Books
Nonviolence is possible, and no longer just an option
PEACE BE WITH YOU:
JUSTIFIED WARFARE OR THE WAY OF NONVIOLENCE By Eileen Egan Oris
Books, 350 pages, $22 To order: phone 1-800-258-5838
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By PATRICK MARRIN
A fellow peacemaker once asked
Dorothy Day if she could produce a clear, theoretical, logical pacifist
manifesto. In more than three decades of leading the Catholic Worker
movement, she couldnt do it.
Day could only describe the personal transformation that alone can
break age-old cycles of violence: Unless we use the weapons of the
spirit, denying ourselves and taking up our cross and following Jesus, dying
with him and rising with him, men will go on fighting, and often from the
highest motives, believing they are fighting defensive wars for justice and
self-defense against present or future aggression.
In effect, Days answer was to offer herself and her struggle
to follow the nonviolent Jesus as her manifesto. Its therefore fitting
that Eileen Egan concludes Peace Be With You, her 350-page compendium of
reflections on gospel nonviolence, with a short biography of her friend,
Dorothy Day.
The books timing is inspired. Egans long journey as a
peacemaker began in the ashes of Europe following World War II when she worked
with refugees as part of Catholic Relief Services. She recalls standing in the
ruins of Dresden in 1945 as a clergy companion explained why hundreds of
thousands of civilian deaths were the unintended and unfortunate, but
justified, result of the Allied need to break German morale. The unimaginable
carnage of world war -- 52 million dead, half of them civilians, untold
millions more injured and displaced, a whole global generation damaged in
spirit by anguish and anger -- became an altar on which Egan pledged her life
to the works of mercy and peace.
Over 50 years and many millions more victims later, Egan is still
keeping her vow and has now provided a textbook on war and peace for a global
classroom focused on Kosovo. As a global audience follows the conflict in real
time by broadcast news and Internet links, the time is ripe to ask if any
modern war can bring peace or stability without inflicting even greater damage
on everyone, sowing the seeds of future revenge.
Peace Be With You is part history, part theology, part
biography, part essay and personal memoir. Egan provides a comprehensive
history of the development of both Christian pacifism and its shadow nemesis
within Christian thought -- the just war theory.
What Jesus taught
Egans first lesson is that pacifism is not heroic hyperbole
over and above ordinary Christianity. Nonviolence is an essential
teaching of Jesus. Resist evil, but do not retaliate if attacked. Turn the
other cheek; if they take your tunic, give your cloak as well; go the extra
mile; love your enemies; do good to those who hate you. If you would expose and
disarm the unjust aggressor, lay down your life if necessary. But do not hate
or kill anyone.
Egan lets the early church witness to this hard teaching. For
three centuries, the church helped transform a world as violent as our own by
accepting martyrdom in imitation of the crucified, risen Christ. It was only as
the church gained official status under Constantine that theologians no less
than Ambrose and Augustine opened the door to the idea of a just
war as understood by the Roman philosopher Cicero.
The rest is history, a bloody history for which the church must
bear its share of responsibility for the crusades, the Inquisition, the
fratricidal religious wars of Europe, the many pogroms against the Jews and the
violent conquest of the New World. In opening the door to justified violence
(as Erasmus mocked, after that every war was justified), the church traded its
witness to martyrdom for a history of aggression and retaliation whose latest
chapter we now confront in the Balkans.
Drawing on this just war theory, many Christians take
for granted that a war can be justified if it:
- is declared by a legitimate authority for a just cause;
- is waged with the right intention and as a last resort;
- is conducted with proportionate and appropriate means;
- distinguishes civilians from combatants;
- has a reasonable chance for a positive outcome;
- is followed by right conduct after hostilities cease.
Applied to the Kosovo war, people of conscience may believe that
NATO is right in waging a sustained bombing campaign against Serbia. Civilian
deaths at the hands of Serbian security forces in Kosovo, or among the refugees
due to disease and the shock of displacement, or in the Allied bombing raids,
are absorbed in light of this belief.
Meanwhile policy makers both deny and prepare for escalation. Many
now assert the need for ground troops -- who, we are told, will accomplish what
the experts say they knew all along massive bombing couldnt.
Beneath it all, however, simmers the uneasy feeling that this
conflict is just beginning, that any cease-fire will only delay claims for
revenge until the next act of official aggression or terrorism. Is there no
alternative to this madness? No better way?
Hard work and wisdom
The hard work and wisdom of peacemaking fills much of Egans
text. There are no simple formulas nor easy answers. But the charge that
nonviolence doesnt work is challenged by the witness of Gandhi and Martin
Luther King Jr., and the near-miraculous defusing of a potential bloodbath in
the Philippines by church-led nonviolent demonstrations that forced the
abdication of President Ferdinand Marcos in 1986. The fall of communism and the
end of the Cold War was likewise triggered by nonviolent resistance in Poland
and Czechoslovakia, and by a pope who had no divisions but who had an inspired
sense of the pulse of history.
There are prophets of peace many of us have never heard of whose
commitment to building the infrastructure of justice and mercy has perhaps
prevented many wars: Argentine artist Aldolfo Pérez Esquivel, American
peace activists Jean Goss and Hildegard Goss-Mayr, Spanish Jesuit Jon Sobrino,
Catholic bishops and other world religious figures who helped forge and pass
the dramatic condemnation of modern warfare at Vatican II, which included
church support for conscientious objectors. Egan tells their stories well
because she was there -- as activist, writer and an important leader in many of
the peace organizations that have worked to educate popular opinion.
For Egan, Christian pacifism is impossible without the Eucharist,
works of mercy, prayer and fasting, and the support of community.
As we approach the end of the most violent century in human
history, nonviolence is neither impossible nor is it any longer just an option.
In the increasing interdependence of human cultures and economies, every
conflict can become a world war. As more and more destructive weapons
proliferate and threaten the planet itself, nonviolence is revealed as a
necessary threshold in human evolution. Hatred is killing us, perpetrator and
victim alike.
The truth about peace has never done well against the rhetoric of
war, especially when the faces of innocent victims haunt us and indignation
moves us to secretly cheer blunt force that stops terror and punishes the
bully. Yet our consciences are troubled. If only Jesus would give us a
clear, theoretical, logical pacifist manifesto.
Egan knows, along with Dorothy Day, why the life of a Sermon on
the Mount Christian is often a long loneliness. Peace Be With
You is a good place to begin our own journey of disarmament.
Patrick Marrin is editor of Celebration, NCRs
liturgical magazine.
National Catholic Reporter, April 30,
1999
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