Pax Christi International: Mission for Peacemaking

Marie Dennis

Washington-based Marie Dennis recently stepped down as a co-president of Pax Christi International after nine years, alongside Bishop Kevin Dowling of Rustenberg in South Africa.

Hope generated by the witness of dedicated peacemakers in local, challenging, often violent contexts is a lasting legacy from two decades in leadership of Pax Christi International. The gift of time in local communities around the world has left me with powerful memories that continue to inspire and to challenge:

• Meeting students at Miriam College in Greater Manila motivated by their friendship with Muslim youth in Mindanao, learning to organise and to advocate for just peace;
• Standing on holy ground in Auschwitz, El Salvador, Sarajevo, Gaza - remembering a cloud of witnesses to horror and to courage;
• Learning from young Pax Christi members in Cite Soleil, Port au Prince, Haiti who shared with former gang members the skills of active nonviolence, organised them into football teams, and helped them to plant trees in a formerly desolate, post-earthquake landscape;
• Visiting, with legendary Bishop Paride Taban, remote villages in Sudan and South Sudan, where a claim on life and determination to move beyond years of war persisted;
• Observing the creativity of Pax Christi members - in Austria as they prepared for a festival celebrating Roma culture; in the UK as they prepared resources for parishes on the Pope's annual World Day of Peace message; in Africa's Great Lakes region as they brought training in active nonviolence to their communities; in Peru as they held mining companies to account for contaminating their water;
• Reading the stirring stories written by young people based on interviews with migrants and refugees as part of Pax Christi's Young Peace Journalists project.

Proclamation of the Good News in a broken and violated world; speaking about just peace in the context of communities wracked by direct, systemic and cultural violence; evangelising cultures of death, transforming them into cultures of nonviolence and just peace - this is the urgent mission of Pax Christi International.

Often it is dismissed as naïve, not up to the task, not politically useful or pertinent. Yet, at other times - as in Palestine or Peru, the DR Congo or Mindanao, Chicago or Colombia - the Gospel of just peace falls on fertile ground and is welcomed. We are learning from the deep, rich experience of Eastern traditions, especially in pursuit of harmony and benevolence; from the many different African traditional rituals for reconciliation and healing; from the indigenous understanding of right relationships with others, including ancestors, future generations and the natural world. We have come to recognise the agency of people themselves - the presence of grace and the seeds of peace present in local communities, even in the midst of war.

The Pax Christi International Peace Prize recipients we met in these years made very visible this presence of grace and the seeds of peace. In Sarajevo we heard the reconciling music of PONTANIMA, a choir that bridged the ethnic divide, and the inspiring words of Jesuits from Syria, "We keep our doors open for everyone even if they come to kill us." In Bethlehem (2015) we honoured powerful women from Colombia who were at the heart of their country's peace process. In Rome we learned about the amazing work of Justine Masika Bihamba with women victims of sexual violence in the Dr Congo. From the European Lawyers in Lesbos to The Women's Active Museum on War and Peace, laureates in these years have been enormously inspiring. Then there are the Catholic Commission for Justice and Peace of Pakistan and the Human Rights Commission of Pakistan, the U.S. No Boundaries Coalition, Mexico's Zodavite, the Russian Federation's International Memorial Society. Year after year, they generate amazing hope.

Dialogue and the practice of respectful encounter are also essential to Pax Christi's peacemaking mission. In 2009, as part of a Pax Christi International delegation to Iraq we met Dominicans and other Christians in Mosul and Qaraqosh, visited holy sites of the Yazidis and were introduced to Suni and Shia religious leaders in Kirkuk by their respected friend, Chaldean Patriarch Louis Raphael Sako. In 2014, we were heartbroken as Christians and Yazidis in the north of Iraq were brutally attacked by ISIS. They were killed, captured or forced to flee. Just two years later, during our 2016 conference in Rome on nonviolence and just peace, we were deeply inspired by Iraqi Dominican Sister Nazik Maty's clear call for nonviolence and an end to war.

In fact, the conference on nonviolence and just peace convened by the Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace and Pax Christi International was the beginning of a remarkable Pax Christi process, now known as the Catholic Nonviolence Initiative. In the 2016 conference and a subsequent conference in 2019, hosted by the Dicastery for Promoting Integral Human Development, as well as during a series of global roundtable conversations on different dimensions of active nonviolence and just peace, the focus was on the experience of participants from the global South and areas of violent conflict. These included members of the clergy, women religious, academics and peace practitioners from the Philippines, Sri Lanka, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Iraq, Thailand, DR Congo, El Salvador, South Sudan, Colombia, Burundi, Guatemala, Mexico, Northern Ireland, Fiji, Palestine and more.

Catholic theology on war peace has evolved dramatically in the last half century. More recent thinking about the positive work of "just peacemaking" and the possibility of waging "nonviolent conflict" has begun to shift the location and parameters of Catholic/Christian contributions to peace. The Catholic Nonviolence Initiative is encouraging this shift toward active nonviolence as a universal ethic promoting just, integral peace. We are engaging the institutional, theological and spiritual resources of our tradition in the great task of creating a culture of nonviolence and just peace in the Church and in the world.

Links:

www.paxchristi.net/

http://paxchristi.org.uk