Ninth General Meeting of the International
Thomas Merton Society
San Diego, CA, June 9-12, 2005
Focus Session: Thursday, June 9, 2005: 2:00 PM – 3:15
PM
Beyond Merton: Catholic Relief Services, Caritas
Internationalis and Catholic Peacebuilding Network
as “Practical
Peacebuilders”
by Fr. William Headley Abstract: Merton’s major peacebuilding contribution
was arguably a new ethic for nonviolence. He also called
for strategies that put this nonviolence into action,
claiming that this was beyond him. Catholic Relief
Services, nurtured by this new ethic, shaken by the
Rwanda genocide and now engaged worldwide with local
partners is forging an applied, “practical” peacebuilding.
Affiliated networks had their own awakenings and now
engage in this common task.
Introduction
It is breathtaking to return to the life and work
of Thomas Merton after some absence, as I am, and to
rediscover the range and depth of his work and influence.
Merton himself and commentators after him have divided
his writings into three periods. 1
This presentation will be grounded in the third period
beginning in 1959, when he increasingly turned his
attention to contemporary social issues. Of particular
interest for this discussion will be his reflections
on wars: Nuclear, Cold and Vietnam.
It was during this third period (1959-68) that Merton
did the majority of his writing on peace. Allow one
important caveat: I will not hold myself rigidly to
drawing from only Merton’s third, “social
issues” period. I will range more freely over
his writings. If this seems undisciplined, I must blame
Merton’s freer style. Unlike that most systematic
and formidable of Jesuit theologians, the Rev. John
C. Murray, who was a contemporary sparring partner,
Merton’s style was effusive, literary and poetic,
defying containment within any given “period.”
Merton-as-Peacemaker stood at a crossroads. He attempted
to assess the Catholic tradition on war and peace in
three areas: Just war, pacifism and nonviolence. One
scholar commented that, “He was not the only
or even the first Catholic writer to take up the cause
of nonviolence as the Christian alternative to war,
but he did succeed better than any other in bringing
it to the attention of an American Catholic audience….” 2
I will focus on what I take to be one of his most
significant contributions: how his writing and actions
on nonviolence opened the door to applied or practical
peacebuilding. Peacebuilding is understood here to
be “the long-term project of building peaceful,
stable communities and societies.” 3 This corresponds
generally to what Merton called peacemaking.
In addition, I will argue that there is at least one
important consequence of his contribution to the praxis
of peacebuilding: Other groups, organizations and individuals
rooted in the Catholic tradition and nurtured on the
emerging new peace ethos in the church have been emboldened
by his practical, active expressions of peacebuilding
to “try it themselves.” As a result, the
practical application of Catholic peacebuilding has
moved far beyond what he knew or envisioned. Even the
briefest survey of these initiatives would be far more
than present time or space allow. I have chosen, instead,
to focus on three concrete, interconnected examples:
Catholic Relief Services (CRS), Caritas Internationalis
and the Catholic Peacebuilding Network.
My lead organization will be CRS. I have chosen it
not only because I am familiar with the agency and,
therefore, it is a convenient example. (Nor, have I
chosen it only because they paid my way to this stunningly
beautiful city.) As the official arm of the Catholic
Church in the United States reaching to people in need
across the globe, CRS offers a good institutional vantage
point from which to take a reading of how both the
theology of peace and its practice have developed in
the real life of the world church.
The Practice of Making Peace according to Merton
The treatment of peace in the new Compendium of the
Social Doctrine of the Church is a scant 13 footnote-laden
pages long.4 It is, perhaps, the footnotes gleaned
from the Scriptures and papal documents spanning slightly
more than 100 years that best tells the story of the
church’s rich reflection on peace in recent times.
What caused such reflection and where does Merton fit
into it?
“Many complex, interactive factors,” comes
the quick answer to the question about cause. 5 There
are the factors that have been played out in the world-at-large:
Two world wars; a Cold War; technological developments
that led to real and feared nuclear horrors; and domestic
as well as international movements toward freedom.
If we add a specific war, Vietnam, we have pretty much
built the world stage observed and addressed in Merton’s
war and peace writings.
Today, adjustments need to be made in the line-up.
The proliferation of actual and suspected nuclear nations
continues, while the U.S. Administration, “…Has
signaled that it is committed to keeping the U.S. nuclear
arsenal as a mainstay of its military power.” 6 Real and threatened armed battles that need to be added
from our times include: terrorism; two more wars for
the U.S. with a preemptive twist; intra- and failed-
state battles; genocides; and smaller, ugly identity
and pseudo-identity conflicts. In summary, the threat
of a big, nuclear war continues with more national
actors playing, while variations of smaller, “hot” wars
proliferate.
There were, also, factors within the church. The centerpiece
was, of course, Vatican II. No single locus, however,
can be pointed to as the trigger to what one authority,
referring to this ferment of Catholic thought and action
on peace that swirled around the Council, called the “New
Catholicism.” 7
A hallmark of this new thinking on peace was the growth
of a genuine pacifist alternative within Catholicism.8 One rushes to add an important qualifier. Pacifism
was not, nor has it become in the years since Merton,
the dominant perspective. That privileged place in
the Catholic repertoire of thinking about war and peace
still belong to Just War Theory. What the inclusion
of pacifism has done is focus, as never before, renewed
attention on nonviolence. 9 The U.S. Catholic bishops
nearly two decades later would echo this theme by both
permitting and respectfully praising nonviolent conflict
resolution. 10
Merton’s major peacebuilding contribution was
his effort to integrate Gandhian nonviolence into the
Catholic theology of peace. 11 In doing this, he moved
from an exclusive focus on the theology (theory) of
peace to its praxis (practice). As one of the most
notable and influential modern church writers on peace,
Merton’s writing and actions had the cumulative
effect of providing a rationale for peacebuilding and
giving “permission” for Catholic efforts
at making peace to become eminently practical. The
prevailing practical peacebuilding expressions of Merton’s
time were of a nonviolent resistance variety, a technique
of action that employs non-cooperation and civil disobedience.
12
…We must repudiate a tactic of inert passivity
that purely and simply leaves man defenseless, without
any recourse whatever to any means of protecting himself,
his rights, or Christian truth. We repeat again and
again that the right, and truth, are to be defended
by the most efficacious possible means, and that the
most efficacious of all are precisely the nonviolent
one, which have always been the only ones that have
effected a really lasting moral change in society and
in man.13
It would be dishonest to claim that Merton or any
single Catholic writer/activist brought nonviolence
into the American social arena. Passive resistance
was “in the wind” at the time Merton wrote
and it had a long, if uneven, history in America. During
Merton’s time, it was embodied in many forms
of community organization. Post-World War II pacifists,
for example, found these tactics most useful in dealing
with injustice in American race relations, Civilian
Public Service camps that provided alternative service
for conscientious objectors, and prisons. The work
of the Rev. Martin L. King, Jr., so greatly admired
by Merton, showed the shining example of an implementer.
King and the movement he gave rise to stand as the
preeminent examples of Gandhian nonviolence applied
to an American social context.
Still, the “New Catholicism” that rose
up around Vatican II spawned its own Catholic expressions
of nonviolent resistance: Molly Rush, Cesar Chavez,
Cecil Roberts and Merton’s long-time friend and
collaborator, Dorothy Day and her Catholic Worker Movement
come quickly to mind. When Catholic nonviolent resistance
reached a feverish pitch with the self-immolation of
the Catholic Worker, Roger LaPorte, Merton would write
heatedly to Jim Forest and Daniel Berrigan, two prominent
activists, declaring that the peace movement, Catholic
style, was becoming “unchristian” and “a
little pathological.” 14
There is no question, however, that within the American
Catholic community, Merton was a prime mover. His massive
and articulate peace writings are too well known among
you to be itemized here. He effectively got his thinking
on nuclear war, pacifism and conscientious objectors
onto the Vatican Council floor, if not fully into its
documents. He associated with numerous peace-oriented
groups and projects such as the Catholic Worker, Fellowship
of Reconciliation, American PAX Association; as well
as Peace Hostage Exchange, Golden Rule, Phoenix and
Everyman. All these were peace initiatives. As Merton
advanced through the third period of his writings and
Vietnam loomed as the dragon to be slain, his analysis,
explanations, exhortations and critiques were being
tested by real life activists. Notes on the famous
November 1964 retreat at Merton’s monastery in
Gethsemane, Ky. on the “Spiritual Roots of Protest” begin:
We are hoping to reflect together during these days
on our common grounds for religious dissent and commitment
in the face of the injustice and disorder of a world
in which total war seems at times inevitable….15
Six of the men in attendance were later to be jailed
for “crimes” of nonviolent resistance.
Despite all this evidence of at least quasi-activist
engagement, Merton claimed, “practical strategizing
was beyond him.”16 And,
yet, he strongly advocated the need for pastoral and
educational work in the area
of peace.17 I contend – and
will argue in the remainder of this paper – that
CRS and other Catholic institutions that reach out
to the developing
world have heard his call to praxis. Certainly, an
account of common forms of nonviolent resistance used
in our day would be interesting. I, however, want to
reach beyond this one form of peacebuilding and discuss
other expressions that have emerged, different than
what Merton would have anticipated but very much in
the spirit of his writing and practice. I will discuss
three such interconnected groups: Catholic Relief Services,
Caritas Internationalis and the Catholic Peacebuilding
Network.
The Practice of Making Peace Beyond Merton
Catholic Relief Services
Our age of the church is not exempted from what every
age must do: read the “signs of the times.”18 This demand to listen to the Spirit as it moves among
the events and people of a given time is as incumbent
on each institution in the church as it is on the church
as a whole. Catholic Relief Services is one such group
that went through its own transformative experience
and, as a result, took a radical turn toward being
a peaceful institution with enormous rippling effect
across the globe. Let me trace this journey ever so
briefly.
CRS is no stranger to war. It came into existence
because of conflict. The year was 1943. It was the
end of World War II. (Merton was just entering the
monastery in Kentucky.) The Catholic people of the
United States wanted to aid war-ravaged Europe. CRS,
then called the War Relief Service, was created in
response.
Since then, armed conflict of various sorts – Biafra,
Vietnam, Afghanistan, Iraq, Indonesia and Sri Lanka – have
served as teachable moments in the life of this faith-based
organization. Each conflict has had its lessons. No
single war experience, however, so affected the direction
of the agency, as did the genocide in Rwanda. CRS had
been in Rwanda for more than 30 years serving the relief
and development needs of its people. We saw the ethnic
tensions, knew their origins and learned to work around
them.
One dark day in April 1994, a modern genocide began,
portrayed in the recent film, Hotel Rwanda. Before
the killing stopped, 800,000 people were massacred.
Our carefully cultivated development programs were
destroyed. Peace had not been part of the mission of
CRS. It had not been part of what we did. We had competencies
in agriculture, health, education and a number of other
social service disciplines. These had been groomed
over time as part of this Catholic agency’s effort
to do excellent development according to the secular
standards of the time. And so, CRS did its development
work and did it well. What we were not prepared to
do was make peace. When the genocide occurred, CRS’ projects
were wiped out in days; many of the people we had served
became the “well-fed dead.”
After and partly because of the genocide, CRS took
a hard look at itself. This introspection called us
to realize that we could no longer just address the
symptoms of conflict-stimulated crisis: burned out
houses, food shortages and refugee movements. We also
had to attack the systems and structures that underlie
oppression and poverty. The agency’s dominant
ethos of being development professionals came under
serious question. 19
This soul-searching led us back to our Catholic roots,
to a reexamination of Catholic Social Teaching. Reflecting
recently on that period, Ken Hackett, CRS’ president
since 1992 commented in a recent presentation, “We
rediscovered a jewel in our religious tradition… Catholic
Social Teaching.”20
Today, peacebuilding is an agency-wide priority for
CRS. We have 75 staff dedicated to this service. There
is a team of regional advisors and a headquarters-based
technical staff to work with partners. Presently, CRS
has better than 100 peace projects in 50 countries.
In 2003, we spent $20 million on justice and peace
activities. Each summer, CRS has training programs
for our staff and overseas partners at the Mindanao
Peace Institute (Philippines) and at University of
Notre Dame’s Kroc Institute for International
Peace Studies. Quietly and steadily without much notice,
an increasing number of bishops from developing countries
have attended.
In the spring of 2004, aided by U.S. government funding,
CRS brought a group of 21 Burundians, including bishops,
priests, sisters and a range of lay leaders to the
Baltimore area. They were offered three weeks of joint
planning and preparation for practical peacebuilding
back in Burundi. It was reasoned that in a predominantly
Catholic country, where a decade-old conflict still
smolders, the church with its array of institutions
could play a critical role.
These calls to include bishops in training experiences,
to assist national churches and to aid the development
of peace institutes and centers has prompted us to
think more seriously of an orientation for bishops
in the practical skills of making peace. Presently,
we are in the design phase of an orientation program
for exposing African bishops to skills that will help
them become practical peacebuilders.
But, our greatest experience is in a much more local,
hands-on context. A few examples will help:
• Following the post-Christmas devastation of
the tsunami, none of us needs a geography lesson on
where Sri Lanka is located. Prior to these cataclysmic
events, a long-standing conflict had been brought to
an uneasy peace. The church, with members on both sides
of the troubled divide, has established a National
Peace Program. This is facilitated through 12 centers
across Sri Lanka. Some of the major CRS-assisted activities
are: North/South exchange programs, peace education
workshops, rallies and marches, language learning initiatives,
peace camps, leadership training, publications of peace
education manuals, etc.
• In El Salvador, more than 10 years after the
peace accord that ended its civil war, violence is
still pervasive. Part of it can be traced to gang members
who have been deported from the U.S., who have recruited
other Salvadoran youths to join their ranks. A CRS/El
Salvador project just funded by the United States Institute
of Peace will train and organize 90 high school youth
between 16-18 years of age. We will deepen their skills
in conflict transformation and restorative justice.
They will be enabled to form youth groups. And, they
will meet with police, municipal leadership and other
institutional actors to develop policy initiatives,
which touch on the lives of local young people.
Caritas Internationalis
CRS was not alone in hearing this wake-up call. Others
in the international Catholic social service apostolate
across the world were experiencing something similar.
Collectively, it was prompting an enlargement of what
the very practical, hands-on type of relief and development
services did. Certainly, relief and development continued
to be the cornerstone of their work. But, they began
to see it through a new lens, one of justice and peace.
This at once expanded and deepened their work.
This transition was formalized at the 1995 General
Assembly of what is called Caritas Internationalis.
Caritas is a federation of 154 Catholic member organizations
with a General Secretariat in Rome and ties to the
Vatican. Most Caritas services represent a single national
church’s charitable outreach to its own peoples,
regardless of religion. More developed local churches,
such as those in Europe and the U.S., aid the countries
of the South in collaboration with their Caritas counter-parts
in these nations.
Many of the member organizations of Caritas work with
the poor and displaced in war zones or regions recovering
from conflict. For them, achieving reconciliation between
hostile communities is a daily challenge. When peace
and reconciliation was chosen as a priority, ambitious
plans were laid: setting up regional intervention teams,
adding a peacebuilding specialist to emergency and
disaster teams, training bishops, affecting greater
networking among groups that are working on peace,
etc. The earlier comments about CRS suggest that a
number of these efforts are under way.
The Peace and Reconciliation Working Group established
by Caritas produced two practical texts: Working for
Reconciliation (1999) and Peacebuilding: A Caritas
Training Manual (2002). 21 The aim of these works is
to help Caritas members in the everyday tasks of building
peaceful communities. An international team with direct
experience in conflict and post-conflict reconciliation
wrote the booklets. Eight training programs have been
held in different parts of the world. In many settings,
these training sessions have been expanded into regional
and national levels. Originally translated into three
languages, sections of these peacebuilding tools have
been translated into more than one-half dozen additional
languages. An Arabic edition of the Manual is forthcoming.
Catholic Peacebuilding Network
No one needs to remind an audience like this of the
numerous Catholic-rooted peace groups working quietly
and diligently on various aspects of the peace agenda
e.g., Pace et Bene, Pax Christi, Saint Egidio Community,
etc. There are numerous religious institutes that come
quickly to mind: The networking conferences of male
and female religious – The Leadership Conference
of Women Religious and the Conference of Major Superiors
of Men – as well as individual communities such
as the Benedictines, Franciscans and Maryknoll. 22
One of the most recent outreach initiatives taking
place in the U.S. is called the Catholic Peacebuilding
Network (CPN). Established in 2002 and based at the
University of Notre Dame ‘s Kroc Institute, CPN
has as its mission the enhancement of communications
and sharing of resources, including local knowledge
and expertise among the thousands of people engaged
in Catholic peacebuilding around the world. The founders
include some of the “likely suspects:” The
Kroc Institute, where the Network is based; Community
of Saint Egidio; Pax Christi; CRS; Maryknoll; and individual
members of the faculty/staff of Boston College, the
Catholic University of America, the Irish School of
Ecumenics and the United States Conference of Catholic
Bishops.
Though the network is based in the U.S. and most of
its members are citizens of this country, CPN wants
to serve people caught in conflict the world over.
In a May 2004 meeting at Notre Dame, there was an exchange
between members of the network and representatives
of Catholic peacebuilding efforts of the South. This
conference featured a detailed examination of peace
efforts by peace agents associated with the church
in Colombia, Rwanda and the Philippines. In July 2005,
a meeting will be held in the Philippines, attended
by representatives from more than 10 countries and
will focus on the specific, hands-on efforts at making
peace in that sector of the Philippines where Muslim-Christian
tensions run high.
A Conclusion…with a Challenge
CRS and the two networks – Caritas Internationalis
and Catholic Peacebuilding Network – have taken
up the Mertonian challenge to give nonviolence a try.
His gift to a church, which wants to be a peace church
in deed as well as creed, was to bring Gandhian nonviolence
into the Catholic theology of peace. It has been left
to our time to bring this beyond nonviolent resistance
to a range of practical peacebuilding efforts. And,
this is happening. When CRS – and the same could
be said of other groups mentioned here – lists
the forms of peacebuilding it undertakes, it needs
a 15-tier category. The range of activities move across
the entire spectrum of the conflict experience: From
peacebuilding in education, through integration into
various development projects to trauma healing.
And so, the next challenge is for you, those undertaking
serious Merton scholarship. Help us with the praxis
of peacebuilding. Let me make the point with a practical
illustration.
I was delighted to be able to take down from the Thomas
Merton Center at Bellarmine University a listing of “Theses
and Dissertations about Thomas Merton.” Somewhat
thrilled, I thumbed through them, looking for peace
work based on Merton’s third period.
In all, I estimated that there are approximately 260
scholarly studies. Perhaps, it is only a very skewed
and select sampling. Allow another caveat: Because
of language limitations, I could not read a few of
the titles. And, I may have inadvertently undercounted
the praxis works. Inflating the number by rounding
them upwards to allow for mistakes and undercounting,
I found no more than 25 studies on topics that even
remotely touched on the praxis of peacebuilding. This
represents less that 10 percent of the scholarly works
on Merton dedicated to the study of practical peacebuilding.
The message is, hopefully, clear for the next generation
of scholars: teach us about practical peacebuilding.
If it is difficult to accept my challenge, take Merton’s
own:
If this task of building a peaceful world is the most
important task of our time, it is also the most difficult.
It will, in fact, require far more discipline, more
sacrifice, more planning, more thought, more cooperation
and more heroism than ever war demanded. 23
The task of peacebuilding is not an easy one. But
there is none more urgent.
Endnotes:
1 Patricia McNeal, Harder than War: Catholic Peacemaking
in Twentieth-Century America (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers
University Press, 1992) 106.
2 Gordon Zahn, introduction to The Nonviolent Alternative,
by Thomas Merton (New York, NY: Farrar, Straus and Giroux,
1980) xxviii.
3 Caritas Internationalis, Peacebuilding: A Caritas
Training Manual (Vatican City, 2002)
4 Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace, Compendium
of the Social Doctrine of the Church (Washington, D.C.:
United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, 2005) 213-226.
5 Stephen Lammers, “Peace,” in
The New Dictionary of Catholic Social Thought, ed.
Judith Dwyer (Collegeville,
MN: The Liturgical Press, 1994) 717-721.
6 Robert McNamara, “Apocalypse Soon,” Foreign
Policy (May/June 2005): 29.
7 Dorothy Day et al., “A New Catholicism,” in
Nonviolence in America: A Documentary History, ed. by
Staughton Lynd and Alice Lynd (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Press,
1995) 309-361.
8 Lammers, “Peace,” The
New Dictionary of Catholic Social Thought, 720.
9 Second Vatican Council, “Pastoral Constitution
on the Church in the Modern World” [Gaudium et
Spes] in The Gospel of Peace and Justice, ed. by Joseph
Gremillion (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 1975) 314, n. 78.
10 National Conference of Catholic Bishops,
The Challenge of Peace: God’s Promise and Our
Response (Washington, D.C.: United States Catholic
Conference, 1983) 93-97.
11 Zahn, introduction to The Nonviolent Alternative,
xii
12 “ Non-cooperation is simply the refusal to
cooperate with a requirement which is taken to violate
fundamental ‘truths’ or refusal to cooperate
with those responsible for such violations. Civil disobedience
is the direct contravention of specific laws.” Joan
Bondurant, Conquest of Violence: The Gandhian Philosophy
of Conflict (Berkeley: University of California, 1969)
8-9.
13 Thomas Merton, Peace in the Post-Christian Era (Maryknoll,
NY: Orbis, 2004) 96.
14 Paul Elie, The Life You Save May Be Your Own (New
York, NY: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2003) 203.
15 Merton, The Nonviolent Alternative, 259.
16 McNeal, Harder than War, 122.
17 Ibid.
18 Second Vatican Council, “Pastoral Constitution
on the Church in the Modern World” in The Gospel
of Peace and Justice, 246, n. 4.
19 Peter Steinfels casts a wide net
over a vast range of U.S.-based institutions, when
speaking of identity
crisis in the U.S. church. [“Catholic Institutions
and Catholic Identity” in A People Adrift (New
York, NY: Simon & Schuster, 2003) 103-161)] He sees
as the stimulant the events taking place both within
and outside the church. Not surprisingly, the pedophilia
scandal looms large in his analysis. In his study, he
strikingly ignores the international outreach of the
church in the states, including the institutions that
affect it. CRS would be high on that list. Though not
recorded by Steinfels, the agency had its own identity
crisis. A pivotal change was from CRS’ understanding
itself as a “professional relief and development
agency” to a “faith-based organization that
does professional relief and development.” The
Rwanda genocide occurred at a critical time when this
radical reorientation was underway. How we came to think
of our mission and ourselves came to include peacebuilding.
It became a priority for CRS after its goal-setting World
Summit in 2000.
20 Kenneth Hackett, “Building Solidarity: From
Rwanda to the Asian Tsunami” (paper presented at
the joint meeting of the Seattle Friends of CRS and the
Seattle World Affairs Council, Seattle, Wash., May 2005)
2-3.
21 Both texts are published by Caritas Internationalis
(Vatican City). Mailing address is Palazzo San Calisto
16, 00120 Vatican City. Web site is: www.caritas.org.
22 Some of these institutions have a very direct connection
with Merton himself. Arguably, Pax Christi has a most
immediate connection, as does CRS. When Merton was attempting
to make his Vatican II intervention into the Gaudium
et Spes document, Eileen Egan, who both worked for CRS
and was a founding member of what became Pax Christi,
was part of the lobbying team in Rome during relevant
sessions of the council. McNeal, Harder than War, 98.
23 Thomas Merton, On Peace (London: Mowbrays, 1976)
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