by Johnny Zokovitch
On September 9-10, more than 100 peace practitioners, pastoral leaders, bishops and priests, women religious, social scientists and theologians gathered in Rome for a two-day conference entitled “Unarmed and Disarming Peace: The Church’s Emerging Paradigm Shift to Gospel Nonviolence.” The conference was sponsored by the Catholic Institute for Nonviolence, a project of Pax Christi International’s Catholic Nonviolence Initiative. The conference drew representatives from over 90 organizations working in 55 different countries around the world.
The conference was convened on the 10th anniversary of a first-of-its-kind gathering on nonviolence commissioned by the Pax Christi International and the Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace (now the Dicastery for Integral Human Development) under Pope Francis. It was a landmark undertaking that witnessed leaders at every level of the Catholic Church exploring together the call of nonviolence and just peace in the framework of Catholic thought and practice.
“I am profoundly moved to be among you, believers in the power of peace, who aspire to bring peace to a fractured world,” stated Cardinal Charles Maung Bo of Myanmar who opened this year’s conference by acknowledging the extraordinary work on nonviolence already being done by conference participants. “For too long, nonviolence has been treated as an optional lifestyle choice or a secondary vocation for a select few. This conference asserts a deeper truth: nonviolence belongs at the absolute center of Catholic life and teaching.”
While Cardinal Bo’s assertion that “nonviolence belongs at the absolute center of Catholic life and teaching” might seem aspirational to some, for grassroots peace practitioners attending the conference, the centrality of nonviolence is not only already a reality but also a necessity.
A smaller cohort of approximately 30 advocates, civil society leaders, pastoral ministers, missioners, and community organizers spent the week leading up to the larger conference engaged in a training on “Gospel Nonviolence in Action.” The training resulted in the building of a community of practice and support while honing the development of the concrete skills and theoretical framework that are essential for strategies of nonviolence to address the situations of conflict from which many of them came. Their conversations during the training demonstrated in real time what Cardinal Bo was suggesting – that nonviolence is already moving from the peripheries to the center of thought and practice within the Catholic Church.
The range of experience of the training participants encompassed both the challenges and wisdom gleaned from addressing war in South Sudan, gang violence in Guatemala, advocacy and accompaniment of immigrants at the US-Mexico border, reconciliation efforts in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, programs of protective presence in support of civilians in Palestine, restorative justice efforts with Indigenous communities, and more. Their work wasn’t defined simply by an approach that makes use of nonviolent tools to transform conflict and de-escalate violence, but flowed from a deep place of faith that understands the comprehensiveness of a specifically termed “gospel nonviolence.”
The days of training were spent unpacking and articulating what gospel nonviolence means and what it looks like in practice. The process of the training itself was designed to be a communal experiment in the practice of gospel nonviolence, with sessions organized around understanding conflict and violence, mapping the broad spectrum of nonviolent strategies and tools, reviewing social movements foundational to gospel nonviolence, exploring spiritual practices, understanding power, designing campaigns, building resilience, and a host of other components.
Echoing the observations of those present for the first conference in 2016, the participants in this training enriched the ongoing efforts to center nonviolence in the church by sharing the concrete experiences of their personal engagement in work for peace in the world, often in situations of extreme, entrenched and generational violence. It is from their commitment that the potential transformative power of gospel nonviolence takes on form, becomes real, and testifies to the effectiveness of the nonviolence inherent in the vision, message and life of Jesus.
At the conference, participants in the training heard Cardinal Bo end his address with this plea:
“Dear brothers and sisters, we stand at a critical historical crossroads. We can either continue sliding down the path of escalating global violence, or we can choose to put nonviolence at the absolute center of Catholic life and teaching.”
Those who participated in the training are showing us – in flesh and bone, right now – what centering gospel nonviolence in the Catholic Church actually looks like.
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. Read more from Johnny at https://johnnyzokovitch.substack.com/ and sign up there to receive his articles directly to your email inbox.