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Jesus, Nonviolence and the Real World Noted lecturer Fr. Emmanuel Charles McCarthy, a Melkite priest and longtime pacifist, often refers to a declaration from the late Fr. John L. McKenzie, dean of American Catholic biblical scholars: “If we cannot know from the New Testament that Jesus rejects violence, we can know nothing of his person or message. It is the clearest of teachings.” I know no Catholic of note who would make the argument that Jesus advocated violence. The problem comes, of course, in applying the teaching of the nonviolent Christ in the real world. Many find ways to parse that teaching so that it is barely recognizable and so that Christians can take ethical comfort in engaging in whatever militaristic endeavor the state undertakes. In the United States today there is no other single issue—not abortion, not stem-cell research, not any of the so-called hot-button issues—for which the state asks as much of us as it does for its military pursuits. An unmatchable percentage of our taxes each year pays for maintenance and development of weapons systems that have been condemned in the most unequivocal way by the Vatican. Yet rare is the church authority who counsels Catholics not to pay. Virtually anyone who has teenagers knows that the U.S. military services receive their names from our public schools and that recruiters call regularly to entice our sons and daughters with promises of money and career possibilities—if they only join up. And in our current circumstances they would likely be joining to fight in the Iraq war, roundly condemned by two popes. Yet where is the religious education program that provides our children with all the church condemnations of war? Preemptive war, state-approved torture, new generations of nuclear weapons—and across wide swaths of the Catholic community there is almost total silence. The nonviolent Christ is AWOL from our conversation about what it means to be Catholic and Christian in our country today. Granted, big security questions emerge when the conversation is broached. One can only presume, for those who might want to approach this question incrementally, that between the poles of the nonviolent Christ and a $600 billion-plus “defense” budget supporting two open-ended wars, there must be room enough to work for rational peace initiatives without engaging the questions of absolute pacifism. Of the many laudable aspects of the Catholic Worker movement one might examine as it celebrates its first 75 years, I have chosen its deep sense of nonviolence because that element is most missing from the experience of the wider Catholic community. I have a hunch that when historians look back on this period of the Catholic community’s history in America, they won’t be celebrating those who manipulated an essential teaching so that we could feel free to participate unquestioningly in our nation’s militarism. Instead, I think they will remember, as we do Dorothy Day today, such groups as the Catholic Worker and Pax Christi and the Catholic Peace Fellowship, among others, as those who helped preserve the heart of the Gospel when most were trying to find a way around it. Tom Roberts |