It is a very limited understanding of humans and human history which supposes that the only alternative to violent action is passive inaction. Has no one ever heard of non-violent resistance? Do the names Gandhi, Martin Luther King and Desmond Tutu mean nothing to you people?
Victory belongs not to those who can inflict the most but to those who can endure the most. Our God does not by his power end human suffering. His gift to us is that he is wholly present with us when we endure suffering. Our faith is a faith not of warriors but of martyrs.
Considers St Maximilian Kolbe
theworkofgod.org/Saints/Lives/MaxKolbe.htm
In 1941 he was arrested by the Nazis and sent to the concentration camp at Auschwitz. There he cared for the fellow prisoners and celebrated masses in secret. Eventually there was an occasion in which some men were chosen to die in reprisal for a prisoner’s escape, St. Maximilliam offered his life to take the place of a young married man with children.
He was put to death along with the other prisoners to die a slow death through starvation. He died after two weeks of suffering.
Consider also Oscar Romero who said
**This is the commitment of being a Christian: to follow Christ in his incarnation. If Christ, the God of majesty, became a lowly human and lived with the poor and even died on a cross like a slave, our Christian faith should also be lived in the same way. The Christian who does not want to live this commitment of solidarity with the poor is not worthy to be called Christian.
Christ invites us not to fear persecution.
Believe me, brothers and sisters,
anyone committed to the poor
must suffer the same fate as the poor.
And in El Salvador we know the fate of the poor:
to be taken away,
to be tortured,
to be jailed,
to be found dead.
Let whoever desires this world’s privileges and not the persecutions that come from this commitment listen to the awesome paradox in today’s gospel: “Blessed are you when people hate you and reject you and insult you and say you are evil, because of the Son of Man. Rejoice on that day and leap for joy, because your reward will be great in heaven.”
With great joy and gratitude I wish to congratulate our priests. It is just when they are most committed to the poor that they are most defamed. It is just when they are most at the side of our people in their wretchedness that they are most slandered.
I wish to rejoice with the religious men and women who have taken their stand with our people, even to the point of heroically suffering with them, and with the Christian communities and with the catechists who stay at their posts while cowards flee.
Let those who would flee the effects of persecution, of slander, of degradation, listen to what Christ says this Sunday: “Woe to you when everyone speaks well of you! That is what your ancestors did with the false prophets.”
February 17, 1980
** **This is the fundamental thought of my preaching:
Nothing is so important to me as human life.
Taking life is something so serious, so grave –
more than the violation of any other human right –
because it is the life of God’s children,
and because such bloodshed only negates love,
awakens new hatreds,
makes reconciliation and peace impossible.
*March 16, 1980
***The church is calling to sanity,
to understanding,
to love.
It does not believe in violent solutions.
The church believes in only one violence,
that of Christ,
who was nailed to the cross.
That is how today’s gospel reading shows him,
taking upon himself all the violence
of hatred and misunderstanding,
so that we humans might forgive one another,
love one another,
feel ourselves brothers and sisters. (Luke 23:35–43.)
November 20, 1977
***
peacemakersguide.org/articles/GoodNews.htm*
**
