The More Things Change…...
In the heart of Rome, there is a church dedicated to the martyrs of the 20th century from Mexico, Central America, Communist China, Eastern Europe. Pope John Paul said , “the church of martyrs and prophets was still alive in the twentieth century.” On Aug 9, Catholics keep many sad anniversaries of victims for Christ in WWII, Blessed Franz Jagger, St Edith Stein and those who died in the atomic bombing of Nagasaki.
Jesus is our Bread of life. Whatever He meant is what we have to try to grasp and with His Help, try to emulate as cells or "Christ particles" in the vibrational field of Christ Jesus.
Whatever Jesus meant, we know that His methodology teaches His disciples the process of non-violent collaborative justice in securing Enoughism for all the sisters and brothers.
California biblical scholar, Fr John McKenzie made three simple yet profound statements about our Bread of Life. 1) Jesus realized the possibilities of authentic human existence better than any other person. 2) Jesus teaches us somehow everything we need to know about God from what Jesus said and did, up until the day He died. 3) Jesus tells us something that nobody else ever did about how to live.
One thing that Jesus teaches us was His stance of non-violence. Whatever His Vision, He would not achieve it violently. Most of the Jesus Movement in the first four centuries of the New Testament, known as the pre-Christian era, got that very clearly. However, in the 4th century with the legitimization of Christianity as the state religion of the Roman world, things started to change. It was only in the fifth century that St Augustine even formulated his just war theory. True, there were always people who committed to non-violence as the sine qua non of the Gospel, such as St Martin of Tours and St Francis of Assisi. The new era, lasting from the fourth century until after World War I (1914-1918) in Europe was called Christendom. If you rocked the boat with either church or state, you rocked the boat with the other as well.
After World War I, several started to challenge the assumption that church and state would always be as one. For example, both French and German Christian felt that God was on their side in WWI. The belt buckle of German soldiers said God with us, Gott mit uns. French mothers sewed miraculous medals to their sons’ uniforms. In addition, in WWI with the rise of new forms of warfare such as mustard gas, the u-boat and the airplane, people wondered what does the traditional just means question mean in St Augustine’s schema. We entered a phase called post-Christian.
As a result, even new questions have been raised about perennial problems. In Europe with the rise of Nazism, while most saw the morality of WWII, not all did. With the rise of firebombs and finally, the atomic bombing, the world was approaching a threshold moment. Blessed Franz Jagger was inducted into the army of the Third Reich and declared that as a Roman Catholic, he could not cooperate with Adolf Hitler. He was beheaded on Aug 9 1943. St Edith Stein was a Jewish convert to Roman Catholicism, based on her study of the philosophy of existentialism and the writings of St Teresa of Avila. She died in Auschwitz on Aug 9, 1942. On Aug 9, 1945, the second of the atomic attacks against Japan on the city of Nagasaki in 1945. What was not revealed at the time was that Nagasaki had a large Roman Catholic population. The cathedral of St Agnes was the target of the bomb. And why a second bomb?
The new moment in world history occurred in 1965 when the USA & USSR developed weapons capable of MAD, viz., mutually assured destruction, a term coined at that time.
In 1983, the American Bishops, with its call to an individual Catholic to nonviolence in one' s everyday dealings with one another, a call to a consistent life ethic for which Cardinals Bernardin & O’Connor will be remembered forever. Finally, they taught us that. since 1965, with the development of MAD, humanity had entered a new phased in human history, where humans had become capable of undoing in the process of creation what God has been doing on the planet for billions of years. They cautioned that the development of sophisticated non nuclear weapons also posed a special problem. Another threshold had been crossed.
After WWII, we became used to a permanent war mentality. (Up until 1989, it was the Soviet Union who were the bad guys. Since then, it has become “those” Terrorists.)
American Catholics are lulled into new everyday words such as collateral damage, extraordinary rendition, drone weapons, sniper schools, executive signature hit lists, violation of national sovereignty of other nations, etc. Recall President Eisenhower’s words in 1948, “One danger arises from too great a concentration of power in the hands of any individual or group: The power of concentrated finance, the power of selfish interest groups, the power of any class organized in opposition to the whole -- any one of these, when allowed to dominate, is fully capable of destroying individual freedom, as is excessive power concentrated in the political head of the state.” (1948????) In a word, follow the money. Who really runs the show?
The Pope’s words are true, “We still live in the age of prophets and martyrs.” For people like Bl. Franz and St Edith, Dorothy Day, Oscar Romero, the Maryknoll sisters, the Jesuit Martyrs and Martin Luther King and many others, when it comes to nonviolence, they try to imitate Jesus Who is the bread of life. Do we, also? Who runs our show? 080512AD jfq
