To Teach What Jesus Taught: A Call to Fidelity
Thoroughly enter into the depth of the issue of Gospel Nonviolence by pondering this reflection.
Eucharist Is "God's Absolute 'No' to Violence"
The Sermon, Eucharist Is "God's Absolute 'No' to Violence," was the third in a series of weekly Lenten meditations delivered by Fr. Raniero Cantalamessa, the Preacher to the Papal Household. In the sermon he states that "Christ defeated violence, not by opposing it with greater violence, but suffering it and laying bare all its injustice and uselessness." He also affirms that, "The Eucharist is the sacrament of non-violence."
A reflection on the Eucharist
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...
Check out the Nonviolence Resource Center (under the Resources menu). More specifically, look under Booklets. The Stations of the Cross of Nonviolent Love contains personally assimilable and livable meditations on specific dimensions of Christ's Nonviolent Love as He endures each of the 14 stations of the cross, emerging finally at the 15th station, the Resurrection, having conquered evil and death.
It has been this author’s experience for over seventy-eight years of Catholic Christian life and for over fifty years of teaching that any rigorous critique of the moral validity of Christian Just War Theory (CJWT), is not only not respected in the Churches but is actually systematically pushed out of the ordinary catechetical and pastoral ministries of the Churches.
Roger LaPorte is long dead, long gone and long forgotten. His name, like the names of most of the non-warrior victims is not to be found on any wall of remembrance in Washington, DC, nor in any high-end television documentary. Nor, have I ever seen the slightest memento or symbol that would call to mind the non-warrior Catholic victims, home and abroad, of U.S. wars in any U.S. Catholic Church.
Roger La Porte immolated himself on November 9, 1965, as his response to the high tech and financially profitable massacre of the people of Vietnam that the U.S. politicians and military were conducting 7200 miles from the borders of the U.S.—and to which most of the U.S. citizenry at the time were indifferent. The sacrifice of his life was his response to this wickedness and to the mass media deceit that was calculatingly covering up the daily fare of atrocities that men in the U.S. military were committing against the Vietnamese.
“Voting is a deeply moral act for me—in rebuilding confidence and encouraging an intelligent and hope-filled society. It is also a decisive act of Christian faith that I matter, society matters, justice matters, and others matter. Not to vote is to hand our power and our dignity over to people who fear actual freedom, honest intelligence, and faith in the very goodness of humanity.”
It is difficult, if not impossible, to figure out which Jesus is being reclaimed in the recent much-ballyhooed document, Reclaiming Jesus: A Confession of Faith in a Time of Crisis (attached below). But, what is clear is the Jesus that the document presumes to reclaim is not the Jesus of the Gospels who was Nonviolent and who teaches a Way of Nonviolent Love of friends and enemies.
© Center for Christian Nonviolence
