Eucharistic unity with Him and through Him with each
other and God? The Church will be the servant it is meant to be
to God and to humanity only to the extent that it is faithful to
what it has been commanded to do internally, namely to "Love
one another. As I have loved you, so you also should love one another."
Absent an unswerving commitment to the new commandment of
the Nonviolent Jesus, the Church will become a body tearing itself
limb from limb — and an anti-sacrament of disunity, the world-wide
public incarnational denial of its own truth, the truth committed
to it by God to proclaim to a violence drenched world by word and
deed.

Disunity
Emanates from Separation of Divine Mandates

A commandment
that is consigned century after century to the doorsteps of oblivion
is a non-thought in a community. Obedience to a non-thought is a
patent impossibility. Yet, it is at the very same Supper that the
Lord commands for all time "Do this in memory of me" that
He pronounces for all time His new commandment. How can these
Divine Mandates be honestly separated? How can one be obeyed religiously
while the other is religiously ignored?

It is this
separation between the two great Eucharistic Commands that is the
source of and the sustaining power for separation within Christianity
— ecclesiastically and Eucharistically. It is this separation in
Christianity between the two great Eucharistic Commands, whose mutually
complementary purpose is to unite, that has reduced the Church in
confrontation with the horrid reality of evil to a coping dinosaur
rather than a conquering Spirit. Disunity dis-empowers to the detriment
of all — except the Fiend.

For mercy's
sake, the pastors of Christianity must relinquish their stance of
calculated inattentiveness to the unbreakable unity of Word and
Sacrament. They must simply stop managing the Eucharistic Prayers
in a manner that spiritually short-circuits the process of repentance
— and hence unification — by perpetually camouflaging the unwanted
truth of Jesus' nonviolent love of friends and enemies and His command
to follow His example of love. There are not two Jesus Christs:
the Eucharistic Christ of faith on one hand, and the historical
Jesus on the other. John Paul II states in his Encyclical, Redemptoris
Missio (1990), "One cannot separate Jesus from the Christ
or speak of a u2018Jesus of history' who would differ from the u2018Christ
of faith'…Christ is none other than Jesus of Nazareth." The
only Jesus Christ present at the Eucharist, the only Jesus Christ
to remember, receive and adore in the Eucharist is the Jesus Christ
who taught and lived unto death a Way of nonviolent love of friends
and enemies and who commanded His disciples to do the same: "Love
one another as I have loved you;" "Do this in memory of
me."

A Pastorally
Truth-Filled Eucharist

Having recently
concluded a Century in which more people have been killed by rationally-justified,
religiously-legitimized war, revolution, abortion, and capital punishment
than all the centuries of humanity combined; having recently concluded
a Century that has by the billions mercilessly murdered "the
least" (Mt 25:14-46) by squandering on the technology of violence
and homicide the most lavish gifts of intelligence and learning
ever granted a century of humanity; having recently concluded a
Century that has brought a planet of humanity to the lip of a cauldron
bubbling with the brew of nuclear plagues and war-generated diseases;
having recently concluded a Century where Christianity has been
a major player in all these evil — it is an urgent moral imperative
for Christian pastors to begin with vigor to lead their Churches
away from evasively ambiguous Eucharistic Prayers and into repeatedly
remembering with clarity of mind and spirit the Way God committed
to them for remembrance on Holy Thursday-Good Friday, 33 A.D.

A pastorally
truth-filled Eucharistic institution narrative, as enunciated above,
initiated in the beginning by the authority of each of the Churches
for its own community, is the key not only to the resolution of
Church divisions and Eucharistic disunity, but also the key to so
much talked about New Pentecost which is the only Power that can
transfigure the agonia that humanity has made of history.
From a New Holy Thursday shall shine a New Pentecost because Eucharistic
prayer is the most powerful prayer to which humanity will ever have
access. This means that, entered into with an honest, humble and
contrite heart, Eucharistic prayer in all its forms — adoration,
contrition, thanksgiving, and supplication — is the supreme instrumentality
available to the human being and to the human community for their
sanctification — which can only express itself in time and space
as deeds of Christ-like love of God, friends, and enemies.

To love the
Eucharist is to live the Eucharist. To live the Eucharist is to
imitate the love of the Eucharistic Jesus. A Nonviolent Eucharistic
Prayer is a mandatum of Christic Truth, a mandatum
of Christic Peace, a mandatum of Christic Love, and hence
a pastoral mandatum.

December
15, 2006

Fr.
Emmanuel Charles McCarthy [send
him mail] is a priest of the Eastern Rite (Byzantine-Melkite)
of the Catholic Church. Formerly a lawyer and a university educator,
he is the founder and the original director of The Program for the
Study and Practice of Nonviolent Conflict Resolution at the University
of Notre Dame. He is also co-founder, along with Dorothy Day and
others of Pax Christi-USA. He has conducted retreats and spoken
at conferences throughout the world on the issue of the relationship
of faith and violence and the nonviolence of the Jesus. He was the
keynote speaker at the Lorraine Motel in Memphis, Tennessee for
the 25th anniversary memorial of the assassination of Rev. Martin
Luther King, Jr. there. He is author of several books, including
these: All Things Flee Thee because Thou Fleest Me: A Cry to
the Churches and their Leaders to Return to the Nonviolent Jesus
and His Nonviolent Way; Christian Just War Theory: The logic of
Deceit; August 9: The Stations of the Cross of Nonviolent Love.
He has also authored innumerable articles on the subject of violence,
religion and the nonviolent love of friends and enemies taught by
Jesus by word and deed. His audio/video series, BEHOLD THE LAMB,
is almost universally considered to be the most spiritually profound
presentation on the matter of Gospel Nonviolent Love available in
this format. Rev. Emmanuel Charles McCarthy was nominated for the
Nobel Peace Prize for his life’s work on behalf of peace within
people and among people. He may be reached and his work my be accessed
at the Center
for Christian Non-Violence.

John McCain Was No Hero

Fr. Emmanuel McCarthy — Thu, 01 Jan 1970 06:00:00 +0000

DIGG THIS

Killing in
an unjust and immoral war is neither laudable nor heroic. Yet, Senator
John McCain is constantly trumpeted by the corporate media as a
war hero with special emphasis on his being a prisoner of war. He
had the gall when he returned to Vietnam — decades after trying
to destroy it and its people, while piloting a multimillion dollar
jet armed with some of the most sophisticated and hellish weapons
ever produced (high-tech anti-personal bombs, napalm, etc.) — to
self-righteously complain that when the Vietnamese stopped him from
killing them and their children they did not treat him properly.
However, it should be noted they did not kill him, as "an eye
for an eye" morality could have easily justified. John McCain
in fact has gone on to live a rich and full life, which is more
than can be said for those Vietnamese, civilian and military, whom
he murdered (unjustly killed) or cooperated with the murder of from
his plane. Whether he or anyone else, who traveled 7,000 miles from
the U.S. to kill Vietnamese, personally considered at the time that
doing the bidding of Johnson, Nixon, McNamara and Kissinger was
murder is a very important point, when reconciliation before God
is considered — if there is a God and if life is not merely an accumulation
of spasms of pleasure and pain before total and permanent annihilation.
But, in 2007 the whole world knows that the U.S. attack on and destruction
of Vietnam and its people was, to use the words of Thomas Merton,
"an overwhelming atrocity." To continue today to refer
to a person by the term "hero" who participated in this
unjust human slaughter, for purposes of trying to morally prop up
this prior act of wicked savagery, is more than ludicrous — it is
participating in and perpetuating the evil out of which the Vietnam
depravity arose.

"Hero"
in reference to a person who unjustifiably kills people, serves
also as part of the indoctrination process for normalizing the evasion
of truth, the denial of reality and the manufacturing of facts that
today allows those who planned and executed the mass murder (unjust
destruction) of hundreds of thousands of human beings in Iraq to
be called "hero." This propagandizing of the "hero"
tag vis-à-vis those involved in an unjust and/or illegal
war is also part of the spin (deception) required to justify in
the eyes of ordinary people sending plane-load after plane-load
of future "heroes" over to Vietnam yesterday, Iraq today
and Iran tomorrow in order to continue the very profitable murder
operation of a perpetual war economy under some auspices or another,
e.g., the Communist Chinese will overrun Vietnam within six months
after the U.S. leaves; the radically hated U.S. is needed as a "peacekeeper"
force in Iraq! Whatever the case that may be made for the "heroic"
killing of other human beings in a just war — and I personally think
that such a case cannot be made — it falls apart completely once
the war is unjust and thereby the destruction of people becomes
unjustified killing, murder. John McCain, John Kerry, John Murtha,
Bob Kerry, etc., with their medals for homicide are not the heroes
of the Vietnam War, the war in "the land of the burning children"
as Daniel Berrigan accurately named it at the time.

NAPALM.
The most effective "anti-personnel" weapon, it is euphemistically
described as "unfamiliar cooking fluid" by those apologists
for American military methods. They automatically attribute all
napalm cases to domestic accidents caused by the people using
gasoline instead of kerosene in their cooking stoves. Kerosene
is far too expensive for the peasants, who normally use charcoal
for cooking. The only "cooking fluid" they know is very
"unfamiliar" — it is delivered through their roofs by
U.S. planes.

Some of its
finer selling points were explained to me by a pilot in 1966:
"We sure are pleased with those backroom boys at Dow. The
original product wasn't so hot — if the gooks were quick they
could scrape it off. So the boys started adding polystyrene —
now it sticks like s__t to a blanket. But then if the gooks jumped
under water it stopped burning, so they started adding Willie
Peter (WP — white phosphorous) so's to make it burn better. It'll
even burn under water now. And just one drop is enough, it'll
keep on burning right down to the bone so they die anyway from
phosphorous poisoning."

~
Vietnam,
Inc., Philip Jones Griffiths, 2001, pp. 210–211

So, what does
an authentic American hero of the Vietnam War look like? He does
not look like the U.S. jet pilot in Vietnam in 1966 whose photo
and comments are included above. Rather, he looks like Dale Noyd.

Dale Noyd was
a decorated Air Force fighter pilot, who was given a medal for landing
a badly damaged, nuclear-armed F-100 Fighter at an English airfield.
He also taught at the Air Force Academy. In 1966, after 11 years
in the Air Force, he asked that he either be allowed to resign his
commission or be classified as a conscientious objector because
of his feelings about the Vietnam War. His request was denied, and
Dale Noyd took his case to federal court in Denver in March 1967.

The American
Civil Liberties Union, which represented him, said it was the first
lawsuit claiming conscientious objector status because of an opposition
to a specific war. In December 1967, using a legal dodge ("We
are not responsible here"), that echoed the defense offered
by the German judges who were tried at Nuremberg for war crimes
after World War II, the U.S. Supreme Court refused to hear his case,
saying that the military had jurisdiction.

The Air Force
then ordered Captain Noyd to train a pilot who was probably on the
path toward Vietnam. Noyd refused and was court-martialed for disobeying
an order.

During his
military trial, the Military Court also availed itself of a position
in direct contradiction to principles on which people were convicted
at Nuremberg, namely, "Hand over your conscience to us, your
moral objections not withstanding — or else." Captain Noyd’s
belief in conscience that the Vietnam War was immoral and illegal
was not addressed. The panel of 10 officers, who were all Vietnam
veterans, did not allow discussion of his beliefs. The central legal-moral
issue, of whether his objecting to a particular war rather than
all wars was legal, was ruled out as a matter of consideration by
the Court. The U.S. Supreme Court for a second time refused his
appeal to hear his case! Therefore the ultimate choice Captain Dale
Noyd was given was to either abandon his conscience and become morally
a murderer in his own eyes, i.e., take part in what he saw as the
unjustified killing of human beings, or become a prisoner of war.
Dale Noyd chose to be true to the truth of his conscience. He was
sentenced to a year in prison, given a dishonorable discharge, and
stripped of his pension and benefits.

This is what
a Vietnam hero, a hero of humanity and of country looks like. It
is Dale Noyd, whose life is a profile in courage on behalf of life,
humanity and country. It is Captain Dale Noyd whose bravery should
be held up before those in the military today, including chaplains,
who know in their consciences that this war on Iraq is unjust, perpetrated
and sustained by a ceaseless flow of lethal lies — that it is nothing
more or less than "big-time" murder incorporated. Most
of all it is Dale Noyd, his integrity, his empathy for those being
unjustly destroyed on all sides, his patriotism, his valor and his
guts, that should be deliberately and ceaselessly placed before
the eyes of each and every U.S. Representative and Senator. Held
up in front of them until every bloody one of them, who knows in
his or her conscience that this war is grotesquely immoral and/or
illegal, acts — without calculation concerning his or her personal
political fortunes — to effectively and immediately put an end to
it.

Dale Edwin
Noyd joined the universal community of the dead on January 11, 2007.

The story ends
here — or does it?

February
6, 2007

Fr.
Emmanuel Charles McCarthy is a priest of the Eastern Rite (Byzantine-Melkite)
of the Catholic Church. Formerly a lawyer and a university educator,
he is the founder and the original director of The Program for the
Study and Practice of Nonviolent Conflict Resolution at the University
of Notre Dame. He is also co-founder, along with Dorothy Day and
others of Pax Christi-USA. He has conducted retreats and spoken
at conferences throughout the world on the issue of the relationship
of faith and violence and the nonviolence of the Jesus. He was the
keynote speaker at the Lorraine Motel in Memphis, Tennessee for
the 25th anniversary memorial of the assassination of Rev. Martin
Luther King, Jr. there. He is author of several books, including
these: All Things Flee Thee because Thou Fleest Me: A Cry to
the Churches and their Leaders to Return to the Nonviolent Jesus
and His Nonviolent Way; Christian Just War Theory: The logic of
Deceit; August 9: The Stations of the Cross of Nonviolent Love.
He has also authored innumerable articles on the subject of violence,
religion and the nonviolent love of friends and enemies taught by
Jesus by word and deed. His audio/video series, BEHOLD THE LAMB,
is almost universally considered to be the most spiritually profound
presentation on the matter of Gospel Nonviolent Love available in
this format. BEHOLD THE LAMB is now available on
mp3CD through his website, either at the cost of $5.00 for a
disc or it can be acquired directly by an mp3 downloaded from
the website for no cost. Rev. Emmanuel Charles McCarthy was
nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize for his life’s work on behalf
of peace within people and among people. He may be reached and his
work may be accessed at the Center
for Christian Non-Violence.