tvc.dsj.org | August 21, 2018
COMMENTARY
17
Praying for Peace at the Pentagon
By Tony Magliano
Internationally syndicated social justice
and peace columnist
[email protected]
Every Monday morning for the past 30 years, mem-
bers of the Dorothy Day Catholic Worker community
in Washington, D.C. have been making their way
across the Potomac River to pray and nonviolently
witness for peace in front of the most symbolic war
planning, war-making headquarters on earth: the
Pentagon.
Just days ago on August 6 – the 73rd anniversary
of the U.S. nuclear bombing of Hiroshima, Japan – I
joined them, along with 19 members of several other
mostly Catholic faith-based organizations.
Facing the Pentagon, we held signs calling for an
end to all nuclear weapons. And we prayed to the God
of peace (see: 1 Thess 5:23) for the full conversion of all
hearts and minds from war-making to peace-making
(see: https://dccatholicworker.wordpress.com).
Together with the Holy Spirit, we were hoping
to awaken the consciences of military and civilian
workers walking toward the Pentagon. But nearly
everyone tried to ignore our Christ-centered message
of peaceful nonviolence.
One member of our group was arrested for bravely
moving outside of the Pentagon police designated
protest zone, and onto the sidewalk used by workers
entering the Pentagon. Her purpose was to make it
harder for Pentagon employees to ignore her sign say-
ing “Hiroshima and Nagasaki: A butchery of untold
magnitude.”
“The God of peace is
never glorified by human violence.”
-Thomas Merton
That statement was taken from soon to be canon-
ized Pope Paul VI’s World Day of Peace Message in
1976, in which he clearly condemned the nuclear
bombing of Japan. He wrote, “If the consciousness
of universal brotherhood truly penetrates into the
hearts of men, will they still need to arm themselves
to the point of becoming blind and fanatic killers of
their brethren who in themselves are innocent, and
of perpetrating, as a contribution to peace, butchery
of untold magnitude, as at Hiroshima on 6 August
1945?”
On that day over 70,000 people – mostly civilians –
were killed when a United States Boeing B-29 bomber
dropped an atomic bomb on that Japanese city.
Then on August 9, 1945 the U.S. dropped a second
atomic bomb, this time on the Japanese city of Na-
gasaki, killing at least 60,000 people – again mostly
civilians. Nagasaki was the center of Japanese Ca-
tholicism. An added tragic irony here is that the U.S.
crew that dropped this atomic bomb was “blessed”
by a Catholic chaplain – the late Father George Za-
belk, who later had a total conversion, spending the
remainder of his life as a nonviolent Catholic peace
activist (see: https://vimeo.com/48820359).
Today, nine nations possess approximately 15,000
nuclear weapons. And especially dangerous is the
fact that the U.S. and Russia have hundreds of nuclear
weapons aimed at each other on high-alert status
ready to be launched within minutes.
On July 7, 2017 the Treaty on the Prohibition of
Nuclear Weapons was adopted by an overwhelming
majority of the world’s nations. But unfortunately,
the U.S. and the other eight nuclear weapon countries
refuse to sign and ratify it. However, Catholics should
prayerfully consider that the Holy See was equally the
first nation to sign and ratified it.
To learn more about this immensely impor-
tant treaty, and how you can help abolish nuclear
weapons, visit the International Campaign to
Abolish Nuclear Weapons – recipient of the 2017
Nobel Peace Prize (http://www.nuclearban.org).
Vi s it t h e C at h ol ic No nv i ol e n c e I n it i at ive
(https://nonviolencejustpeace.net) and Nonviolent
Peaceforce (www.nonviolentpeaceforce.org).
As followers of the nonviolent Jesus, let us form
our lives by the words of the famous Trappist monk
Thomas Merton: “The God of peace is never glorified
by human violence.”
Why I Believe in God
By Rev. Ron Rolheiser, OMI
Theologian, teacher, award-winning
author, and President of the Oblate
School of Theology in San Antonio, TX
Some of my favorite authors are agnostics, men
and women who face life honestly and courageously
without faith in a personal God. They’re stoics mostly,
persons who have made peace with the fact that God
may not exist and that perhaps death ends everything
for us. I see this, for example, in the late James Hillman,
a man whom I greatly admire and who has much to
teach believers about what it means to listen to and
honor the human soul.
But here’s something I don’t admire in these
agnostic stoics: While they face with courage what
it should mean for us if God doesn’t exist and death
ends our personal existence, they don’t, with the same
courage ask the question of what it should mean for us
if God does exist and death does not end our personal
existence. What if God does exist and what if the
tenets of our faith are true? They need too to face that
question.
I believe that God exists, not because I have never
had doubts, or because I was raised in the faith by
persons whose lives gave deep witness to its truth, or
because perennially the vast majority of people on this
planet believe in God. I believe that a personal God ex-
ists for more reasons than I can name: the goodness of
saints; the hook in my own heart that has never let me
go; the interface of faith with my own experience, the
courage of religious martyrs throughout history; the
stunning depth of Jesus’ teachings; the deep insights
contained in other religions, the mystical experience
of countless people; our sense of connection inside
the communion of saints with loved ones who have
died; the convergence of the anecdotal testimony of
hundreds of individuals who have been clinically dead
and resuscitated back to life; the things we sometimes
intuitively know beyond all logical reason; the constant
recurrence of resurrection in our lives; the essential
triumph of truth and goodness throughout history;
the fact that hope never dies, the unyielding imperative
we feel inside of ourselves to be reconciled with others
before we die; the infinite depth of the human heart;
and, yes, even the very ability of atheists and agnostics
to intuit that somehow it still all makes sense, points
to the existence of a living, personal God.
I believe that God exists because faith works; at least
to the extent we work it. The existence of God proves
itself true to the extent that we take it seriously and
live our lives in face of it. Simply put, we’re happy
and at peace to the exact extent that we risk, explicitly
or implicitly, living lives of faith. The happiest people
I know are also the most generous, selfless, gracious,
and reverent persons I know. That’s no accident.
Leon Bloy once asserted that there’s only one true
sadness in life, that of not being a saint. We see that in
the story of the rich young man in Gospels who turns
down Jesus’ invitation to live his faith more deeply. He
goes away sad. Of course, being a saint and being sad
are never all or nothing, both have degrees. But there’s
a constant: We’re happy or sad in direct proportion to
our fidelity or infidelity to what’s one, true, good, and
beautiful. I know that existentially: I’m happy and at
peace to the exact extent that I take my faith seriously
and live it out in fidelity; the more faithful I am, the
more at peace I am, and vice versa.
Inherent in all of this too is a certain “law of karma”,
namely, the universe gives back to us morally exactly
what we give to it. As Jesus worded it, the measure you
measure out is the measure that will be measured back to you.
What we breathe out is what we’re going to inhale. If
I breathe out selfishness, selfishness is what I will in-
hale; if I breathe out bitterness, that’s what I’ll meet at
every turn; conversely, if I breathe out love, gracious,
and forgiveness, these will be given back to me in the
exact measure that I give them out. Our lives and our
universe have a deep, innate, non-negotiable structure
of love and justice written into them, one that can only
be underwritten by a living, personal, divine mind
and heart of love.
None of this, of course, proves God’s existence with
the kind of proof we find in science or mathematics;
but God isn’t found at the end of an empirical test, a
mathematical equation, or a philosophical syllogism.
God is found, explicitly or implicitly, in living a good,
honest, gracious, selfless, moral life, and this can hap-
pen inside of religion or outside of it.
The Belgium Benedictine, Benoit Standaert, sub-
mits that wisdom is three things, and a fourth. Wisdom
is a respect for knowledge; wisdom is a respect for
honesty and aesthetics; and wisdom is a respect for
mystery. But there’s a fourth - wisdom is a respect
for Someone.