Nonviolence like the weight of a snowflake

By Johnny Zokovitch

There is an old parable about the weight of a snowflake. It begins with a sparrow asking a dove to “tell me the weight of a snowflake.” The dove replies, “Nothing more than nothing.” The sparrow goes on to tell the dove that, as she sat on a tree, she counted gently falling snowflakes gathering on a branch below her. “After counting a million snowflakes,” the sparrow tells the dove, “when the next snowflake dropped onto the branch – nothing more than nothing, as you say – the branch broke off.”

For the Catholic Church, that branch finally broke on January 1, 2017. At the recognition of the World Day of Peace that year, Pope Francis delivered a message entitled, “Nonviolence: A Style of Politics for Peace.” In the message, the pope stated, “To be true followers of Jesus today…includes embracing his teaching about nonviolence.” He went on to pledge “the assistance of the Church in every effort to build peace through active and creative nonviolence.”

That message has proven to be a watershed moment for the promotion of active nonviolence as central to the teachings of Jesus and therefore vital to the mission of the Catholic Church. At that point, Pax Christi, the international Catholic peace movement, had been preaching, proclaiming and practicing nonviolence for over 70 years, and its contributions to the papal message cannot be overstated. 

Every research paper published, prayer lifted up, nonviolent action undertaken were like snowflakes piling up on that proverbial branch. That last snowflake was the creation of the Catholic Nonviolence Initiative. Born out of a 2016 international conference on nonviolence and just peace in Rome jointly sponsored by Pax Christi International and the Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace, the Catholic Nonviolence Initiative is dedicated to promoting active nonviolence as a core Gospel principle and aims to integrate nonviolence into the life of the Church at every level.

The past decade has seen that work expand exponentially with Pope Francis’ 2017 World Day of Peace message serving as the opening of the floodgates for the consideration of nonviolence in bishops’ conferences, in Vatican dicasteries and sponsored symposia, at Catholic universities in research and in the classroom, and throughout parish life on every continent in the world, especially through the annual Catholic Nonviolence Days of Action taking place in late September.

The 2026 World Day of Peace witnessed Pope Leo XIV taking up the promise of nonviolence in new and profound ways. He articulates a peace which is “unarmed and disarming,” calling to mind Jesus’ command to his disciples to put away the sword just before his arrest:

“‘Do not let your hearts be troubled, and do not let them be afraid’ (John 14:27). [The disciples’] distress and fear were certainly connected to the violence soon to befall him. But, more deeply, the Gospels do not hide the fact that what troubled the disciples was his nonviolent response: a path that they all, Peter first among them, contested; yet the Master asked them to follow this path to the end. The way of Jesus continues to cause unease and fear. He firmly repeats to those who would defend him by force: ‘Put your sword back into its sheath’ (John 18:11; cf. Matthew 26:52). The peace of the risen Jesus is unarmed, because his was an unarmed struggle in the midst of concrete historical, political and social circumstances. Christians must together bear prophetic witness to this novelty, mindful of the tragedies in which they have too often been complicit.”

In an interview with Vatican News, Marie Dennis, director of Pax Christi’s Catholic Institute for Nonviolence, elaborated, “That reaction [of the disciples] is very familiar. We tend to think that nonviolence in the face of such overwhelming violence is naïve or impossible.”

“What we are learning is that nonviolent strategies work and they often work better than armed responses.”

Later in his message, the pope goes on to offer “experiences of nonviolent participation, and practices of restorative justice on both a small and large scale” as an antidote to the despair and discouragement being sown in service to the desire of some to dominate others.

What lends even greater weight to Pope Leo’s World Day of Peace message was the backdrop against which it was released. Shortly before the message on Christmas Day, President Trump bombed Nigeria; and two days after, more US bombs fell in Venezuela. 

Such atrocities are enough to wring from us what little hope we have left. But if you’re looking to revive that hope, look at how, over the past decade, the Catholic Church has been more deeply embracing nonviolence. And how – no matter how difficult it may be to believe – the snowflake that breaks the branch may already be falling.

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Johnny Zokovitch is the former executive director of Pax Christi USA. He currently serves on the board of the Pax Christi International Fund for Peace and is in pastoral leadership at St. Cronan Catholic Church in St. Louis.