Gospel Nonviolence Working Group Report

AUSCP Assembly June 13, 2023

By Bob Cushing, Chair

Where We Are

We have gathered these days in beautiful San Diego around the theme of “Unity through Synodality.” This is a bold project because presently our country and our Church are unusually divided and polarized. We submit to you that the lifestyle and the lens of Gospel Nonviolence profoundly overlaps the work and spirituality of synodality. Pope Francis said: “The word ‘synod’ means ‘walking together’ … A synodal Church is a Church that listens, with the understanding that listening ‘is more than hearing.’ It is reciprocal listening in which everyone has something to learn.” Synodality offers us methods and means for encountering one another as the people of God. Likewise, nonviolence helps us appreciate the differences among the people of God, learning to appreciate the story of every person, even when they appear to clash and conflict.

The Reality of Conflict

Conflict is the normal energy of within all growing things. The question is not how we can get rid of conflict but how we can respond creatively. But most of us in our culture have been conditioned to respond to conflict either by flight or fight. Either we avoid, deny, or withdraw from conflict out of fear, or we react aggressively with various forms of violence. The more challenging response to conflict is not flight or fight, but … flow – a sacred stance of attentive respect, listening, and dialogue that can transform understanding and behavior on the part of both parties. Nonviolent flow is challenging on an interpersonal level but even more daunting in relations between ethnic groups and nations. Put simply, conflict is inevitable, but violence is optional.

What is Nonviolence?

Nonviolence is what the flow looks like as a way of life. However, there is much misunderstanding around nonviolence. Our working group spent considerable time trying to clarify its meaning. Nonviolence is easily confused with passivity – becoming doormats or refusing to defend the innocent. Some members of AUSCP have suggested that we stop using the term nonviolence. But as the saying goes, “we persist.” Why? We invite others to move beyond the surface, beyond a negative perception of nonviolence. At its core, nonviolence is an orientation of being toward all relationships, an attitude of unconditional love.

What is gospel nonviolence?

Martin Luther King describes nonviolence as ‘love that does justice.’ His apt phrase coincides with what our Gospel Nonviolence-Working Group have arrived at as our working vision and practice. The key to Gospel Nonviolence is to understand justice and peacemaking from the biblical rather than civil perspective. The key is to ground it in the life, teaching, and ministry of Jesus of Nazareth. Gospel Nonviolence is far more than a social strategy, a political tool, or a psychological method. Gospel Nonviolence is the prophetic stance with which Jesus confronted the violent political, cultural, and religious systems of his time. It is the incarnation of nonviolent love that led Jesus to the cross. It is the power of Christ’s servant leadership: love of enemies, the forgiveness of persecutors, compassion for all, reconciliation, inclusion, and radical respect for the other. Gospel Nonviolence is the same boundary breaking vision of Pope Francis who speaks of it as a ‘revolution in tenderness.’

From this perspective let’s review the Past Year. 

During the last 12 months, our Working-Group continued our efforts to challenge many forms of violence—both personal and systemic.  We meet monthly on Zoom and many of us are in daily contact with one another through email and phone conversations, sharing the latest events and updates, articles and scholarly presentations, and planning peace events and strategies that put our priorities into action. Our work has focused on the following 5 action priorities: 

1. Encouraging the study and implementation of Archbishop John Wester’s Pastoral Letter, “Living in the Light of Christ’s Peace: A Conversation Toward Nuclear Disarmament.”  We disseminate, advocate and participate in the. study and implementation of this document through the USCCB, AUSCP, Pax Christi, Pace e Bene, other peace groups, especially in dioceses, parishes, youth groups, religious communities, and other local communities, including ecumenical and interfaith groups. Several members have participated in Zoom sessions where Archbishop Wester has presented a summary of his pastoral and shared his personal witness. Copies of this Pastoral letter are available at our Gospel Nonviolence table in the exhibition room, if you have not put your hands on it yet. It invites a Study-Prayer-Dialogue and Action method much like the consensus model that the synodal process is also advocating. Synodality and nonviolence require our shared sense of mission to the world. Thus, the letter’s conclusion also invites us to our next priority.
2. Advocating on behalf of the Treaty for the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons (TPNW). … The United Nations in 2017 adopted the Treaty for the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons. It prohibits participating countries from developing, testing, producing, acquiring, possessing, or USING nuclear weapons. This urgent global movement already has significant momentum with more than 95 nations as state signatories, of them 68 have ratified it as international law. The Vatican was the first state to sign it. ICAN, the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear weapons, received the Nobel Peace prize that year for their work on this. Our working group has signed up as an independent religious group supporting it, and we are asking the bishops to do the same.
   
   The truth of nuclear weapons must be spoken out loud: they are a real and present danger, an existential threat to every mother’s child and all creation, the most inhumane and indiscriminate weapons ever created. They violate international law, cause severe environmental damage, undermine national and global security, and divert vast public resources away from meeting human needs. All 13,000 weapons in current arsenals must be eliminated as soon as possible. They have no moral right to exist. The urgency of such catastrophic violence can be numbing or … be ignored without humble and bold prayer, which is our next priority.
3. Promoting the Eucharistic Prayer of Gospel Nonviolence as an integral
   form of Catholic worship. The preacher of the Papal Household, Cardinal Cantalamessa, has said that “The Eucharist is the sacrament of Nonviolence!” Moved by just that conviction, our GNV-WG put months of effort into this project which has marvelous potential to assist in the kind of Eucharistic Revival that we need in these times of violence. The radical nature of nonviolent love in what Jesus said and did is simply not available for prayer material in most conventional Catholic churches, at least not in my opinion. The primary author of these two Eucharistic Prayers of Nonviolence, Fr. John Heagle, is not with us because of health concerns. But he had us so on fire when we finished it on January 1, 2022, the International Day of Prayer for Peace, that we couldn’t wait to send out hard copies at the beginning of Lent to every member of AUSCP and to every cardinal, archbishop, bishop and auxiliary in the US. John wrote an article on the Eucharist of Gospel Nonviolence for NCR online, for June 8, 2022, entitled Could a New Eucharistic Prayer Help Reclaim the Nonviolent Christ? His question has stayed with me. And my answer is YES!!!! YES, because I know that some priests ARE USING it, privately, and adapting it for weekday masses. Some religious sisters are using it as well as they strive to live the Eucharist in the spirit of the Nonviolent Christ. And just so that you might have a chance to meditate on it or adapt it for your own purposes, another copy of the Eucharist of Gospel Nonviolence has been slipped into each of your assembly handbags.
   
   We continue to seek wider support for the use of our Eucharist of Gospel Nonviolence. I was surprised when Pax Christi International absolutely snatched it up and translated it immediately into French and Spanish. But then Rome, after receiving it graciously, said, “This really needs to go back to your national conference of Bishops’ Liturgical Commission,” where I suspect it will sit for a long time before giving us their decision. We are still reaching out to Australia and the United Kingdom. Our zoom conference with the Association of Irish Priests went well enough, but one honest Irish Mick let us know of his unfamiliarity with the whole concept in his thick brogue: “I jus con’t wrap me head aroun’ the word “nonviolence”!
   
   Yes, we will continue to advocate for this eucharistic prayer to become an integral form of Catholic worship through online petitions, education, prayers of the faithful, and promotion through peace-oriented bishops, clergy, and lay leaders. For as we pray, so shall we live.
4. In the face of escalating gun violence, our working group submitted a proposal to our Leadership Team for advocating a ban on Assault Weapons last December. AUSCP petitioned the USCCB to take a public stand on banning all assault weapons. Three of their leading archbishops had already made powerful statements against assault weapons, but few people seemed to know about it. AUSCP proposed that the USCCB make this their official policy, as a priority to include homiletic and catechetical material to implement this moral stance. Recognizing the resistance that our priests are facing from certain groups in the gun lobby, we would invite pastoral preaching to unite with our bishops in this effort.
5. Our Working Group seeks to integrate Gospel nonviolence as the grounding matrix of all AUSCP priorities. Yes, that means Vatican II teachings, anti-racism, and including the Laudato Si’ and the eco-justice movement, all these MUST be seen with the eyes of gospel nonviolence. Like synodality, Gospel Nonviolence is so much at the heart of the Christian discipleship that we cannot help but be grounded in its way of traveling as friends listening with the heart, walking down the road together with Christ.

Our Challenge in Becoming Artisans of Peace

This means we continue to pray, study, dialogue and act on behalf of Gospel Nonviolence. We have grown in our experience of community through lively conversations that revealed our shared commitments, but also we see strongly differing perspectives on how we can put Gospel Nonviolence into action in our lives, our church, and our culture. We share a consensus that ‘there is no such thing as a just war’, to quote the phrase of Pope Francis (a statement which he appears to modify in other situations, especially since the war in Ukraine.)  The devastation of that war has increased the debate between the “Just War Theory” and the emerging Just Peace Vision of the future. We have come a long way since John XXIII’s Pacem in Terris in 1963 and our US Bishops’ 1983 pastoral letter on war and peace. They gave us the language to be able to address this violence in a new way such that Pope Francis consented to the beginning of the Catholic Nonviolence Initiative (CNI) in 2016: “Active nonviolence is the heart and vision of Jesus, the life of the Catholic Church, and the long term vocation of healing and reconciling both people and the planet.” The primary area of disagreement in our Working Group is related more to the question of how—how to disagree with our brothers and sisters—perhaps especially our U.S. bishops—in a manner that is itself nonviolent and forthright.  Perhaps our GNV-WG is a microcosm of most Catholic peace groups who have only just begun.  

The intensity of violence and its changing background in unfolding events daily reshapes the urgency of our action priorities. Often this is overwhelming to contemplate. With 690 mass shootings in 2021 and over 200 mass shootings so far in 2023, with Putin’s threat of use of nuclear weapons, Russia withdrawing from START Treaty, and tensions arising with China, we scramble to read and study, to pray and dialogue about just what is going on and how followers of the Nonviolent Christ can respond.

Our final major challenge is our apparent inability to make ‘inroads’ with our fellow priests and the USCCB, let alone the U.S. Catholic people as a whole. We discuss, debate, and pass significant resolutions in areas like banning assault weapons, advocating for an immediate cease fire in Ukraine, and support for the TPNW. The Leadership Team of AUSCP also discuss and pass these resolutions on behalf of the entire membership, but it appears that it stops there.  We are not successful in getting the bishops to dialogue with us, let alone bringing about a change in their public stance. Are we expecting too much? Perhaps. 

Conclusion:

We invite the leadership team and all AUSCP members to continue in this work and invite any interested members to become part of our core group or another working group and stay in touch via our website. Let’s continue this way of synodality, this way of becoming artisans of peace, this way of living into Gospel Nonviolence.

The Working Group on Gospel Nonviolence:
Bernie Survil , Harry Bury, Bob and Donna Cushing, Mark Scibilia-Carver, Tim Taugher,
Deacon Jim Rauner, Bob Bonnot, Sr. Paulette Schroeder, and John Heagle.

Advocacy Action Proposal/Resolutions

1.  AUSCP joined other peace groups in signing a letter to President Biden and the US Congress advocating for a cut in military spending and reduction of nuclear weapons (as a beginning first step). (October 2022).
2. Advocacy and Resolutions to AUSCP Leadership and USCCB: Proposals developed, passed by the Leadership Team, and sent to the USCCB asking for their advocacy, implementation, or support:
   • a.   Proposal asking the entire USCCB to make an official, public declaration banning assault weapons in the United States (three USCCB committees have done so in unison, but few people seem to know about it). (December 2022)
   • b.   Resolution for an Immediate Cease Fire in Ukraine, followed by serious, ongoing negotiations to ensure a just and lasting peace. (February 2023).
   • c.    Resolution developed, passed by the LT, and sent to the USCCB asking the U.S. bishops to request officially to be signers on the TPNW list of religious and NGO signatories (in addition to the State – international nations – signatories).
   • d.   Advocating for the dissemination and implementation of Archbishop Wester’s Pastoral regarding dismantling Nuclear Weapons with AUSCP, USCCB, and in collaboration with other Catholic Peace Organizations.

Other Actions on Behalf of Peacemaking

• Pax Christi 50th Anniversary Assembly—four of our members, Bernie Survil, Bob & Donna Cushing, and Mark Scibilia-Carver participated, and a few protested in front of the Pentagon and the White House later that week.
• Sr. Paulette Schroeder and Tiffin Nonviolent sponsored a successful gospel nonviolent booth at the Seneca County Fair, July 22. Paulette also writes a local peacemaker’s newsletter.
• Bernie, Mark, Tim participated in demonstrations at British Aeronautic Electronics and Lockheed plants to confront the Merchants of Death, organized by Jack Gilroy (another “Friend of AUSCP”) and his peacemaking communities, Sept 9, 22.
• We wrote a letter to Pope Francis affirming his statement ‘There is no such thing as a just war’.  Mark led this initiative, with edits, consensus from our GNV- WG and the LT.  Mailed to Pope Francis on October 10, 22.
• We participated in and Collaborated with the Catholic Nonviolence Initiative and Pax Christi International in a five-part series on the meaning and practice of Gospel Nonviolence, October 22.
• Mark and Tim Taugher met with Bishop Lucia on the ‘Doctrine of Discovery’ and the need for the official Church to rescind this doctrine, Sept 22, 2022. The Pope liked our footnote and developed his own statement.
• Mark Scibilia Carver went to the Baltimore November meeting of the Bishops with his signs [The Eucharist is the sacrament of Nonviolence!] and protested in front of their gathering hotel as well as talked with various bishops.
• The Gospel Nonviolent Working Group Monthly Newsletter: August thru December 2022.  (This was an experimental effort on John’s part to be in more regular contact with our 100+ mailing list and the AUSCP membership. Little or no responses, so he decided it wasn’t a necessary contribution.
• Our advocating for the cause for sainthood for Ben Salmon reached a ‘dead end’ with Cardinal Cupich, who said there was not a large enough groundswell of support for it. Other options are now being explored.
• Important dialogue with the Association of Irish Priests via Zoom, Feb 21, 2023, asking for the help implementing the Eucharist of Gospel Nonviolence. (Bernie was the moving force behind this.  John Heagle also contacted priests’ associations in Australia and the UK with no response so far.)
• NCR carried John Heagle’s article on March 28, 2023: What If We Just Gave Up Nuclear Weapons for Lent? It focused the nuclear weapons crisis as the communal conversion that is required of believers during Lent.
• Creative Demonstration against ‘Merchants of Death, April 21, 2023.  A symbolic prophetic action led by Jack Gilroy and including Bernie Survil, Mark Scibilia-Carver, Tim Taugher, and members of other peace groups in the Syracuse, NY area.
  • a.   Proposal asking the entire USCCB to make an official, public declaration banning assault weapons in the United States (three USCCB committees have done so in unison, but few people seem to know about it). (December 2022)
  • b.   Resolution for an Immediate Cease Fire in Ukraine, followed by serious, ongoing negotiations to ensure a just and lasting peace. (February 2023).
  • c.   Resolution developed, passed by the LT, and sent to the USCCB asking the U.S. bishops to request officially to be signers on the TPNW list of religious and NGO signatories (in addition to the State – international nations – signatories).
  • d.   Advocating for the dissemination and implementation of Archbishop Wester’s Pastoral regarding dismantling Nuclear Weapons with AUSCP, USCCB, and in collaboration with other Catholic Peace Organizations. Other Actions on Behalf of Peacemaking
• Pax Christi 50th  Anniversary Assembly—four of our members, Bernie Survil, Bob & Donna Cushing, and Mark Scibilia-Carver participated, and a few protested in front of the Pentagon and the White House later that week.
• Sr. Paulette Schroeder and Tiffin Nonviolent sponsored a successful gospel nonviolent booth at the Seneca County Fair, July 22. Paulette also writes a local peacemaker’s newsletter.
• Bernie, Mark, Tim participated in demonstrations at British Aeronautic Electronics and Lockheed plants to confront the Merchants of Death, organized by Jack Gilroy (another “Friend of AUSCP”) and his peacemaking communities, Sept 9, 22.
• We wrote a letter to Pope Francis affirming his statement ‘There is no such thing as a just war’.  Mark led this initiative, with edits, consensus from our GNV- WG and the LT.  Mailed to Pope Francis on October 10, 22.
• We participated in and Collaborated with the Catholic Nonviolence Initiative and Pax Christi International in a five-part series on the meaning and practice of Gospel Nonviolence, October 22.
• Mark and Tim Taugher met with Bishop Lucia on the ‘Doctrine of Discovery’ and the need for the official Church to rescind this doctrine, Sept 22, 2022. The Pope liked our footnote and developed his own statement.
• Mark Scibilia Carver went to the Baltimore November meeting of the Bishops with his signs [The Eucharist is the sacrament of Nonviolence!] and protested in front of their gathering hotel as well as talked with various bishops.
• The Gospel Nonviolent Working Group Monthly Newsletter: August thru December 2022.  (This was an experimental effort on John’s part to be in more regular contact with our 100+ mailing list and the AUSCP membership. Little or no responses, so he decided it wasn’t a necessary contribution.)
• Our advocating for the cause for sainthood for Ben Salmon reached a ‘dead end’ with Cardinal Cupich, who said there was not a large enough groundswell of support for it. Other options are now being explored.
• Important dialogue with the Association of Irish Priests via Zoom, Feb 21, 2023, asking for the help implementing the Eucharist of Gospel Nonviolence.  (Bernie was the moving force behind this.  John Heagle also contacted priests’ associations in Australia and the UK with no response so far.)
• NCR carried John Heagle’s article on March 28, 2023: What If We Just Gave Up Nuclear Weapons for Lent? It focused the nuclear weapons crisis as the communal conversion that is required of believers during Lent.
• Creative Demonstration against ‘Merchants of Death, April 21, 2023.  A symbolic prophetic action led by Jack Gilroy and including Bernie Survil, Mark Scibilia-Carver, Tim Taugher, and members of other peace groups in the Syracuse, NY area.