The Ancient Eddy
If our preemptive, aggressive invasion of a foreign land that lasted fifteen years and killed almost a quarter of a million people can be justified in terms of self-defense, and a war that killed 75 million people can be referred to by Christians as “The Good War,” I don’t think we’re going to be able to appeal to reason or the moral law to try to convince Israel that what they are doing does not meet the sniff test. Frankly, if we American Catholics think we can lecture anyone about justified killing, or about the moral law or about how God is the author of life from beginning to end or about how all life is sacred, I call to mind the words of Dr. Jones from that 2019 podcast:
“This is delusion!” he yelled, as he leaned forward, pointing at his brain.
Essays of a Catholic
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And good luck trying to convince a woman she shouldn’t have an abortion, by the way. After all, she intends to “end the pregnancy” not kill the baby. It’s called double effect. But the baby is innocent! So? She’s not doing it indiscriminately. She gave birth to her first five kids. She just doesn’t want to have any more.
Did God ever say a woman should be forced to have a baby? Even Mary was given a choice…
The only hint of “double-effect” that I can find in the Gospels, by the way, is in Matthew 26:52: “Those who live by the sword die by the sword.” Think about how different this is from the double-effect described in the Catechism, especially when it is preceded in the Gospel by the words: “Put down your sword.” How simple! How clear! How unambiguous! Simone Weil, in her brilliant essay about The Iliad, understands double-effect: “Such is the nature of force. Its power of converting a man into a thing is a double one, and in its application double-edged. To the same degree, though in different fashions, those who use it and those who endure it are turned to stone.” Maybe this “petrifactive effect” as she calls it explains all the suicides. Nothing about that in the section on War in the Catechism either.
Weil writes: “Force is pitiless to the man who possesses it, or thinks he does, as it is to its victims; the second it crushes, the first it intoxicates.” This is depicted in every great film or play or story about war ever written. I know there is something in the Catechism about how “sin creates proclivity to sin” but that appears in a different section. I guess they can’t put it right next to all the war stuff because then someone might confuse “rendering the unjust aggressor unable to do harm” with sin. Why men still suffer the devastating effects of sin when all they are doing is “rendering the unjust aggressor unable to do harm” is beyond me—and a question the Catechism fails to address.
I am so sick of hearing people say with a tone of gritty realism: “War is hell.” That has become the worst cliche of all. Hell is the absence of God, a place filled with evil. If we Catholics believed that war is hell, if we really believed that, we wouldn’t see it as a cure, or any kind of option, even as a last resort. Because we Christians know we can not control evil and we certainly cannot outsmart evil. (We can’t even outsmart the social engineers who keep sending us off to war!) We certainly cannot do evil in order to bring about good. Father Walter H. Halloran was the Jesuit priest who took part in the exorcism upon which the book and the film The Exorcist were based. He was also a paratrooper chaplain in Vietnam. He is reported to have said: “I saw more evil in Vietnam than I ever did in that boy’s bedroom.” I believe it. So why do we think we can seek the Kingdom of God by participating in Hell on Earth? We must be just like the pagan Chorus in the play Agamemnon, who repeat the line over and over: Cry, sorrow, sorrow. Yet let good prevail! They come across as so helpless, so impotent, so—stuck.
There are no streams of the tradition. That’s what I think. There is no Just War as far as I can see. There exists no war that meets the criteria for both jus ad bellum and jus in bello outside of our own minds. There is no Gospel Nonviolence in our minds, and therefore there is none in practice. So these “two streams of the tradition” are more like an eddy, a very dark, very stagnant, very ancient eddy. Neither is a channel that helps us “cast our waters into the bright sea”! The Just Defense track is too crammed with corpses and the Gospel Nonviolence track is all fogged up. We don’t even know where it leads or whether they’ve even laid down all the track. Nobody wants to go there. Too scary, even scarier, apparently, than World War III.
Truth is the mind’s conformance to reality. If we Catholics are content to let the situation remain as is, then we should at least stop saying “War is hell” and start saying instead: “War is a festival.” It would be more honest. Freud defined a festival as “a permitted, or rather an obligatory, excess, a column breach of a prohibition,” in this case the prohibition against killing. This is why governments are so eager to label anything a war; all the better if there is no clear end point, because in war, there are different rules. If we’re being honest, war is the last pagan festival, more like, in the words of Freud, a “sacrificial custom…whose virtue lies ultimately in its very impiety.” Think about how we say “war is hell” on the one hand, and then have to praise the soldier for his “sacrifice” and “service” on the other. Rene Girard wrote: “Sacrifice and festival are one in the same right…This mechanism provides the only feasible explanation of how a sacrificial murder, originally regarded as a crime, can literally be transformed into an act of piety.” As you walk across the floors of the Cathedral in your headscarf, you are symbolically delivering a blow to the fascist enemy…
Again, one of the reasons we all love E. Michael Jones is that he doesn’t equivocate. He also happens to be a great listener, if you have something to say. All of this makes him someone you can talk to, dialogue with. But I fear that, because of your own level of intelligence and intellectual honesty, Dr. Jones, you put a little too much stock in human reason and philosophy as a means of elevating consciousness for humanity.
The pagans understood better than we do, I think, that reason is corrupted by sin. In Aeschylus’s Oresteain Trilogy Clytemnestra is trying to justify her act of killing her husband, armed with all the usual arguments and appeals to justice, and the Chorus, who knows that what she did is wrong, responds:
Where, where lies Right? Reason despairs her powers, mind numbly gropes. Her quick resources spent.
Rene Girard put it in his own words when he said (I paraphrase): people are often loathe to admit that the reasons used to justify violence on both sides of a conflict are equally valid.
King Oedipus killed not only his father, the former king, but the three other men who were traveling with the king. When I ask my students why, they often say, “He snapped and went crazy!” But Oedipus killed three people not because he went crazy or was a psychopath, but because: once he had killed the king, he had to kill the three other men so they couldn’t take revenge on him for killing the king. It is the nature of violence to escalate.
Weil writes: “A moderate use of force, which alone would enable a man to escape being enmeshed in its machinery, would require a superhuman virtue, which is as rare as dignity in weakness.” Dignity in weakness sounds a lot like the Cross, which was a scandal to the Jews, and foolishness to the Greeks. Is it any less scandalous and foolish to us, we Americans who spend more on defense than the next seven countries combined? Do the Russians find dignity in weakness? Does Israel? Does the Just Defense doctrine simply assume that men “who have responsibility for the common good” (2309) will exercise this “superhuman virtue” as a matter of routine? If the followers of Christ, like George Bush, can’t even do it, how do we expect Jewish leaders like Bibi Netanyahu to?
I saw one clear theme stand out at the Republican National Convention this year: “Fight! Fight! Fight!” These were Trump’s “spontaneous” words after supposedly being saved by God from a 20-year-old assassin’s bullet (and allowed an incredible photo opportunity in the process). The words “Fight! Fight! Fight!” were echoed by Kid Rock and then chanted by the entire crowd. But fight for whom? For what? This is the question the Hitler-loving white boys will have to answer when they get drafted to go fight World War III, the perennial question of war: Whose side is God on? Should I die for the gay disco or defect to Russia and fight alongside the Nazi’s historical enemies? There has never been a more confusing time to kill.
But there are some things that are not confusing. It says in the Catechism: “The prohibition of murder does not abrogate the right to render an unjust aggressor unable to inflict harm” (2321). (Actually, you might have to read that twice.) Anyway, who gets to determine who the “unjust aggressor” is? Oedipus claims: “I do.” Who gets to determine when that unjust aggressor is no longer able to inflict harm? Israel claims: “We do.”
All of this is almost enough to make you wonder if maybe, just maybe, Jesus wasn’t the ultimate realist, and if the Just Defense doctrine—which he did not teach— is actually the thing that has caught Christian hearts in a “savage delusion” and “walks the air above men’s heads” leading them astray. A person could learn more about the human condition, the nature of violence and the machinations of evil from reading ten lines in Sophocles, or one play by Aeschylus, than they ever could from reading the Church’s teaching on Just Defense and the Fifth Commandment.
Aristotle said the heart of tragedy is man fallen into misery not due to vice or depravity, but due to some error. (Poetics)
John Paul II wrote it Fides et Ratio: “This is the human condition vividly described by the Book of Genesis when it tells us that God placed the human being in the Garden of Eden, in the middle of which there stood ‘the tree of knowledge of good and evil’ (2:17). The symbol is clear: man was in no position to discern and decide for himself what was good and what was evil, but was constrained to appeal to a higher source. The blindness of pride deceived our first parents into thinking themselves sovereign and autonomous, and into thinking that they could ignore the knowledge which comes from God. All men and women were caught up in this primal disobedience, which so wounded reason that from then on its path to full truth would be strewn with obstacles. From that time onwards the human capacity to know the truth was impaired by an aversion to the One who is the source and origin of truth. It is again the Apostle who reveals just how far human thinking, because of sin, became ‘empty,’ and human reasoning became distorted and inclined to falsehood (cf. Rom 1:21-22). The eyes of the mind were no longer able to see clearly: reason became more and more a prisoner to itself. The coming of Christ was the saving event which redeemed reason for its weakness, setting it free from the shackles in which it had imprisoned itself.”
Our Polar Night
The Latin verb “orior” means “to rise.” It is associated with the East because the first thing a pilgrim has to do in the morning is orient him- or herself by the direction of the sun. Daylight can help you to see clearly but only the sun can tell you which way to go. Consider that there are places on the earth in times of the year when the sun never sets, nor will it pass overhead; instead it will appear to move from left to right across the horizon, and the sun will remain visible even at midnight. During a polar night the sun will remain hidden all day, and the observer will experience something like a constant blue twilight, as the sun’s light is refracted through clouds, sea and snow. The sun’s path across the sky, whether it be high or low, as well as the length of time it will appear above the horizon, is determined by the axial tilt of the earth, the time of year, and the latitude at which the observer is standing. We are living in a time when logos is indeed rising, but the trajectory of its arc, and therefore the degree to which it will be able to light and warm the earth, remains to be seen. We Christians are disoriented. We can’t see the Way. And frankly, that makes us dumb.
The effects of cognitive dissonance are that devastating: spiritually, globally, eternally. This state of affairs poses a threat to the salvation of souls, because first and foremost, our Lord Jesus Christ taught a Way of nonviolent love of friends and enemies.
This Way is what He taught.
This Way is what He lived.
This Way is how He died.
Nobody can deny that. Surely, we are meant to grapple with this mystery and not disregard it, avoid it, compartmentalize it, minimize it, or rationalize it away for fear of its implications.
By now, it can no longer be argued that Jesus did not teach a way of nonviolent love because he told his apostles to buy a sword or because he turned over tables in the temple or because the god of the Old Testament was called upon to help people smite their enemies. All of those objections are mere cliches. The scholarship on this has been done. The issue is settled. This is another assertion I don’t have time to thoroughly back-up in this essay (it would require a book), but I’ll offer one quick point: Fr. John L. McKenzie, one of the most pre-eminent Catholic theologians of the 20th century, wrote: “If we cannot know that Jesus was nonviolent, we can know nothing of his person. It is the clearest of teachings.”
I think of a line by one of my favorite singer-songwriters, Neko Case: “It was so clear to me that it was almost invisible.”
Gospel Nonviolence is the older stream of the tradition, the original stream, and is the presumptive stance of the Church. Just Defense is supposed to be the exception, not the rule. It attempts to carve out very specific criteria that must be “strictly applied” in order for a Christian to be able to justify going to war. Nobody, including Saint Ambrose and Saint Augustine, ever said the criteria could be met. Furthermore, Saint Augustine said that it was a only a theory of state, and that if a person was individually threatened, he must die in imitation of his Creator!
Yet, Just Defense is considered by most Catholics to be normative while Gospel Nonviolence is regarded an eccentric choice or a “moral option” a Catholic would consider only when he’s backed into a corner and out of options: outnumbered, outsmarted, or outgunned. The cognitive dissonance experienced by followers of Jesus results in a situation of diabolical reversal; in doing so, it allows Christians become mentally captivated by something other than the Way, the Truth, and the Life that Jesus came to reveal. This means the conscience cannot be properly formed, which assures that the Christian’s processes of moral reasoning will be handicapped, stunted, severely impeded.
Another way of thinking about this is: Theology is the Queen of the Sciences and Philosophy is her handmaid. When Gospel Nonviolence gets dropped, there is no tension in the mind between Theology and Philosophy, and Catholics default to a purely philosophical way of thinking about violence, based on natural law, that no longer stands in its proper relationship to Divine Law, or Revelation, and I would argue has very little relationship to the realities of violence and war. (Let’s not pretend that Just War Doctrine is the product of the tension. Cicero came up with the first Just War Doctrine before God became Flesh. It is a work of philosophy and the product of human reasoning without reference to anything Jesus ever said or did in the Gospels.) Once that tension gets dropped, what makes the Catholic any different from the pagan or the Jew? To quote Pope Benedict XVI: “For philosophy … listening to the great experiences and insights of the …Christian faith in particular, is a source of knowledge, and to ignore it would be an unacceptable restriction …”
Once his moral reasoning is short-circuited, the Catholic becomes casually dismissive, if not smugly contemptuous, of Jesus’s teachings. Imagine that 11-year-old kid sitting by the campfire and the priest explaining Just Defense doctrine to him.
The kid says: “But Jesus says right there: If you try to save your life in this world, you will lose it, but if you lose your life for my sake and the sake of the Gospels, you will save it.”
The priest says: “Jesus isn’t talking about your biological life. He’s talking about the things you have an unhealthy attachment to, like your wealth or your reputation or your favorite Lego set.”
“Are you sure, Father? Because I found this other part where Jesus says: Do not worry about those who can kill the body but worry about those who can kill both the body and the soul…..”
“Well, if you want to let yourself get killed, kid, I suppose that’s your choice, but the Church teaches in Catechism section 2265 that ‘legitimate defense can be not only a right but a grave duty for one who is responsible for the lives of others.’ You can’t just stand by and let people get slaughtered.”
“I know but — Jesus said — love your enemies.’”
“But the Catechism section 2264 says ‘love towards oneself remains a fundamental principle of morality.’ And just because you’re throwing a grenade at your enemy and shredding them to pieces doesn’t mean you don’t love them.”
How I wish this kid would respond with a line from Oedipus Rex: “Wag on, smart tongue! I’ve never met an honest man subtle in argument!”
But it is likely that this kid will simply “drop” the teachings of Jesus and will never take Jesus seriously ever again, nor will he ever take the Church seriously again. Is it any wonder Catholic kids are still marching off to go fight in every war the government tells them is necessary,”despite 100 years of strongly worded cautionary letters issued from the See of Peter? Like every other Catholic, that kid will adopt the thinking: Life is sacred (blah blah blah) and God alone is the Lord of life from the beginning until its end (blah blah blah) and in the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus recalls the commandment, You shall not (blah blah blah)— but in the end, you gotta do what you gotta do. And I’ll decide for myself what I gotta do based on what the government tells me I gotta do because at least what the government tells me I gotta do makes some kind of logical sense. And I’ll interpret all of that gobbledygook in the Catechism for myself, thank you very much.
At this point, he is putty in the hands of the war planners and social engineers. All they will have to do is convince him, “If you don’t do this, something worse will happen. We have to do the bad thing to prevent the worse thing from happening. So the bad thing is not really a bad thing, it’s good, you see?” And of course no one can see the future, so nobody can really prove that the worse thing would have happened, or that if it did happen, it would be worse than if it didn’t, because no one can measure or quantify evil. But you’ve got him in a double bind. He’ll start thinking like the pagan King Agamemnon (who wasn’t too bright), when he was contemplating the bad, bad thing he “had” to do in order to get the wind to sail to Troy:
What can I say? Disaster follows if I disobey; surely yet worse disaster if I yield…
In the words of King Agamemnon (who, I remind you, wasn’t too bright):
May good prevail and justify my deed.
Then he put on
The harness of Necessity.
A harness is something that is used to control—an animal. (Isn’t that one meaning of the word “goy”?) And notice it wasn’t put upon him by some god. He put it on himself. So was it really done out of necessity—or was it a choice? Aeschylus was a veteran of war, and a proud one at that, yet even he seems to want us to think about this.
JPII writes: “…men and women are always called to direct their steps towards a truth which transcends them. Sundered from that truth, individuals are at the mercy of caprice…” Sundered from that truth, individuals are disoriented—and dumb. Aeschylus describes the moment when the Greeks choose to ignore the prohibition against killing the innocent in order to get the wind to sail to Troy. Aeschylus matches EMJ in his bluntness when he assesses the situation:
They valued more
Their glory, and their war.
Trump is freedom, white boys, freedom Trump. That is all ye know, and all ye need to know.
We are told by the USCCB: “There are two streams of the tradition which always remain in tension.” There is no tension. How can you have tension between two things when one of them is either entirely unknown by 90% of Catholics or, once it is introduced, is dropped as the result of cognitive dissonance? You can’t. Just Defense doctrine is a philosophical idea based on natural law, and let’s face it: It rules the day because it appeals to common sense, and in comparison, Gospel Nonviolence when not taught well sounds to the average person like a Freudian death wish.
But what if that’s because we don’t understand Gospel Nonviolence?
And if we don’t understand it, how can we ever act on it?
And what happens if we fail to act on it?
This is dangerous!
Saint Paul warned us: See to it that no one captivate you with an empty, seductive philosophy according to human tradition, according to the elemental powers of the world and not according to Christ. (Colossians 2:8)
The Hidden Grammar of the Hidden Grammar of The Universe
“Aristotle didn’t know the world was created. But now that we understand the world you can look at the world and understand there’s beauty there because God created it and if you look at it long enough, you will be able to imitate that — art is imitation of nature — you will be able to imitate that and create beauty in your world. That’s what happened here. So if it weren’t for that crucifix, we wouldn’t have it, it wouldn’t happen. Because it provided protection, it provides an organizing principle, it allows you to tear into the hidden grammar of the universe which is LOGOS, thesis the logos incarnate. It’s Europe and what are we in the process of doing, what’s the wicked American empire in the process of doing? Turning all of these states into vassal states whose main purpose is to turn provide cannon fodder for some war that some Jew wants to have…we have to be able to break away from this control. …And what am I talking about? A philosophical understanding of the Catholic Faith, of the depths of reality……” – EMJ on Gemma Doherty’s podcast
I agree with Dr. Jones completely! But he has not gone far enough. I realize that I am the first person in the history of the world to ever utter the words: “E. Michael Jones has not gone far enough.” I want to propose a few ways this situation can be rectified, short of the Pope calling an ecumenical council and abolishing Just Defense doctrine forever (which I personally would support). No, I do not expect that my remedies will end war or abolish human violence from the face of the Earth. I do think they will create conditions in which it will be easier for Christians to know, love, and serve the Lord, preach the Gospel, and bear witness to the truth, which is what we are called to do. Consistency, after all, is key to credible witness.
First, we must no longer practice avoidance. If the twentieth century didn’t teach us the price we pay for avoidance, I don’t know what will. Some people seem to think that we can get away with continuing to avoid the topic of Gospel Nonviolence as long as we do a better job of teaching Just War doctrine. That is not true. I can make this statement because, as I said before, both of my own brothers fought in the preemptive war in Iraq. One of them majored in math and philosophy before becoming an officer in the Marine Corps and going to Iraq in 2003. He is extremely intelligent. I found out years later that the topic of his senior year philosophy thesis was—Just War Theory! The problem was not that he didn’t get it. I think the problem was that Just War Theory (as it was called then) was not taught alongside Gospel Nonviolence, so he couldn’t see them in relief. He was never given the chance to compare the two. For him as for most Catholics, nonviolence was a non-thought. (Sometimes I have to wonder if this is not done intentionally so as to keep Catholics in an Edenic state of “invincible ignorance.”)
Second, the relationship between these two streams of the tradition is described by the USCCB as “shifting,” so: Let’s allow it to shift, and to shift dramatically enough so as to correct the state of diabolical reversal previously explained. In my experience, Catholics tend to believe that everything in the Catechism has equal weight and is permanently frozen, which is not true. Many Catholics don’t understand the difference between Dogma and Doctrine, or Tradition and tradition (custom). This is the root of the confusion, and as soon as you clear that up, a large part of the cognitive dissonance with regard to Church teaching on violence and war tends to resolve itself; and Catholics are better able to see how the Holy Spirit guides the Church without putting its permanent stamp of infallible approval on everything ever uttered or written by someone in the Church.
I have found that the best way to to address this issue and clear up the confusion is to educate Catholics about the 8 Levels of Acceptance and Certainty in the Church. I don’t know if the Church has officially “stamped” the Just Defense doctrine with a certain level but it seems safe to assume that Just Defense doctrine would fall somewhere on the seventh or eighth level of certainty, especially when you consider the following quote that appeared in La Civilta Cattolica in 1991: “It becomes clear that theology has sustained the theory of ‘Just War’ for many centuries, a theory which however never became official, which never was blessed by the Magisterium of the Church.” More quotes like this, which speak of the standing of the doctrine in the Church must be found, collected, and widely circulated, then researched by people who are smarter than me need to figure out what the deal is here. How could that have been written in a publication officially approved by the Vatican? Sustained for centuries without being “blessed”? Let’s not tell that to the 11-year-old boy sitting by the fire. He might end up throwing his Catechism in the fire. Let’s just tell that 11-year-old boy that Jesus’s teachings are way, way, way up here in terms of levels of acceptance and certainty and Just Defense doctrine is way, way, way down here, because Jesus was God and the men who wrote the Just Defense doctrine were not. That will go a long way toward correcting things.
Moreover, when teaching both “streams of the tradition,” we do not need to give them equal time. The four hours that they are spending on Just Defense in seminaries is probably too much. Since Just Defense doctrine can easily be grasped by any 14-year-old in about ten minutes (HERE’S THE PART WHERE IT SAYS WHEN YOU CAN KILL SOMEONE!), we should give it about ten minutes. Gospel Nonviolence is based on the Gospels, which is of infinite depth. A person can wrestle with it, investigate it, “ponder it in their heart” for years, even decades. Whereas Just Defense applies only in certain situations (situations which, let’s face it, most Catholics will never find themselves in, and situations which Pope Benedict XVI seemed to imply could be nonexistent), Gospel Nonviolence can be applied moment-to-moment in every day life, according to the 11th commandment: Love one another as I have loved you. Therefore, it makes sense that Gospel Nonviolence should be given more time and attention, not less!
Third, we need to legitimize Gospel Nonviolence, which means we need to legitimize those who question and critique Just Defense doctrine, which is what Pope Benedict said twenty years ago we “should” be doing. A man named Ben Salmon did this very thing over 100 years ago, back in 1917, during World War I, before Iraq was invaded, before the CIA was created, before we understood things like P.T.S.D. and “moral injury,’ before the U.N. defined “war crimes,” before the atomic bomb was built, before Hitler and the Holocaust. A devout Catholic, Ben Salmon said: “There is no such animal as a Just War.” For this and for registering as a Conscientious Objector, the Knights of Columbus kicked him out of their club! The secular authorities arrested him and when he wouldn’t capitulate, sent him to a mental hospital, where he was put in a ward for the criminally insane and asked to write a history of his “mental illness,” which is what it was considered back then when a Christian took an absolute stand against killing! If Benedict did not mean to advocate the critiquing and questioning of the doctrine itself, then he must have meant we should at least be questioning its applicability to real life at this stage in history, which is what Blessed Franz Jagerstatter did when he refused to fight for Hitler in World War II because he said Hitler was fighting an unjust war. He didn’t fare much better: His fellow Christians beheaded him. (Surely out of self-defense!)
It should be perfectly acceptable to question and critique the Just Defense doctrine given its low level of acceptance and certainty the church and after taking honest stock of its fruits. Those who do so in a spirit of critical enquiry should not be accused of failing to adhere to the guidance of the Magisterium, disregarding the Church’s teaching on faith and morals, or setting him- or herself against the teachings of the Catholic Church. No Catholic is obligated to show “assent of intellect and will” to the Just War doctrine, period. So we need to stop treating it like a sacred cow and Gospel Nonviolence like a potential contaminant. We need to engage critics of the Just Defense doctrine rather than trying to delegitimize and silence them. After all, who was on the right side of history: Ben Salmon and Franz Jagerstatter or their persecutors? Let us, like the pagans and these twentieth century prophets, embrace a spirit of critical enquiry surrounding the issue. Sometimes, the most important questions are the most basic ones. In the words of Aeschylus’s Chorus:
Cry, sorrow, sorrow!
Yet let good prevail!
But what is good?
And who is God?
Fourth, we need to give people a philosophical understanding of the Catholic Faith and of the depths of reality, and we cannot do that without teaching Gospel Nonviolence, because Jesus is Logos and that is what Jesus taught. We need to teach it actively and we need to teach it well. If Just Defense doctrine can be taught as a set of philosophical propositions that make logical sense, we should be able to teach Gospel Nonviolence in that same way: systematically and philosophically, not as a “rare, one-off event.” Only then can people see how and why the teachings of Jesus are theo-logical, and not utopian, silly, or unrealistic. Seven years ago, Pope Francis said on the 50th anniversary of the World Day of Peace that “to be true followers of Jesus today also includes embracing his teaching about nonviolence.” You can’t embrace something you’ve never heard of and don’t understand and have never been taught anything about.
Fifth, let us not be afraid to teach Gospel Nonviolence! Pope Saint John Paul II said in his Day of Peace message on January 1, 1979: “To everyone, Christians, believers, and men and women of good will, I say: Do not be afraid to take a chance on peace, to teach peace.” When I first read this I thought it was strange: Why would someone be afraid to teach peace? After ten years of trying to do just that, I have a better understanding. In Fides et Ratio, Pope Saint John Paul II wrote: “The natural limitation of reason and the inconstancy of the heart often obscure and distort a person’s search. Truth can also drown in a welter of other concerns. People can even run from the truth as soon as they glimpse it because they are afraid of its demands.”
An example of a welter of other concerns: I was recently trying to get my Gospel Nonviolence curriculum approved by the Archdiocese of Denver so I could teach it in my parish. After many months of review, the Chancellor told me he thought it would “not be prudent to present in a parish setting as there would be too many potential pitfalls for the average parishioner.” By this I think he meant that it would create too much cognitive dissonance and would make people start questioning the Just War doctrine and would therefore make the Church look bad. One can’t always overcome those concerns, but I do think it’s possible to help people overcome fear. We can remind people that: Man has the right to act in conscience and in freedom so as personally to make moral decisions. “He must not be forced to act contrary to his conscience. Nor must he be prevented from acting according to his conscience, especially in religious matters.” (CCC 1782) So if you encounter a situation wherein you feel you must use violence, like if an old granny is getting mugged or something, you can go with your conscience, but your job as a Christian is to form your conscience, and that is what the learning about Gospel Nonviolence is all about. So you should have no fear of its demands!
We should actually be afraid not to teach Gospel Nonviolence. After all, Our Lord didn’t just say go get baptized. That’s a good first step, but then what? He said: “Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, and teaching them to obey all that I have commanded you.” (Matthew 28:19-20) And when Jesus told the servants to go fill the jars with water, which would have made absolutely no sense to them, Mary said: “Do whatever He tells you.” (John 2:5)
Sixth, let us not forget that Logos is the good, the true, and the beautiful! Christ is the Prince of Peace. When we imitate Christ, we create beauty in our world! Beauty attracts. There is only one bishop I know of in the United States who not only spoke out against the Iraq War in 2003, but sent his people a letter telling them it was unjust and that they were not allowed to fight in it. (Imagine if every bishop had done that!) His name is Bishop John Botean. A listener of my podcast wrote to me: “I appreciate your work. You read Bishop Botean’s Lenten exhortation…seeing he and the Pope opposed the wars in 2000s helped bring me back to the Church.” When I sent this to the Bishop, he responded: “Thanks, Ellen. I continue to be amazed that that letter keeps showing up. We have a whole new group of members at our Cathedral because of it!” That’s what I call logos rising!
Invitation
As I mentioned before, there are places on the earth in times of the year when the sun remains visible even at midnight, and other places and times when the sun never appears at all. What is so interesting is that in winter, when certain places are experiencing their polar night, and the surface of the Earth is dark and cold, the Earth is actually at its perihelion, which is the point when the Earth is closest to the sun. Even when things are at their darkest, God is “not far,” though we may have to “grope for him” (Acts 17:27).
“There’s a transition that we have to make here…We have to become somehow philosophical .. This is a more complicated world…and we have to come up with a way..I’m talking with people all over the world and the one institution that can do it is the Catholic Church. We have the technology we have the lingua franca which is English now but we need the philosophical basis. We need the basic categories. I’m sitting here with Americans. You know, you’re trying to talk to someone who has been baptized a Catholic and they bring to the conversation one cliche after another…we have to break down these cliches. They’re not helping you. They’re distorting your world. Rise up. Have this transcendental view because beauty is a transcendental.” – EMJ
I would like invite you, Dr. Jones, and you, the Culture Wars reader, and at the CAM listener, and the LRC reader, to attend a Pre-Advent Online Retreat with me and Fr. McCarthy to learn about, contemplate, and wrestle with Jesus’s teachings of nonviolent love of friends and enemies during the month of November. In their own time, participants will listen to “Behold the Lamb,” a series of sixteen recordings of talks that were given by Fr. Emmanuel Charles McCarthy at the Knock Shrine in Ireland, and we will convene every Tuesday night in the month of November for some prayer and discussion (5 pm Pacific, 8 pm Eastern). Behold the Lamb is the best, and perhaps the only, resource that can give us the philosophical basis for Gospel Nonviolence and the basic categories to think and talk about it. It will help us to break down cliches about war and violence and pacifism and achieve a transcendental view of our world. It did this for Father George Zabelka, who was the Catholic Chaplain to the Hiroshima-Nagasaki Atomic Bomb Crew. He said: “Fr. McCarthy’s retreat was the turning point in my conversion to Christian Nonviolence.” Fr. Zabelka understood that the education of the conscience is a lifelong task. (CCC 1784)
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I would be especially excited if Dr. Jones would join the retreat, because the other problem I have with him—besides the fact that he would rescue an innocent granny who was being mugged against the explicit teachings of Jesus (kidding, I’m kidding)— is that he spends most of his time online talking with intellectual pygmies like me! Rarely do you ever see him interact with someone on his level. I think Fr. McCarthy is on his level and in the interest of iron sharpening iron, I would love to hear Dr. Jones’s responses to Fr. McCarthy’s lectures. Moreover, it seems to me there is a curious connection or crossover between Dr. Jones’s life’s work, Fr. McCarthy’s, and Rene Girard’s, one that I can’t quite put my finger on, but I know it would be fascinating to explore with likeminded people. St. Teresa Benedicta of the Cross (Edith Stein) represents something of a lodestar here. She was a Jew born on Yom Kippur, the “Day of Atonement.” She became a Carmelite nun and said she wanted to give her life in atonement for her people. She died at Auschwitz. The healing of Fr. McCarthy’s daughter Benedicta, who was named after her, was the official miracle for her canonization.
“Understand what’s perfect. Understand the basis that we have and break away all these cliches…it’s gotta happen…that’s good. It will open you up to a new vista…This is the world that’s going to come into being after the American Empire goes down the drain and it’s going down the drain. And it’s going down the drain because of the wretched excess and war and everything else. Something new and better is going to emerge.” — EMJ
Nothing new and better is going to emerge without Jesus Christ and obedience to his commands. “Behold! I make all things new!” (Rev. 21:5) Christ said: “I have come to reveal things lain hidden since the foundation of the world.” (Matthew 13:35)
To Reach Peace, Teach Peace!
Upcoming Retreats and Courses
High School:
Ellen Finnigan’s online Ancient Greek Literature and Advanced Composition course starts September 3
Adults:
Online Retreat with Fr. McCarthy starts November 5, 2024
Teens:
Hunger Games Gospel Nonviolence online course for teens starts January 24, 2024
Use discount code LRCPEACE by August 31 for $25 off.
