Several of my relatives are Roman Catholics. I was at their parish church yesterday, as I’d been invited to join them for a special family service. Looking around one of the stalls in their church carrying the church’s religious and devotional literature, I found several newsletters from Pax Christi. They’re the official Roman Catholic peace movement, and are part of a broader Christian organisation, the Network of Christian Peace Organisations. The other Christian peace groups in the Network include the following:
Anglican Pacifist Fellowship
Baptist Peace Fellowship
Campaign Against Arms Trade Christian Network
Christian Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament
Christian International Peace Service
Church and Peace
Community of Reconciliation
Congregational Peace Fellowship
Fellowship of Reconciliation England
Franciscan Justice Peace and Integrity of Creation
Martin Luther King Peace Committee
Methodist Peace Fellowship
Northern Friends Peace Board
Pax Christi
Quaker Peace and Social Witness
Student Christian Movement
United Reformed Church Peace Fellowship.
Pax Christi in Britain publishes a monthly newsletter, Justpeace. The April 2015 edition gives a brief history of Pax Christi International and an overview of their activities across the world. According to the newsletter, it was
founded in France in March 1945 as Catholic movement for peace and reconciliation following World War II, Pax Christi International is now a network of 115 member organisations on five continents with over a hundred thousand members worldwide.
Recognised by Pope Pius XII as the official Catholic peace movement, Pax Christi has also always been autonomous, with members of the hierarchy, clergy and laypeople working together as equals for peace and reconciliation in situations of violence and war around the world. The presidency of Pax Christi International, for example, is shared by a bishop, Bishop Kevin Dowling from South Africa, and a lay woman, Marie Dennis from the United States, both of whom were elected by Pax Christi member organisations.
Pax Christi International has held consultative status at the United Nations since 1979 and is working at the UN in Geneva, New York, Vienna and Paris. It is also officially represented at the African Union and the Council of Europe and has regular access to the European Parliament, the European Commission and NATO.
Among its activities across the world, Pax Christi is involved in
* a multi-year strategy to address deep-seated racism in the United States
* dynamic ‘sports for peace’ programs in South Sudan and Haiti
* strategies to integrate former combatants back into their own communities in the Democratic Republic of Congo
* courses in preventive reconciliation using the principles of haikido in the Philippines.
* efforts to address destructive mining practices in Colombia and Peru;
* advocacy and campaigning at a national and international level for the abolition of nuclear, chemical and biological weapons; for a meaningful arms trade treaty; for an end to the use of depleted uranium in weapons.
* ‘peace week’ initiatives, many of them annual, in the Netherlands, Belgium, Germany, France, the African Great Lakes region, Kosovo, Russia, Croatia, the Philippines and Colombia.
* collaboration with local partners to support active nonviolence in southern Mexico.
* excellent grassroots peace education programs in Lebanon and Philippines.
* exchanges of experience between civil society from the Middle East and from Central Europe on their role in bringing about nonviolent social change
* work with the Pastoral Land Commission (CPT), our partner in Brazil, in response to growing conflict over land – and
* ongoing work with civil society groups in Syria, Iraq and Palestine.
The Network of Christian Peace Organisations and Trident at the General Election
The NCPO also produced a General Election Briefing for this last year’s election in order to promote disarmament and specifically to tackle the government’s intention to introduce Trident. Their very short – four page! – pamphlet outlined the way Christians and church groups could work to promote peace, and had short sections on the issues of Military Spending and Human Security, Renewal of Trident, the UK Arms Trade , the UK Armed Drones Programme and Britain’s Role in the World. It included questions and requests that should be asked of politicians respecting these issues. The pamphlet also carried details of other organisations dealing with those specific issues and their websites.
Pax Christi and Atomic Weapons
Pax Christi also produced a little pamphlet outlining their opposition to nuclear weapons. This included statements by the Church, including papacy, condemning them. Pope Francis last year (2014) declared that ‘Nuclear deterrence cannot be the basis for an ethics of solidarity and peaceful coexistence among people and states’.
His predecessor, Benedict XVI, in 2007 was much stronger in his condemnation. He said, ‘What can be said, too, about those governments which count on nuclear arms as a means of ensuring the security of their countries?… that nuclear weapons have any place in civilised society, is not only baneful but also completely fallacious. In a nuclear war there would be no victors, only victims’.
The Vatican II Pastoral Constitution on the Church in the Modern World in 1965 states in article 80 that
Any act of war aimed indiscriminately at the destruction of entire cities and or extensive areas along with their population is a crime against God and humanity. It merits unequivocal and unhesitating condemnation.
This is all enough to have Pat Robertson and the right-wing American evangelicals start screaming ‘Social gospel! Social gospel!’ at the top of their lungs, before launching into a long tirade about how ‘cultural Marxism’ is undermining society. And just to show you how ‘Christian’ some of these right-wingers are, a few of them flew into a rage this past year when Pope Francis said something rather left-wing. They like Christianity, but only when it appears to support their prejudices and policies.
I’m not a member of Pax Christi or any of the other organisations. But if you’re a Christian and would like to join their witness for peace, their address is:
NCPO, c/o Pax Christi,
St Joseph’s, Watford Way,
London NW4 4TY
and their website is http://www.ncpo.org.uk
Pax Christi is also on the web. Their address is http://www.paxchristi.net.
May God bless them and their work.
Tags: 'Justpeace', African Union, Anglican Pacifist Fellowship, anti-racism, Arms Trade, Baptist Peace Fellowship, Benedict XVI, Biological Weapons, Bishop Kevin Dowling, Campaign Against Arms Trade Christian Network, Central Europe, Chemical Weapons, Christian Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, Christian International Peace Service, Christianity, Church and Peace, Community of Reconciliation, Congregational Peace Fellowship, Croatia, Cultural Marxism, Democratic Republic of Congo, Depleted Uranium, Drones, European Commission, European Parliament, Fellowship of Reconciliation England, Franciscan Justice Peace and Integrity of Creation, Geneva, haikido, Haiti, Kosovo, London, Marie Dennis, Martin Luther King Peace Committee, Methodist Peace Fellowship, Middle East, NATO, Network of Christian Peace Organisations, New York, Northern Friends Peace Board, Nuclear Weapons, Palestine, Paris, Pastoral Land Commission, Pat Robertson, Pax Christi, Pax Christi International, Philippines, Pius II, Pope Francis, Quaker Peace and Social Witness, racism, Social Gospel, South Sudan, Student Christian Movement, Trident, United Reformed Church Peace Fellowship., Vatican II Pastoral Constitution, Vienna, World War II
Beastrabban\'s Weblog 
December 28, 2015 at 11:56 am |
Thanks for putting this list together. Wanted to add that these little lights, though small, can have an enormous effect even though there has always been war mongering support from the UK’s state church e.g. https://theconversation.com/the-church-of-englands-vote-to-effectively-back-military-action-is-a-shocking-mistake-51679
Last December, I attended a conference called ‘Movements for Peace in 1914’ at Regents College, Oxford, supported by the Fellowship of Reconciliation and the Centre for Baptist History and Heritage; one of the talks illustrated just how far these peace movements reached. In the presentation on ‘The Relation between the International Fellowship of Reconciliation and the early Civil Rights Movement’ by Andrea Strubind (Prof of Church History and Dean of Faculty for the Institut fur Evangelische Theologie at the Universitat Oldenburg) a profound link was shown between the black Baptist movement and the Fellowship of Reconciliation (FOR). FOR had developed training and co-operation in non-violent peaceful demonstration and resistance. This training was shared in the Montgomery bus movement and many others in the Baptist church including Martin Luther King, even Gandhi learnt some of the peaceful resistance techniques from Clifford an early advocate of FOR because Gandhi had been influenced in his early years by Clifford when he had been injured and stayed with him in his home.
Today also the Quakers reach out in unexpected ways, they have peace education for schools, especially important to try and counteract the current government’s Dept. of Defence’s youth engagement strategy to build support for the armed forces (for which the poorer students are especially targeted!).
REF: http://www.theguardian.com/education/2015/nov/09/peace-education-schools-mililtary-ethos-children and further info from http://www.forceswatch.net/
December 28, 2015 at 12:32 pm |
Thanks for that, Michelle, that’s really interesting. And you can be sure that not all teachers in schools will be impressed by the government’s attempts to get schoolchildren to support the army. One of the art teachers at my old school was very definitely anti-War. I can remember hearing from one of the other lads that her father had been an air raid warden during the War, or served with one of the emergency services. He saw the destruction produced by the bombing, including picking up body parts.
One day the army came round recruiting, trying to interest some of the boys into considering a military career, and showed them a very gung-ho, promotional film. This particularly art teacher was outraged, and made it very clear to us in her class that she thought it was brainwashing. Schools are in a difficult position, as they have to be impartial and show that they are not indoctrinating their pupils. But you can bet that many of their staff will support the Quakers’ initiative.
December 28, 2015 at 1:06 pm
I really hope so, though I am not a Quaker myself I have been on peaceful demonstrations with them. The state structure for military support is so deceptively embedded, people don’t notice how it feeds the children’s imagination e.g. the way remembrance day has a tendency to glorify the war… Thanks again and keep writing!