Pax Christi celebrates women 's nonviolent peacemaking on International Women's Day

Mary Yelenick

Once again, the power of Zoom worked its magic for Pax Christi members and supporters last evening. More than 140 people tuned in from every part of these islands as well as from Colombia, Uruguay, USA, Kenya, Palestine and New Zealand.

The purpose of the evening was to explore nonviolence and the role of advocacy and nonviolence and religious life through the work of two women and to celebrate the many approaches to peace that women bring to our world.

Mary Yelenick leads the Pax Christi NGO team at the United Nations in New York. She is also active in the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons and is a board member of Pax Christi International. She began her presentation by reminding listeners that Pax Christi's work over the past 75 years, and its work at the UN, has been to offer alternatives to violence. The issue focus at the UN is on nuclear abolition, the mining and extractive industries and Israel & Palestine. As regards to advocacy as a process her reflection was revealing of her personal approach. It is,she said, about using ones voice and also using ones ears. Listening is essential to understand the issues and the people who have no connections or leverage. It is about building mutual trust, even to the point of discarding ones own views. It is about identifying problems, picking up early warnings and then working together to explore and solutions. Women, she suggested, are good at being in relationships therefore good at effective advocacy work. She summarised the work of advocacy as Listen, Learn, Share, Work Together.

Sr Katrina Alton is a Sister of St Joseph of Peace based in Nottingham. She is currently preparing to open a 'House of Hospitality' for women made destitute by the UK asylum process. She is a spiritual accompanier and as a peace activist her focus in on the arms trade and nuclear weapons. She opened her presentation with an image of the Resurrection by the artist Michael Cook revealing three women, full of colour, joy and life beside the disciples cowering in the dark. This, she suggested, shows that the women have witnessed great violence but have broken through… the Good News, that violence will not have the last word, has broken through.

To the three well-known evangelical virtues of religious life, poverty, celibacy and obedience, she added nonviolence - needed to make the world a better place. She illustrated how women religious today project this virtue. The Benedictine Abbess in Germany shelters refugee and migrant women who have been abuses. The sister in Mynamar who stood in front of troops to prevent them firing on civilians. Her own action, with others, to block vehicles carrying weapons from entering an arms fair. The risk of losing one's own privilege, she said, especially as a religious, is one way of taking back power from violence through collaboration and change. She left listeners with this question: What holds us back from this evangelical work of nonviolence?

Participants were able to reflect together on what they had heard before being led in prayer by Martha Innes Romero, Pax Christi Coordinator in Latin America and Sister Monica O'Brien, a Marist sister and volunteer with Pax Christi.

Explore more of Pax Christi's nonviolence work here: https://paxchristi.org.uk/resources/nonviolence-in-action/