Picking up Joe Nangle’s hope and challenge

By Johnny Zokovitch

One of the most satisfying decisions I made during my time as executive director of Pax Christi USA was to ask Fr. Joe Nangle, ofm, to write a weekly column for our website. Joe’s columns were consistently the most-read posts on our site week-in and week-out. I heard regularly from people all across the United States (and even around the world) about how much Joe’s columns meant to them. Many referred to his columns as the “Sunday homilies” they couldn’t get in their own parishes, his words like “bread for the journey,” and how his writing both sustained and challenged them in their own experiments as disciples to the radical, nonviolent, compassionate Jesus. I was joyfully overwhelmed by the gratitude that people expressed for Joe and his weekly columns.

I don’t think it is overstating it to say that Joe was the de facto pastor to so many of us in Pax Christi USA, and his weekly columns were the prophetic word of God we need to hear preached from the pulpit. 

I offer all this as preamble. Pax Christi USA national staff approached me a few months ago asking if I would consider picking up Joe’s weekly column, hoping that I might be able to – in some small way – continue to offer some of the “hope and challenge” that Joe had purposely named his weekly column. Joe was both friend and mentor to me, and I promise that I’ll do my best to channel Joe in the words that I share in this space. 

Joe wrote his first column for us in April 2020. It was the early days of the pandemic, and Joe spoke of the “vulnerability” that many of us were experiencing. He drew on recent statements from both Pope Francis and Bishop John Stowe in trying to articulate for us a way through what was a dark, unsettling and anxiety-ridden time.

“[D]espite these ominous times, we are the community which believes and celebrates the ultimate triumph of life over death which Christ’s resurrection signifies, not only for ourselves but for the entire human family,” Joe wrote. “This belief gives us the capacity to stir up HOPE in ourselves, that strong and positive virtue which comes from the Holy Spirit, and one which we are called to cultivate and strengthen.”

It seems to me that Joe’s words hold true now, in this moment in which we find ourselves. The “hope” that Joe speaks of has never seemed more of a “challenge” than it feels like in these days of immigration raids, deportations and concentration camps masked as detention centers. Economic desperation hangs over many of our heads like a sword of Damocles, not knowing whether we’ll have our jobs tomorrow, or be able to pay our bills, or afford the healthcare we or our loved ones need. Extrajudicial killings like the attacks on boats in the Caribbean seem to be the new norm. Anyone with eyes to see and ears to hear cannot mistake the evil taking place for anything other than what it is. 

If you are like me, your hope is sorely tested in these times. I find my hope battered and bruised, nearly extinguished by the forces arrayed against all that I have spent a lifetime striving for. And then I hear the whispers – voices like Joe’s that spark candles to puncture the darkness that seems to be relentless and remorseless. 

In that initial column, Joe sought to remind us that “we are ultimately dependent, vulnerable human beings, living for a time on this earth, contingent, fragile and entirely mortal.” And yet he challenged us that it is indeed times just like this which are kairos moments for us, an opportunity to remake the world in which we live and then emerge one day into one that is more just, more equitable, rooted in nonviolence, peace and love. 

Joe promised to use his future columns to explore this important work, how we move–even with great resistance – “toward an entirely new order of things…nothing less than a new way of being human.” I hope to honor Joe’s commitment in this space going forward. 

Johnny Zokovitch is the former executive director of Pax Christi USA. He currently serves in pastoral leadership at St. Cronan Catholic Church in St. Louis.