Remembering a peacemaker: Bishop Leroy T. Matthiesen

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Guest blog post by John Zokovitch

This past summer, Pax Christi USA honored one of its own, Bishop Leroy T. Matthiesen, as the 2009 recipient of the Teacher of Peace Award. Despite having just turned 88, Bishop Matt, as he encouraged us to call him, was full of wit and energy as he shared stories, reconnected with old friends, and most of all solidly challenged the church to declare nuclear deterrence as morally unjustified once and for all. The moment seemed to energize him.

Swords into electricity

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It's not every day that you get to see biblical metaphors brought to life, but a program conducted between the United States and Russia has taken the classic swords into plowshares image to heart and turned it into a commercial opportunity for Russian cold warriors and U.S. power companies. It's been quietly transforming some of the most dangerous weapons in the world from the arsenal of the old Soviet Union into electricity to run kitchen appliances in America for years.

Not-so-basic training: Recruiting priests for military duty

By John Lasker| Print this pagePrint | Email this pageShare
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Like any enlisted man or woman, Catholic chaplains have go training, and they don't get special treatment.
John Lasker is a freelance journalist from Columbus, Ohio. See more posts by John Lasker

Signs of peace

By Gerard F. Powers| Print this pagePrint | Email this pageShare
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Catholics around the world can inspire us with the many ways — both personal and political — through which they build peace.

Mary Mukanaho is a Tutsi in Rwanda. Her seven children and husband were killed in the 1994 genocide-by neighbors whom she had lived next to for 40 years. She survived because she happened to be out of the country at the time. She felt she was going mad and turned to alcohol to dull the pain. She was enraged to see her neighbors receive Communion with the very hands that had murdered her family.

Gerard F. Powers is director of policy studies at the Kroc Institute for International Peace Studies of the University of Notre Dame. See more posts by Gerard F. Powers

Let's really go in peace

By John Dear| Print this pagePrint | Email this pageShare
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We need to break our personal and national addiction to violence if we hope to ever see an end to war.

To our modern ears the idea of heresy seems quaint and medieval-involving technical arguments about abstract matters. But I contend that heresy and its cousin apostasy are constructs of down-to-earth significance that we should keep in mind today. And for us Catholics, I submit, our chief heresy is violence.

The editors interview. See more posts by John Dear

Peace trained

By Heather Grennan Gary| Print this pagePrint | Email this pageShare
Article Life
In Catholic classrooms and Ugandan villages, Patrick Corrigan strives to learn how to heal wounds of violence.

In 2007, six months after his college graduation, Patrick Corrigan found himself about as far from a leafy, peaceful campus as he could get-in Kampala, Uganda, sitting in on a meeting between parliamentarians and representatives of the Lord's Resistance Army, a notorious rebel group that has terrorized the region for decades and is best known for abducting children and forcing them to participate in its bloody campaigns.

Heather Grennan Gary is a former editor of U.S. Catholic.

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American idol: An interview with Andrew Bacevich

By A U.S. Catholic interview| Print this pagePrint | Email this pageShare
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Could ending our adoration of oil be the key to a peaceful future?

Has the idea of American exceptionalism finally run its historical course in the big muddy by the Euphrates? A persistent critic of the Iraq invasion and an ongoing skeptic of U.S. military adventures pretty much anywhere, Andrew Bacevich is too much a scholar of history to believe that Americans have permanently lost their taste for foreign entanglements.

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Who Would Jesus Kill? War, Peace, and the Christian Tradition

By James Halstead, O.S.A.| Print this pagePrint | Email this pageShare
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By Mark J. Allman (St. Mary’s Press, 2008)

“Who would Jesus kill?” asks author Mark Allman in this introduction to Christian thought on the ideal of peace and the morality of warfare. The answer is easy: No one! The unmarried, childless, propertyless, non-political Jesus of the canonical gospels kills no one.

See more posts by James Halstead, O.S.A.