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Ring out the thousand wars of
old,” the verse goes. “Ring in the thousand years of peace.”
Is there a more insistent or deeply felt yearning among humans
than the desire for peace? We speak of it constantly, we wish it, we beg for
it, pray for it. And yet.
As we turn the corner on a new year, it appears inevitable that
the thousand wars of old will only multiply.
On my way into work one recent morning, I was behind a car with
the bumper sticker, “If you want peace, prepare for war.”
One might understand the raw instinct behind the line, which can
be traced, at least in one derivative form, to a James Russell Lowell poem. The
ones with the biggest guns, the thinking used to go, could enforce the peace
and generally have their way. We know now that’s not necessarily so, which
leaves the world in an even more precarious state and with a particularly
nagging new question: How to prepare for war in an age of global terrorism?
Is it completely out of the question to suggest a different
argument? How about: If you want peace, prepare for peace?
It is not in our bones to think that way. Colman McCarthy, a
writer whose work frequently appears in these pages and who, for decades, has
been devoted to researching and teaching peacemaking, has a flip answer for
those who say nonviolence doesn’t get results in the real world. “You
give me $90 million a day,” he says, “and I’ll get you
results.”
It’s flip, but not any more than prepare for war if you want
peace. How would a 21st century culture prepare for peace? What would be the
work involved? Where would one spend the money? Into what would a culture place
its resources and best minds? Right now, as far as the public treasury goes,
war making has everything trumped.
As Pat Morrison’s story on Page
3 shows, the situation in Israel and the Palestinian Territories continues to
deteriorate. As NCR went to press, we learned from several parish
leaders, seminary staff and religious in the Holy Land that the Israeli
government’s foot-dragging in issuing or renewing visas for Catholic
church workers is effectively paralyzing movement in and out of the country and
consequently the church’s pastoral work.
In a statement released earlier in December, Patriarch Michel
Sabbah, the leader of Latin Catholics in Jerusalem, said the Catholic church
there has been subjected to harassment by the Israeli government in recent
months, particularly through inaction on visas and residency permits for
seminarians and church workers.
Church leaders reported that as many as 70 priests and religious
were waiting for visas. Sabbah said, “Numerous procedures have been
undertaken over the past months by the seminary itself, by the official organs
of the patriarchate and by the Apostolic Delegation of Jerusalem [the
pope’s representative]. Until the present time, no satisfactory response
has been given.”
While most of the attention recently has been given to overt acts
of violence, the latest tactics by the Israeli government, in the words of one
priest, is “a systematic way of making life for Christians and
non-Israelis more difficult. And the fact that the church works with the
Palestinian people is part of it, too.”
-- Tom Roberts
My e-mail address is troberts@natcath.org
National Catholic Reporter, January 10,
2003
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