“We say killing is disorder. Life and gentleness and community and unselfishness is the only order we recognize. For the sake of that order, we risk our liberty, our good name. The time is past when good people can remain silent, when obedience can segregate people from public risk, when the poor can die without defense.”
“We ask our fellow Christians to consider in their hearts a question that has tortured us, night and day, since the war began:
“How many must die before our voices are heard, how many must be tortured, dislocated, starved, maddened? How long must the world’s resources be raped in the service of legalized murder? When, at what point, will you say no to this war?”
As contemporary as it may sound, this prophetic clarion was penned forty years ago by US ‘radical priest’ Daniel Berrigan as he, his brother Philip and a small group of other “illustrious Catholic resisters” prepared for an act of nonviolent resistance to the war on Viet Nam. They became known as the Catonsville Nine.
The war on Iraq has reinvigorated Christian nonviolent resistance, in the tradition of Dorothy Day and Martin Luther King Jnr. Its moral premise understands obedience to an unjust power as complicity in injustice. Christians pacifists are further inspired by the Hebrew prophecy that nations ‘shall beat their swords into ploughshares, and . . . study war no more’.
Let us add our ‘Amen’ in prayer and action.
