FIRST HELPING:
PRAYER FOR THE FORTY DAY FAST
FOR THE TRUTH OF GOSPEL NONVIOLENCE
JULY 1-AUGUST 9
—for the uniting of all churches in proclaiming the truth
of the nonviolent jesus of the gospels and his way of nonviolent love of friends and enemies—
Abba, in the name of Jesus we ask you to send the Holy Spirit to gather the Churches together, so that they may proclaim that Jesus’ Way of Nonviolent Love of all people—friends and enemies—is the Way of God and therefore teach that
violence is not the Christian Way, violence is not the Holy Way,
violence is not the Gospels’ Way,
violence is not the Apostolic Way,
violence is not the Way of Jesus, violence is not the Way of God,
thereby setting Christians free forever from bondage to the unholy, un-catholic, un-apostolic, un-Christlike ways of the false gods and theologies of justified violence and enmity.
We plead this grace so that the Nonviolent Lamb may be our Lord in deed, as well as, in word and sacrament.
We request this gift so that the Christian Community may be—for afflicted humanity—a faithful witness to Jesus’ Way of overcoming evil.
We implore this healing so that the Church may be an authentic extension in time and space of the Way of the Lamb of God, of the Way of the Nonviolent Jesus, which is the Way to renew the face of the earth and to save all people from evil and eternal death. Amen.
Our Lamb has conquered; Him let us follow.
2ND HELPING:
Our Lamb has conquered; Him let us follow.
Racism is violence. It is intentionally hurting people by thought, word and or deed because of their race. Human institutions are constructed and sustained by humans. Racists will construct and sustain racists institutions to serve their needs. Those who believe that Irish people are the dregs of humanity and who also hold the power to construct and sustain commercial institutions will so arrange life in their society that they can legally advertise jobs with the statement in them that “Irish need not apply.” Or, they can so arrange the other institutions of society which they control, e.g. schools, so that the only jobs Irish people will be competent to do will be the jobs that no one else wants or no one else will do for the pittence being paid as a salary.
This 10 minute video is a remarkable presentations on the violence of racism and its institutional causes and perpetuatio
https://www.facebook.com/iammiketodd/videos/260759581686846/
-Emmanuel Charles McCarthy
THIRD HELPING:
Our Lamb has conquered;Him let us follow.
“The clergyman who does not put the flag above the church had better close his church and keep it closed.”
—Theodore Roosevelt
Below, the symbol of the marriage of two historically very violent institutions.
Basilica of the Immaculate Conception,
The US Catholic Bishops’ Church.
“The presence of the national flag beside the tabernacle of worship and of student Reserve Officers Training Corps (ROTC) on the campuses of prestigious Catholic schools says to the worshiper and to the student that military life is as religious as God and as normal as going to school.
“These subtle indirect influences of the military over civilian life are more effective in militarizing society that most others . . . The military at an educational institution infiltrates and spreads its philosophy that violence and killing are the American way as well as the Christian way..
This inevitably leads to the conclusion that force and violence, instead of cooperation through some international organization or reconciliation or admission of fault on either or both sides, will solve the world’s and the nation’s problems.
“Through this process each generation learns to forget the horror experienced in every war and passes on to the next generation stories of glory and of heroes. Thus, most young people, whether Christian or otherwise, are prepared to kill other people when the signal is given.”
—Richard McSorley, S.J., PhD.
-Emmanuel Charles McCarthy
FOURTH HELPING:
Our Lamb has conquered; Him let us follow.
“This is something the Christian fellowship really needs to get through its hide. I had a preacher friend of mine who told me recently, ‘Clarence, we have just got to lay low on all these things and let it blow over—and then you can afford to take a stand on it.’ I said, ‘Reverend, do you feel that way about all sin in general? Are you gonna wait ’til sin just blows over, and then you’re gonna to hop up and say, “I’m agin it!”
—Clarence Jordan
When the U.S. killing of the Arab people of the Middle East that began on March 20, AD 2003 is declared officially over by the U.S., the bishops will come out of hiding, bedecked in full canonical regalia, arriving like trained bears on unicycles in the arena of public discourse, bumptiously dispensing tidal waves of moral wisdom regarding the evils of war and proclaiming “war never again.” But until that day in the distant future the order of the day for everyday for every U.S. bishop is “lay low, give implied moral consent to the government’s murder operation by silence and wait until it all blows over.” In the mean-time it is misery galore for the victims of the U.S. Episcopacy’s silence.
-Emmanuel Charles McCarthy
FIFTH HELPING:
Our Lamb has conquered; Him let us follow.
History has a special ability to reveal the ludicrousness of those beliefs, which glue us all to the social frame of our fathers. It also can reinforce that frame with great power and has done so most of the time.
I recall the words of the iconoclast sociologist E. Franklin Frazier to Negro college students one evening in Atlanta, Georgia: ‘All your life white folks have bamboozled you, preachers have bamboozled you, teachers have bamboozled you; I am here to debamboozle you.’”
—Howard Zinn
The Politics of History
So what shall it be bishops, priests, ministers and my fellow Christians in relation to the Nonviolent Jesus of the Gospels and to His Way of Nonviolent Love of friends and enemies? What will you be for the Christian souls you are ordained and Baptized to care for: a bamboozler or a debamboozler?
-Emmanuel Charles McCarthy
SIXTH HELPING:
Our Lamb has conquered; Him let us follow.
When the missiles go up
who cares where they come down.
‘Not my department,’
says Werner von Braun.”
—Tom Lehrer
The Beatification of Franz Jagerstatter, the lone Catholic layman to refuse to participate in Hitler’s military, is an explicit repudiation, at least for Catholics and their bishops, priests, chaplains and laity, of the Theology of “Not My Department.” Hopefully the leaders and Christians of other Churches will also repudiate this corrupt Theology of “Not My Department.”
Werner von Braun or Franz Jagerstatter—given the choice which of these two men would the average Christian who is a scientist today choose to follow? And why? Which of these two men does the average Christian who is a scientist today resemble? Is it or is it not the truth to say that most Christian scientists today live their Christian lives by the Theology of “Not My Department”
-Emmanuel Charles McCarthy
SEVENTH HELPING:
Our Lamb has conquered; Him let us follow.
Am I my brother’s keeper? Oh no! I am my brother’s killer! It is a wonder that anyone employed in the making of these munitions, from the president of the company to the scientists down to the man who sweeps up at night, can look at their faces in the mirror or go to church on Sundays. Do we want to preach the Gospel of Christ or our own gospel? Which shall it be?”
—Catherine de Hueck Doherty
The Gospel Without Compromise, 1976
-Emmanuel Charles McCarthy
EIGHT HELPING
Our Lamb has conquered: HIm let us follow.
For, in reality, the cause of war does not lie in armaments, but in adults who make use of them.
The wars of today are not born of hatred of the enemy. We see nations fighting against one people today and another tomorrow. Docile citizens engage in warfare not because of hatred, but because they have been ordered to do so.
We honor the person who has discovered the microbe of a disease and formulated a serum which will save thousands of lives, and then we honor, still more greatly, the one who discovers new means of destruction and uses intellectual energies for wiping out an entire population.
Dr. Maria Montessori
Peace and Education
-Emmanuel Charles McCarthy
NINTH HELPING:
Our Lamb has conquered; Him let us follow.
The Churches, Protestant or Catholic, of Jesus Christ can no longer pretend it is God’s will to believe in or engage in ‘just wars.’ Bishop Augustine’s just war theory is as wrong as Bishop Ussher’s (1650) chronology of the age of the earth: “I deduce that the time from the creation until midnight, January 1, 1 AD was 4003 years, seventy days and six hours.”
—Rev. Howard Goeringer
Haunts of Violence in the Church: A Biblical Interpretation of Peace and Violence
Infinity Publishing
Conshohocken, PA 19428
ISBN 0-7414-2494-0
-Emmanuel Charles McCarthy
TENTH HELPING:
Our Lamb has conquered; Him let us follow.
“I can hire half the working class to kill the other half.” Jay Gould
“Half the scientists in the world, Christian or otherwise, can be hired to kill the other half.” ECM
“All our talks about peace and the weapons of the spirit are meaningless unless we try in every way to not work in any position, any job, that contributes to war, not to take any job whose pay comes from fear or war. We wish the workers would lay down their tools and refuse to make the instruments of death. One can withdraw from the factory, refuse to make munitions, airplanes, atom bombs As you come to know the seriousness of our situation—the war, the racism, the poverty in the world—you come to realize it is not going to be changed just by words or demonstrations. It’s a question of risking your life somewhere other than on the battlefields of war. It’s a question of living your life in drastically different ways.”
Dorothy Day
-Emmanuel Charles McCarthy
ELEVENTH HELPING:
Our Lamb has conquered; Him let us follow.
The battle to claim Jesus for violence or for nonviolence has become increasingly acrimonious and shrill. It is a crucial battle. For those whose faith claims Jesus as the authoritative moral sanction, then whatever Jesus taught about violence decides the issue for each Christian and for all Christian.
“There is a danger in ignoring the monstrous extent of oppression and exploitation, violence and counter violence in Jewish Palestine in the time of Jesus, and at the same time to fail to take account of the radically different response of Jesus and the early Christians to this hopeless situation. Innumerable Jewish freedom fighters, sometimes called zealots—terrorists from the Roman perspective—were executed by crucifixion in Palestine prior to and during the first century A.D. For the zealots slaying the Godless enemy out of zeal for God’s cause was a fundamental commandment, true to the rabbinic maxim: ‘Whoever spills the blood of one of the Godless is like one who offers sacrifice.’Moreover,the enemies of God that had to be destroyed were not exclusively pagans or Romans. In the approximately ninety years before Jesus’ birth Jews were killing Jews in the name of God. The Pharisees, a popular lay religious party, and the Sadducees, the priestly and military aristocracy, became so certain that the others ways were not the ways of God that in their turn each had the other destroyed. Eight hundred Pharisees were crucified by Alexander Jannaeus who was aligned with the Sadducees. After he died (67 B.C.) his mother, the regnant queen,who was aligned with the Pharisees, took bloody, holy vengeance on the Sadducees. The Galilee in which Jesus lived for most of his first thirty years was a hot-bed of Roman and Jewish violence.
Jesus and his Way take on sharper focus when viewed within the turbulence of his day. Jesus did confront a world similar to ours. He did see a world of military, political and
economic violence and social oppression. He too was horrified by this inhumanity. Likewise, the option of violence was available to him as it is today. His own views are clarified for us when they are seen as the result of a struggle for a stance different from other options open to him and his society. Jesus took a rigorous position against the popular morality of his age. He demanded love of enemies and renunciation of violence. ”
—Martin Hengel
Victory Over Violence
-Emmanuel Charles McCarthy
TWELFTH HELPING:
Our Lamb has conquered; Him let us follow.
“We’re not made by God to mass kill one another, and that’s backed up by the Gospels. Lying and war are always associated. Pay attention to war-makers when they try to defend their current actions; if they’re moving their lips they’re lying.” -Phil Berrigan
“Why would anyone believe that those who would lie to them about war would not lie to them about anything else that it served their interests to lie about?” -Emmanuel Charles McCarthy
“Even a thin cloth or newspaper can protect you”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9cJ4GjE9yzI
-Emmanuel Charles McCarthy
THIRTEENTH HELPING:
Our Lamb has conquered; Him let us follow.
“Violence can only be concealed by a lie, and the lie can only be maintained by violence. Any man who has once proclaimed violence as his method is inevitably forced to take the lie as his principle.”-Alexander Solzehnitzhyn
“Violence flourishes in lies, and needs lies. Truth is the power of peace. It is a fact, and no-one doubts it, that truth serves the cause of peace; it is also beyond discussion that non-truth in all its forms and at all levels (lies, partial or slanted information, sectarian propaganda, manipulation of the communications media, and so on) goes hand in hand with violence. Public opinion is often less sensitive to the various forms of non-truth that underlie violence and that create a fertile soil for it.
What should one say of the practice of combatting or silencing those who do not share the same views by labelling them as enemies, attributing to them hostile intentions and using skilful and constant propaganda to negatively brand them? What should one say about selective indignation, sly insinuations, the manipulation of information, the systematic discrediting of opponents – their persons, intentions and actions – blackmail and intimidation: these are forms of non-truth working to develop a climate of uncertainty aimed at forcing individuals, groups, governments, and even international organizations to keep silent in helplessness in the face of and in complicity with violence. All these attitudes are equally capable of favouring the murderous game of violence
.
To promote truth as the power of peace means that we ourselves must make a constant effort not to use the weapons of falsehood, even for a good purpose. It is, however, truth communicated in the spirit of love that will release unsuspected light and energy and will give new opportunities for peace in the world.”
-John Paul II, December 8, 1979
-Emmanuel Charles McCarthy
FOURTEENTH HELPING:
Our Lamb has conquered; Him let is follow.
“Of all tyrannies, a tyranny exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It may be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron’s cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience. They may be more likely to go to Heaven yet at the same time likelier to make a Hell of earth. This very kindness stings with intolerable insult. To be “cured” against one’s will and cured of states which we may not regard as disease is to be put on a level of those who have not yet reached the age of reason or those who never will; it is to be classed with infants, imbeciles, and domestic animals.”
– C.S. Lewis
Coerced virtue is not virtue., Coerced love is not love. ECM
“What interferes with the integrity of human freedom interferes with the ability to love. You have done nothing Christian until you have done it yourself.”
Rev. John L.McKenzie
-Emmanuel Charles McCarthy
FIFTEENTH HELPING:
Our Lamb has conquered; Him let us follow.
All things are subject to interpretation and whichever interpretation prevails at a given time, regardless of why it prevails, is the truth. Truth then is the product of power and not of its independently verifiable conformity with the reality of which it speaks. Why? Because, it is a sociological dictum that the dominant value system of any culture is the value system that the dominant class of that culture wishes it to have. I do not know of any dominant class of any culture whose value system even comes close to the values system of Jesus in the Gospels. This is the reason that Jesus’ Way of Nonviolent Love of friends and enemies instead of being seen as the truth of Jesus, of the Gospels and of God is experienced as something that Christians of every tier in every culture can easily dismiss or consider absurd.
-Emmanuel Charles McCarthy
SIXTEENTH HELPING:
Our Lamb has conquered; Him let us follow.
The first public use of the term, military-industrial complex, was by the British pacifist, Charles Trevelyan, on August 5, 1914. He had formed a pacifist organization named The Union of Democratic Control. Point Four of its declaration stated: “National armaments should be limited by mutual agreement, and the pressures of the military-industrial complex regulated by the nationalization of armaments firms and control over the arms trade.”
The Manhattan Project, that produced the first atomic bomb which was detonated 75 years ago this day at Trinity Site in the New Mexico desert, was at the time the most expensive scientific undertaking in the history of the world. It resulted in a weapon that could kill sixty thousand people in a flash—and did. No one person made or could have made the atomic bomb. For it to come into existence, the “best and the brightest” of a society had to take the accumulated learning of 25,000 generations of homo sapiens and direct it to being used for the destruction of other human beings.
Technology has always been a part of warfare. Tools were used as weapons before recorded history. The Bronze Age and Iron Age saw the rise of groups geared towards making weaponry. But, these groups also had practical peacetime applications, as well. It was not until the 19th and 20th centuries that military weaponry became sufficiently complicated so as to require a large subset of industrial efforts solely dedicated to warfare, i.e. human destruction.
Firearms, artillery, steamships, aircraft, nuclear, bacteriological, chemical and electromagnetic weapons were different from medieval swords. These new weapons required years of highly specialized labor, as opposed to part-time efforts. Beyond this the length of time necessary to build evermore sophisticatedly destructive weapons required pre-planning and construction during times of peace time. And so, the for-profit, permanent war economy came into existence. This is what the phrase, “military-industrial complex,” refers to. As mentioned above it was not Dwight Eisenhower who saw grave danger of collusion between a tax-based military and a private, for profit owned arms industry, In his Farewell Presidential speech in 1961 he named this approaching life destroying ogre the military-industrial complex:
This conjunction of an immense military establishment and a large arms industry is new in the American experience. The total influence—economic, political, even spiritual—is felt in every city, every state house, every office of the federal government . . . In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist.
Today more people are killed by the process that makes the sword, than by the sword. Yet hardly a word from the pulpits of the largest arms producing country in the world and in the history of the world. Hardly a word even though in the U.S and other Western countries, it is mostly Christians, by the millions, who are daily using their life’s time making these instruments of destruction and who are making their living by making these instruments of human destruction. Occasionally in a pastoral letter an unemotional reference is made by the Churches’ leadership to the arms race in general but nothing that would even hint at their fellow Christians being morally complicit in an economic plague that is daily destroying human life physically, spiritually, morally and psychologically. Thomas Merton writes in Faith and Violence:
It is the polite, white-collar murder machine that threatens the world with destruction, not the violence of a few desperate teenagers in the slums. But, our antiquated theology myopically focused on individual violence alone fails to see this. It shudders at the phantasm of muggings and killings on our doorstep, but blesses and canonizes the antiseptic violence of corporately organized murder because it is respectable, efficient, clean, and above all profitable.
“Whatever you do to the least you do to me.”
The Manhattan Project that culminated 75 years ago today at the mockingly named, “Trinity Site” in the New Mexico desert, is the proto-icon of what Merton speaks and of the economic and moral plague that rages across the planet to this very minute, devouring human beings with the appetite of an un-empathic, gluttonous, rapacious economic predator. It is this white-collar, scientists-dependant murder machine that in the West has as its source of sustenance and energy the body and blood of millions of Christians—of million of men and women who call themselves follower of the Jesus of the Gospels, that is, of the Nonviolent Jesus who proclaims as Way of Nonviolent Love of friends as God’s Way, as the Way of the Holy Trinity.
-Emmanuel Charles McCarthy
SEVENTEENTH HELPING
Our Lamb has conquered; Him let us follow.
What is the relationship, if any, between Gospel Nonviolence and truth?
“You may not follow a lie because you like the liar, nor can you follow a lie because you dislike the truth-teller.” ECM
-Emmanuel Charles McCarthy
EIGHTEENTH HELPING
Our Lamb has conquered; Him let us follow.
Can a Christian be engaged in Gospel Nonviolent Love, be loving as Jesus loves, and simultaneously be lying or supporting someone(s) who is lying? The answer is, “No.”
-Emmanuel Charles McCarthy
NINETEENTH HELPING
Our Lamb has conquered; Him let us follow.
“I am the truth” (Jn 14:6). Of course, if Jesus is the Messiah, the Christ, the Son of the living God, the Word of God “made flesh,” Lord, God and Savior, what else could He be but “the truth.” That is exactly what the Gospel proclaim He is without equivocation: “The Word was made flesh and dwelt among us. We have seen His glory, the glory of the one and only begotten Son from the Father, full of grace and truth” (Jn 1:14).
“Truth here means more than real or genuine; it is real in the sense of permanent and lasting, and its permanence is rooted in its heavenly and incorruptible character. Truth is the divinely revealed reality of God manifest in the words and in the deeds of Jesus Christ…When Jesus says, “If you abide in my word you will know the truth and the truth will set you free,” he is speaking of liberation from sin not ignorance.” ( Rev. John L.McKenzie, DICTIONARY OF THE BIBLE, Imprimatur 1966).
The Spirit which Jesus sends who will teach His disciples all truth is the spirit of truth: ” I will ask the Father and He will give you another advocate to help you and be with you forever, the spirit of truth. The world cannot accept him, but you know him, for He lives in you and will be in you” (Jn 14:16-17).
Jesus responded, “You belong to your father the devil, and you want to carry out the desires of your father. He was a murderer from the beginning and has never stood for the truth, since there is no truth in him. Whenever he tells a lie, he speaks from his own character, because he is a liar and the father of lies” (Jn 8:44).
Since for the Christian Jesus is God Incarnate and is the truth, all that is said above is true. Therefore what is in contradiction to the truth that Jesus communicates by His words and deeds regarding God and God’s will, good and evil is untrue, a falsehood, a lie.Hence, those, who for any reason, even for a good cause, intentionally communicate a lie as the truth, are carrying out the “desires of Satan,” “who is a liar and a murderer from the beginning.” Soory, but that is what Truth Incarnate says!
What are the implications of this in a world where the wickedness of intentional deception is normalized and even aggrandized, where entire multi-billion dollar industries exist to convince people to believe that what is not true is true, where ten of millions of Christians make their living by conjuring up and distributing what they know are lies? Jesus connects Satan as liar with Satan as murderer. Is this just a haphazard use of rhetoric by Jesus or is there an integral relation between the two objectively and in the mind and in the desires of the Evil One?
-Emmanuel Charles McCarthy
TWENTIETH HELPING:
Our Lamb has conquered; Him let us follow.
Human beings, even the most saintly, must constantly struggle against the temptation to evade unwanted truth that reveals unambiguously the grave immorality of a normal, traditional and even honored course of action.
The struggle to discern the truth and the struggle to love as Jesus loves are spiritually and morally essential and inseparable from each other. However in the operation of conscience, truth has a priority over love. It makes an infinite difference whether there are “weapons of mass destruction” or not, whether two planes knock down three skyscrapers at free fall speed into their own footprints or not. If these statements are lies, then participation in and/or support of a war based on them is participation in and support of the evil of murder, the intentional unjust destruction of human life.
It is dicta of Catholic nonviolent as well as violence justifying moral theology that “The effort one is obliged to make in order to acquire moral certainty is to be measured by the importance of the action itself and the consequences which are anticipated. To act without moral certainty is to do evil.”
When a Christian, violent or nonviolent, shows little concern for seeking what is true, he and she gradually becomes almost morally blind from being accustomed to evil. He and she becomes prey for the crisis monger. Such Christians jump like children playing hopscotch from one media reported crisis to another. The media generated emotion of ‘crisis’ rather than factual knowledge of the matter at hand becomes the moral standard for conscience and for subsequent behavior. William Randolph Hearst’s ceaselessly repeated media mantra “Remember the Maine” in six months turned million of Americans, Christians and non-Christians, into conscientious blood thirsty, revengeful human beings full of hatred for the Spanish and equally full of self righteousness.
Dependence upon the media driven emotion of crisis to validate truth and hence the behavior that follows is all too often the way of the American Christian, whether violent or nonviolent. The crisis rhythms and emotions of the Christian preachers, pulpiteers and evangelists—even if today they are dressed like politicians, scientists and experts—go back to well before the founding of the United States. Their history of being the work of “the father of lies, who is a murder from the beginning” is provable and incontestable. Their history of generating abominable levels of human pain and misery is equally provable and incontestable.
Beware of the crisis monger as a standard of truth. It is not just after your body under the auspices of protecting your body. It is after your soul.
TWENTY-FIRST HELPING:
Our Lamb has conquered; Him let us follow.
“Metanoia”, “change your mind.” -Jesus first spoken word in His public ministry
“The mind is the ultimate spiritual battlefield.” -Gandhi
“Veracity is the heart of morality.” -Thomas Huxley
St. Edith Stein:
“My desire for truth was itself a prayer.”
“God is truth. Those who seek truth, seek God, whether they know it or not.”
Mahatma Gandhi:
“The word satya (Truth) is derived from Sat which means ‘being.’ Nothing is or exists in reality except Truth. That is why Sat or Truth is perhaps the most important name of God.”
“Devotion to this Truth is the sole justification for our existence. All our activities should be centered in Truth. Truth should be the very breath of our life. Without Truth it is impossible to have any principles or rules in life.”
“Therefore the pursuit of Truth is true bhakti (devotion). It is the path that leads to God.”
“Purge the canker of untruth.”
“The danger is that when we are surrounded by falsehood on all sides, we might be caught in it and begin to deceive ourselves. We should be careful not to make a mistake, out of our laziness and ignorance, Constant vigilance under all circumstances is essential. A votary of Truth cannot act otherwise.”
“God as Truth has been for me a treasure beyond price. May he be so to everyone of us!”
“Character is based on virtuous action and virtuous action is grounded on Truth. Truth, then, is the source and foundation of all things that are good and great. Hence, be fearless and unflinching in pursuit of Truth.”
TWENTY-SECOND HELPING:
Our Lamb has conquered, Him let us follow.
In this post-truth age, where as Tommy Smother said, “Truth is what you get others to believe is truth,” where as Eric Fromm said, “Truth is mobile, depending on what the interests of the moment require,” where corporate mass media reigns unobstructed in defining and proclaiming truth for general public consumption, what is the Christian to think, to choose, to do surrounded by this cacophony of “truths?” The answer is neither complicated nor opaque. Since the Christian believes Jesus Christ is God who is love (agape), the Holy One, “made flesh,” he or she is to put on the mind of Christ-God and follow Him. He or she is to become holy as Jesus is holy. He or she is to become loving as Jesus is loving. But how?
Listen to the words of one of the great Biblical scholars in the modern catholic Church, the late Rev. John L. McKenzie:
“For Saint Paul holiness—indeed life itself—is identification with Christ, which is not mere imitation of Jesus or acceptance of His teachings. Paul’s writing to the Philippians (2:1-11) say what this meant to him: you must think like Christ.
Think like Christ, what will that do to our world of values which we have built up from habit and conviction in our years since childhood? Think like Christ and how much that we adore would we have to burn? One must think like Jesus to see how he or she is to become present in any activity in which they are engaged. Both Gospels and Epistles insist that thinking like Jesus is a personal responsibility which each must fulfill for himself or herself. Unless the Christian makes the effort to put on the mind of Christ precisely in his life at this time and place, he is not a Christian in what he is doing. Paul invited Christians to make the mind of Christ real and effective in the management of their lives, as a mother in a family, as a physician, as a merchant, as a salesperson, as a mechanic, as a factory worker. Are there not, however, ways of life and professions in which it is impossible to put on the mind of Christ, to think like Christ?”(Emphasis added)
The Jesus Christ who is meant here is, of course, the Jesus Christ of the Gospels for He is “the truth.”
-Emmanuel Charles McCarthy
TWENTY-THIRD HELPING
Our Lamb has conquered; Him let us follow.
“Make your own, the mind of Christ Jesus.” (Phil 2: 5),
A Petitionary Prayer for the Grace
To Think Like Jesus
Jesus, you have the words of eternal life.
Replace my thoughts with your thoughts,
I want my thinking to correspond with your teaching;
I want to make decisions according to your standards.
You are the Truth given to me by the Father.
Let your mind be my mind.
Live in my mind, Jesus!
Amen.
Blessed James Alberione, SSP
-Emmanuel Charles McCarthy
TWENTY-FOURTH HELPING
Our Lamb has conquered; Him let us follow.
Think Like Jesus.
You, machine worker, and man in the workshop: Tomorrow, when they order you no longer to make water pipes and cooking ware but steel helmets and machine artillery; then think like Jesus: say no!
You, young lady behind the sales counter, and the girl in the office: Tomorrow, when they order you to fill grenades and mount telescope sights for machine guns; then think like Jesus: say no!
You, scientist in the laboratory: Tomorrow, when they order you to discover a new formula to kill people; then think like Jesus: say no!
You, poet in your study: Tomorrow, when they order you to write ballads of hate instead of songs of love; then think like Jesus: say no!
You, minister in your pulpit: Tomorrow, when they order you to bless and to justify war; then think like Jesus: say no!
You captain of a steamer: Tomorrow, when they order you no longer to haul wheat, but rather, cannons and bombs; then think like Jesus: say no!
You, man in the village and man in the city: Tomorrow, when they come recruit you into the military; then think like Jesus: say no!
You, mothers from all parts of the world: Tomorrow, when they order that your precious child be a soldier for new slaughters of other mothers’ precious ones; then think like Jesus: say no!
You Christian: Tomorrow when they come as Jesus said they would; then think like Jesus, fear not and be at peace for Christ is Risen.
-Emmanuel Charles McCarthy
TWENTY-FIFTH HELPING:
Our Lamb has conquered; Him let us follow.
Then Saul, still breathing threats and murder against the disciples of the Lord, went to the high priest and asked letters from him to the synagogues of Damascus, so that if he found any who were of the Way, whether men or women, he might bring them bound to Jerusalem.
As he journeyed he came near Damascus, and suddenly a light shone around him from heaven. He fell to the ground, and heard a voice saying to him, “Saul, Saul, why are you persecuting me?”
Saul asked, “Who are You, Lord?”
Then the Lord said, “I am Jesus, whom you are persecuting” (Ac 9:1-19, Ac 22:6-21 and Ac 26:12-18).
It is critical to note, that Jesus does not say to Saul, “Why are you persecuting my disciples or my followers?” Jesus says to Saul, “Why are you persecuting me?”
In all the editions of the Bible I have consulted the footnote reference after this passage is to Matthew 25:31-46.
“Whatever you do unto the least of one of these brothers and sisters of mine you do unto me” (Mt 25:31-46).
For the Christian, all weapons—nuclear, bacteriological-viral, chemical, electromagnetic— are ultimately made to be Christ-killers. For the Christian all weapons whether in their creation or their use are either Christ-killers or intended to be Christ-killers.
Christian Just War Theory in all of its configurations is a perfidious institutional Church theological theory that justifies Christ killing.
True or False?
Ask your bishop, priest, minister, pastor. Ask yourself.
-Emmanuel Charles McCarthy
TWENTY-SIXTH HELPING:
Our Lamb has conquered: Him let us follow.
If you are a Christ-killer does it really make any difference if you are a Democrat, Republican, Socialist or Communist, liberal, conservative or radical, Catholic, Protestant, Orthodox or Evangelical, Russian, Irish, English, Italian, German, Jewish or American?
Or perhaps, “Saul, Saul, why are you persecuting me?“, is a mere fabrication, lie, by St. Paul to boost his spiritual status among the Christians of his day? Or, perhaps, “Whatever you do unto the least you do to me,” is a noble lie by Jesus to trick those who believe in Him into being more compassionate.
If you are a mother who sees her son or daughter butchered to death, does it really make any difference to you what the color of your child’s slayer’s uniform is or whether he or she is a Democrat, Republican, Socialist or Communist, liberal, conservative or radical, Catholic, Protestant, Orthodox or Evangelical, Russian, Irish, English, Italian, German, Jewish or American?
Since God—who is love and who infinitely loves all His sons and daughters—became human and since all human beings suffer when those whom they love suffer, Christ-God suffers each time we cause another to suffer—regardless of the noble reasons for which we cause it?
But why should this make any difference to the Christians. If he or she will not love the neighbor they can see, it is sheer folly to believe they will love God whom they cannot see. “Anyone who says, ‘I love God,’and hates his or her brother or sister is a liar, since whoever does not love the brother or sister he or she can see, cannot love God whom he or she has never seen” (1Jn 4:20). The love of course that is meant here is ‘love as Jesus loves,’ which is a Nonviolent Love of friends and enemies
-Emmanuel Charles McCarthy
TWENTY-SEVENTH HELPING:
Our Lamb has conquered; Him let us follow.
“All political power comes from the barrel of a gun.”
—Mao Zedong.
“The most dangerous element in Christianity from the point of view of the establishment is the refusal to kill another human being.”
—Peter Vergin, Dukhobor leader, Christian pacifist
September 2, 1897
“The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting”
The absence of the Nonviolent Jesus and His Way of Nonviolent Love of Friends and enemies from the everyday consciousnesses and consciences of the overwhelming majority of Christians for the last 1700 years is the result of institutional Church leadership intentionally censoring that aspect of Jesus’ life and the Gospels. That is an historically verifiable fact. The censorship during these centuries was done mostly by the intentional omission in all of the ordinary avenues of communication available to the Church in at any given time. Suppression of truth by omission and is a common method of censorship. Nothing is said from the pulpit, nothing is written, nothing is spoken in the Church by anyone with ecclesiastical authority of the fact that the real Jesus, the only Jesus of history there is, the only Christ of faith there is, that is the Nonviolent Jesus Christ of the Gospels refuses to kill people, even lethal enemies, and explicitly commands His disciples to “Love your enemies,” as He loved His enemies.
To this hour this near universal practice of suppression of this truth of the Gospels by the leadership of most institutional Churches continues full throttle. Although today, thanks to the cleansing winnowing fan of New Testament scholarship, the ranking ecclesiastics of most Churches must give an occasional simultaneous tip-of-the-hat and wave-of-dismissal to the historical Nonviolent Jesus of the Gospels and His Way of Nonviolent love of friends and enemies.
-Emmanuel Charles McCarthy
TWENTY-EIGHT HELPING:
OurLamb has conquered; Him let us follow.
“All political power comes from the barrel of a gun.”
—Mao Zedong.
“The most dangerous element in Christianity from the point of view of the establishment is the refusal to kill another human being.”
—Peter Vergin, Dukhobor leader, Christian pacifist
September 2, 1897
“The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting”
No Christian theologian or writer prior to Constantine justified killing or Christian participation in the military.” The Early Church on Killing: A Comprehensive Sourcebook on War, Abortion and Capital Punishment. –Ronald Sider, PhD (Yale)
Censorship: The suppression of speech, public communication, or other information, on the basis that such material is considered objectionable, harmful, sensitive, or inconvenient. Censorship is conducted by governments, private institutions, and other controlling bodies.
Why would the leaders of an institutional Church that has been straightforward and clear in teaching and living an unambiguous truth of Jesus for 300 years all of a sudden begin to suppress that teaching by systematically and institutionally ignoring it in word and deed? What possible spiritual or moral benefit would the disciples of Jesus in that institutional Church at that time receive from such an act of censorship? What possible spiritual or moral benefit could any disciple of Jesus at any time, including today, receive from such an act of censorship by Church leadership?
What in Jesus’ teaching of Nonviolent Love of friends and enemies did and do Church leaders find so objectionable, harmful, sensitive or inconvenient that they have to systematically prevent it from entering the minds of members of the Church—except maybe, when presented as a blatantly ludicrous, unrealistic and unreasonable manner of living the Christian life in the “real world?”
After teaching and living according to Jesus’ Way of Nonviolent love of all at all times for 300 years and seeing the Church grow to the point of becoming one of the two largest religious bodies in the Roman Empire, what could motivate Church leaders, then or now, to bracket-out of ordinary Christian consciousness an indisputable teaching of the God Incarnate in the Gospels?
In 1959 I would have flunked my Catholic moral theology exam at the University of Notre Dame if I had written, “A Catholic can be a pacifist.” Why? Because, in the moral theology text the class was assigned for the course, The Christians Virtues, with Imprimatur, written by Rev. Charles Sheedy, C.S.C., S.T.D., it reads on page 191, “There is no justification either in Sacred Scripture, nor in Catholic tradition for a position of absolute pacifism,” This is an example of Church leaders reaching into the classroom and hence into the minds of young people to censor what they know about the Nonviolent Jesus of the Gospels and His Way of Nonviolent Love of friends and enemies and thereby guaranteeing for all practical purposes that the Catholic young person will never know that the “refusal to kill’ is his or her Baptismal right and calling. This is orchestrated censorship that pre-dates by 1600 years George Orwell’s 1984, but is as systematic, as far reaching and as effective as anything “Big Brother” conceived.
-Emmanuel Charles McCarthy
TWENTY-NINTH HELPING:
Our Lamb has conquered; Him let us follow.
“All political power comes from the barrel of a gun.”
—Mao Zedong.
“The most dangerous element in Christianity from the point of view of the establishment is the refusal to kill another human being.”
—Peter Vergin, Dukhobor leader, Christian pacifist
September 2, 1897
“The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting”
“No Christian theologian or writer prior to Constantine justified killing or Christian participation in the military.” The Early Church on Killing: A Comprehensive Sourcebook on War, Abortion and Capital Punishment. –Ronald Sider, PhD (Yale)
There is a very long history of institutional Church leaders, via various methods, censoring Jesus. In the Catholic moral theology textbook I mentioned in the last FAST FOOD Helping, The Christian Virtues, written in 1949, there is a section on love of enemies. The author states, “Our Lord Himself tells us we must love our enemies. ((Mt 5:44).” He then proceed with an extensive discussion of what this means, with many concrete examples from life regarding where and how to apply this teaching of Jesus. But nowhere in this multi-page presentation does he say a single word about “love your enemies” in relations to war.
A few weeks ago a friend of mine watched an address on Jesus’ teaching, “Love your enemies,” by Catholic Bishop Robert Barron. She noticed that he never once mentioned how this teaching of Jesus related to war. So, she sent that question to some sort of public “comments and questions” message board that viewers can write into after a talk by him. Well, not only did he not respond to her question, her question never showed up on his public “comments and questions” board. Thinking this might have been just a computer snafu, she sent in her question again. It still did not appear. Giving it “that old college try,” she sent her question in a third time. Same results.
Note the consistency between the manner in which the Church taught everyday Catholics the meaning of “Love your enemies” in 1949 and in 2020! Jesus’ teaching of “Love your enemies” just did not relate it to war. This does not mean that the Church did not have libraries full of books on theories of how one could follow Jesus’ command of “Love your enemies” and still kill enemies in war. It did. And, each of these theories became self-evidently more convoluted and detached from the realities of war and the teachings of Jesus than the one before it. For example, besides adhering strictly to all the standards of the Catholic Just War Theory, in order to morally kill another human being in war it had to be done with love for the person you are burning to death with your flame thrower. When discussing what Jesus meant by His command, “Love your enemies,” it is better to avoid the subject of war altogether when speaking to the average Christian. Talking too much in public on the issue might expose the outrageous absurdities on which the Christian morality of “blowing your enemy to pieces equaling loving your enemy” is based. And, that might plant the seed in the Christian’s mind that he or she should and can refuse to kill.
But what possibly could be a motivation, a desire, with so much power in it that it could bring Church leaders to censor God Incarnate in the Fourth Century or in the Twenty-first Century?
Well, if you are a leader of a large Christian group and want to be chummy with the elites of government, the military and finance, you better not be telling your people that the refusal to kill is a part of the Way that Jesus wants you to live. So, here are the choices placed before the leaders of the institutional Churches since the time of Constantine: Either serve the elites by withholding from the view of the average Joe in the pew, whom the elites required for cannon fodder, an accurate knowledge of the Nonviolent Jesus of the Gospels and His Way of Nonviolent Love of friends and enemies, or serve Jesus and refuse to censor His teaching for anybody or for any reason.
-Emmanuel Charles McCarthy
THIRTIETH HELPING:
Our Lamb has conquered; Him let us follow.
Censorship of Jesus rejection of violence and His love of enemies teaching by institutional Church leaders makes no rational sense by any standard of holiness, goodness or love that can be found in the Gospels. As a Christian or as a Christian group, to fail once or to fail 70 times 7 times to live according to the teaching of your Lord, God and Savior is sin. But, part of the good news of the Gospel is that God forgives all sin as many times as the person asks for forgiveness. But, sin and the forgiveness of sin by God is infinitely removed from censoring the teachings of Jesus and thereby leaving Christians and all human beings with eternal destinies in a state of ignorance regarding good and evil as defined by God Incarnate.
Church leaders censoring Jesus’ teaching, which censoring de facto amounts to cultivating ignorance about God’s will as revealed by Jesus, is the antithesis of what Jesus explicitly commissioned His Church leaders for and commissioned them to do: “Go therefore and make disciples of all nation, baptizing them in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit, and teach them to obey all that I have commanded you” (Mt 28:20). What powerful evil spirit lurking in the hearts of Church leaders, yesterday and today, could possible move them to interpret the above commission, known as The Great Commission, to mean censor, hide, the teachings I have commissioned you to inform my disciples about and thereby guarantee that they will be unable to obey them?
The Catholic Biblical scholar, the late Rev. John L. McKenzie, starts us down the road to an answer to this question when he writes in his book, Sources, “At least since Constantine the institutional church has been, besides the vehicle for the Gospel, an omnibus carrying many passengers on a first-class ride to power, wealth and worldly security.”
But, there is no such thing as a first-class ride in life that does not require someone riding shotgun. Luxury wealth can only be defended, in the face of those who do not have the necessities of life, by the willingness to employ violence against any upstart Lazarus among the destitute. It is therefore whimsical to think that such first-class passengers—even if they are Christian—and the institutions they control—even if they are Churches— would authentically support the proclamation of the Nonviolent Jesus of the Gospels and His Way of Nonviolent Love of friends and enemies—or that they would support anyone who supports such a proclamation. Why?
As just said, luxury wealth can only be defended with violence. When I have more than I could ever need and others have to watch their children live in depravation and die from curable diseases, the only way to protect my luxury from their destitution is by the gun. Nonviolence at a minimum requires giving up the protection of violence. Giving up the protection of violence would mean that those who are presently on a first-class ride through life would have to ride in economy-class like all the other ordinary Joe—and that loss of “power, wealth and worldly security” is an option that such people would find worse than the grave.
Hence, do not expect those riding first-class through life to dismiss the mercenaries riding shotgun for them. Do not expect them or the institutions they control to do much more than occasionally give lip-service and some spare change in support of proclaiming Jesus’ Way of Nonviolent Love of friends and enemies. From the perspective of the worldly value system in which they have been formed and from which they have so greatly benefited, it would be irrational for them to do otherwise. Sorrowfully therefore, violence and the justification of violence and the variegated methods of censoring the Nonviolent Jesus of the Gospels and His Way of Nonviolent Love of friends and enemies are here to stay for a long while in the institutional Churches.
“It is not always easy for a person to see that the duty of protecting the investment may be precisely and without doubt the old man of sin to which we must die.”
—Rev. John L. McKenzie
-Emmanuel Charles McCarthy
THIRTY-FIRST HELPING:
Our Lamb has conquered; Him let us follow.
When Church leaders, bishops, priests, ministers, pastors, superintendents, religious education directors etc., censor by various strategies and practices Jesus’ teachings of Nonviolent Love of friends and enemies, they are making a concrete decision that the Christian community is better off and is stronger by not knowing what Jesus taught. More than a millennium before INGSOC, the totalitarian ruling party in the novel, 1984, existed in the minds of people, the leaders of the Christian Churches were implementing its slogan: Ignorance is strength. To this day most of the Christian Churches adhere to the Ignorance is strength model of evangelization and contrive ploys to censor Jesus’ rejection of violence and love of enemies. For Church leaders to think this cultivated ignorance of Jesus and His teaching spiritually or morally serves God, Jesus’ mission or the sanctification of the individual Christian is not to think like Jesus thinks. Jesus did not live, proclaim, die for and die in the Way of Nonviolent Love of friends and enemies to have the leaders, the bishops etc., of the Church He founded censor His teaching on this matter.
Ignorance of Jesus’ teachings of Nonviolent Love of friends and enemies, which the censorship orchestrated by institutional Church leaders assures, strengthen only the Satanic in this world. Such censorship does not and cannot strengthen Christians to be more loving, move holy, more faithful, more Christlike. Cannot! But such censorship of Jesus can and does throw open new doors of hell, thereby permitting new legions of ugly evil spirits to roam throughout the world in the hearts of human beings seeking the ruin of souls. Now, thanks to most post-Constantinian bishops, these diabolical spirits, which Jesus came to bind, can seek by violence and by enmity to make human existence a piece of hell on earth—while operating under the name of Christianity.
Bishops, can you not see that you and your predecessors have brought nearly the entire Church of Jesus Christ to a place of doublethink that not even INGSOC in the high-tech, totalitarian, dystopia of 1984 could achieve— namely, believing that the teaching by word and deed of the Nonviolent Jesus to “Love your enemies” can be adhered to while slaughtering your enemies?
Bishops, I ask you, is what you are getting for yourselves and for the institutional Church of such value that it justifies censoring out of Christians’ ordinary consciousness and conscience the Gospel truth and the historical reality of the Nonviolent Jesus and His Way of Nonviolent Love of friends and enemies?
-Emmanuel Charles McCarthy
THIRTY-SECOND HELPING:
Our Lamb has conquered; Him let us follow.
If tomorrow the Church—via an Ecumenical Council or via the Pope speaking infallibly—taught what Jesus in the Gospels teaches about violence and enmity, namely, that they are to be rejected completely, that they are never the will of the Father, that one cannot be following Jesus faithfully and employ them for any reason, that they are intrinsically evil under all circumstances, that they are utterly contradictory to Jesus’ new commandment to “love one another as I have loved you,” and that any Christian that belongs to an organization that requires him or her to kill other human beings, other beloved sons and daughters of the Father of all, must leave such a group, would you leave the Church? Would you part company with Jesus—as the Messiah, the Christ, the Son of the Living God, the Word (Logos) of God Incarnate, the Lord, the Second Person of the Holy Trinity, God?
Suppose it was not an Ecumenical Council or the Pope speaking infallibly who told you this, suppose it was Matthew, Mark, Luke and John, individually and collectively, who told you this? Would you then part company with them and with Jesus—as the Messiah, the Christ, the Son of the Living God, the Word of God Incarnate, the Lord, the Second Person of the Holy Trinity, God?
“I went through a crisis of faith (regarding Jesus’ teaching of nonviolence and love of enemies in 1974). I am a practical man and those words of Jesus—“Love your enemies . . . Do good to those who hate you . . . Turn the other cheek when someone strikes you . . . ” were completely impractical and unworkable. I couldn’t understand it. In many ways I still don’t. Yet Jesus took this course of suffering and nonviolence. His words were so clear, and there is the example of His life and death. For me, the issue is very simple. Either Jesus is God or not. If not, then his words could be dismissed as idealism. But if Jesus is God, then what he said he meant. He wasn’t kidding. He could not be dismissed as an idealist who didn’t understand human reality. So, either I accept what he says as coming from God or else I forget about the whole business. Forget about Christianity! My crisis was a practical one. My choice was made on the basis of Faith in Jesus being God.”
—Rev. George Zabelka
Catholic Chaplain for the 509th Composite Group,
Hiroshima-Nagasaki Bomb Crews
Quote from the television documentary on his life
The Reluctant Prophet (DVD)
-Emmanuel Charles McCarthy
THIRTY-THIRD HELPING:
Our Lamb has conquered; Him let us follow.
What is the relationship, if any, between Gospel Nonviolence and truth? A few directional considerations:
Truth and falsehood are set before us for the trial of our hearts. -St. John Henry Newman
Although each individual has a right to be respected in his own journey in search of the truth, there exists a prior moral obligation, and a grave one at that, to seek the truth and to adhere to it once it is known. -John Paul II,
-Mahatma Gandhi:
My religion is based on truth and non-violence. Truth is the substance of all morality. Non-violence and truth are inseparable and presuppose one another. I must purged myself of the canker of untruth.
Satyagraha (truth-force) is derived from the Sanskrit words satya (meaning “truth”) and āgraha (“polite insistence”, or “holding firmly to”). Satya is derived from the word “sat”, which means “being”. Nothing is or exists in reality except Truth. Truth is real, as opposed to nonexistent (asat). Hence we know God as Sat-Chit-Ananda, one who combines in Himself Truth, Knowledge and Bliss. The world rests upon the bedrock of satya or truth. If untruth does not so much as exist, its victory is out of the question. And truth being that which is, can never be destroyed. This is the doctrine of satyagraha in a nutshell. Its root meaning is holding on to truth, hence truth-force
Devotion to Truth is the sole justification for our existence. All our activities should be centered in Truth. Truth should be the very breath of our life. Sat or Truth is perhaps the most important name of God
The pursuit of Truth is true bhakti (devotion). It is the path that leads to God.
The Satyagrahi’s object is to convert, not to coerce, the wrong-doer. I have drawn the distinction between passive resistance as understood and practiced in the West and satyagraha. Before I had evolved the doctrine of satyagraha to its full logical and spiritual extent, I often used “passive resistance” and “satyagraha” as synonymous terms: but as the doctrine of satyagraha developed, the expression “passive resistance” ceased to be synonymous, as passive resistance has admitted of violence as in the case of the suffragettes
and has been universally acknowledged to be a weapon of the weak. Moreover, passive resistance does not necessarily involve complete adherence to truth under every circumstance. Therefore it is different from satyagraha in three essentials: Satyagraha is a weapon of the strong; it admits of no violence under any circumstance whatsoever; and it ever insists upon truth.
All human beings are made with the desire to know and what they desire to know is the truth, what is, what is real. To live in conformity to what is real, truth, is what we are created for. To live in unreality, illusion, untruth, a lie is to live a life contrary to our nature, contrary to that for which we were formed as we are. -ECM
Neither sincerity nor piety, nor public consensus, nor good will, nor pleasant rhetoric, nor fear, nor coercive power validate a statement as the truth. If a statement says that something is that is not, it is a falsehood. It is the human and Christian obligation of the listener to evaluate, independent of the sincerity, piety, public consensus, good will, pleasant rhetoric, fear of or power of the speaker, whether what is said is the truth. -ECM
When a person shows little concern for seeking what is true, either in particular situations or in general, he or she gradually becomes accustomed to living under the tyranny of caprice. -ECM
So, in truth what is the relation between Gospel Nonviolence and truth? In truth, what does Jesus teach in the Gospels that His disciples should do in relation to the options of violence and enmity?
-Emmanuel Charles McCarthy
THIRTY-FOURTH HELPING
Our Lamb has conquered; Him let us follow.
Thomas Merton wrote fifty -five years ago; or was this written this morning?
“The Church confesses that she has taken in vain the name of Jesus Christ, for she has been ashamed of his name before the world and she has not striven forcefully enough against the misuse of this name for an evil purpose. She has stood by while violence and wrong were being committed under cover of this name.” —Bonhoeffer
The character of pseudo-Christianity that while claiming to be justified by God, by faith or by the works of faith and love, it merely operates as a machine for excusing sin instead of confessing, repenting and pardoning it. If it becomes expedient to commit murder, whether by lynch law or by inquisitorial tyranny, then murder becomes an act of holy justice. Thus gradually the determination to pervert the Christian conscience becomes a function of the “Church”—perhaps even its prime function. And this becomes inevitably a sign of God’s judgment on the “Church.”
The Church has an obligation not to join in the incantations of political slogans and in the concoction of pseudo -events. We abandon communication in order to celebrate our favorite group-myths in a ritual pseudo-events.
“News” is largely made up of this liturgy of pseudo-events. We are told we must adjust. Adjust to what? To the general fiction? Trying to adjust involves adjusting to a whole galaxy of illusions. Stop trying to adjust
When anyone is judged by God, he receives in the very hour of judgment, a gift from God. This gift that is offered to him, in his judgement, is truth. He can receive the truth or reject it. In any case truth is offered silently, mercifully, in the very crisis by which he is put to the test.
We are confronted by a choice: either to live by the truth or be destroyed; doomed to a future of psychopathic horror in a new barbarism that must emerge from the ruins of what we have brought down on our own heads?
The tactic of nonviolence is a tactic of love that seeks the salvation and redemption of the opponent, not his castigation, humiliation and defeat.
-Emmanuel Charles McCarthy
THIRTY-FIFTH HELPING:
Our Lamb has conquered; Him let us follow.
“It is terrible to see how Jesus, with open eyes, let himself be impaled on the drawn knife–and yet could do no other without betraying the thing he had finally, finally brought into human history: the refusal to use violence. Jesus was nonviolent to the core.”
—Norbert Lohfink, SJ
Professor Emeritus of Old Testament at the Philosophisch-Theologische Hochschule Sankt Georgen in Frankfurt am Main, Germany
.
“Nonviolence, renunciation of domination and the consequent vulnerability are irrevocably embedded in the Church and its offices by the praxis of Jesus. When did the Church no longer venture to say that it was the Messianic location of the absolute renunciation of violence? When did the Church no longer understand itself as God’s “contrast-society?” It is clear that the so-called ‘Constantinian Turn’ marks a profound break.
The compatibility of Christianity and military service is not a peripheral issue. At stake is the Church’s nonviolence, and since Christ, the Lord of the Church, renounced all violence and died impotently on the cross, this concerns the most crucial part of the Church’s existence. The desire to dominate, the inclination to violence, the eternal rivalries, here is the most basic problem of all in human society. It is precisely nonviolence that is the most important characteristic of the “contrast-society,” which Jesus meant his Church to be.”
—Gerhard Lohfink, SJ, Chaired Professor of New Testament Studies
Catholic Theological Faculty, University of Tubingen
Jesus and Community: The Social Dimension of Christian Faith
-Emmanuel Charles McCarthy
THIRTY-SIXTH HELPING:
Our Lamb has conquered; Him let us follow.
In the morning of August 6, 1890 a lamp panel lights up on the Westinghouse generator at Auburn State Prison indicating that it has reached two thousand volts—which has been scientifically determined to be the optimal voltage for executing a human being. The switch is pulled by a man named Edwin Davis and electricity courses through William Kemmler for 17 seconds. When it is over Albert Southwick, a leader in the killing chair movement, exclaims, “There is the culmination of ten years work and study.” The electric chair was a mini-Manhattan Project brought to successful completion!
However, a problem exists. William Kemmler is not dead. Government officials in a panic try to turn the Westinghouse generator back on, but cannot. It requires time to recharge itself to 2000 volts. Meanwhile, William Kemmler, who has turned bright red during his “electrocution,” is in agony, groaning and frantically gasping for breath. He has of course urinated and defecated all over himself, since it is not known at this time that those to be executed in this manner must wear diapers. The New York Herald describing this scene reports that “strong men fainted and fell on the floor.” When turned back on, the current is kept rushing through Kemmler’s body for over a minute. The next day newspaper stories tell how smoke rose from Kemmler’s head, the smell of burning flesh permeated the room, a curious crackling sound was heard by all witnesses and flames shot from his mouth. Although there is considerable public outcry, it does not move the legislature to repeal the electrocution law nor does it move the Supreme Court to see anything cruel and unusual in it.
Perhaps on each August 6 it would be appropriate, along with remembering the victims and executioners of August 6, 1945, to remember the victims and executioners of August 6, 1890. Perhaps it would be good to remember on each August 6 that the executioners of that day are not just Paul Tibbets the pilot of the Enola Gay or the switch-puller Edwin Davis, but all—including some of the brightest people the world has ever produced, e.g. Thomas Edison, Robert Oppenheimer—who freely, directly abd significantly participated in the long chain of choices without which August 6, 1945 and August 6, 1890 could not have entered history as they did. Finally, it may be spiritually sound and humanly helpful to specifically remember the individual human being, William Kemmler, on that day when two utterly new forms of high-intelligence, high-tech homicidal violence tear into the human community.
I make this last observation because in the end homicidal violence cuts into life one unique, fragile, pain-absorbing human being at a time—even when hundreds of thousands are killed on a battlefield. “One death is a tragedy; a million is a statistic,” says Stalin. True enough. Because of the lies and mechanisms that society, its institutions—including religious institutions—and its media employ to nurture psychic numbing and indifference to the mass killing of human beings by governments, most people who are not immediately part of it read about the battles and the statistics of human slaughter as if they were reading the statistics of the won-loss columns in the sports page. But, whether on the blood drenched fields of Gettysburg, or in the vermin infested trenches on the Somme, or inside a burning tank in Baghdad, or at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, each person dies his or her own private death, every bit as much as did William Kemmler.
It should be an imperative of truth and morality to always and everywhere acknowledge and emphasize this fact, and thereby foster the growth of a deep certainty regarding the intrinsic perniciousness and perversion of homicidal violence.
If the spirit of homicidal violence had but one victim in human history, it would be no less monstrous, grotesque and perverted. The satanic is not discerned by statistics. Indeed, statistics can dull empathic sensibilities that expose critical truths. Exclusive focus on quantity can be a decoy of the demonic, whereby the actual concrete reality of an irreplaceable person being painfully mutilated or burned to death is rendered all but invisible by fixating on the numerical abstractions of competing body counts. And of course, once a reality can no longer be seen, it is no longer subject to accurate moral evaluation. Once the screams of the individual person are silenced beneath the clatter and chatter of statistics and justifying philosophies or theologies presented by mass media, then homicide ceases to be experienced as the phenomena it in fact is. Its radically tragic personal face is masked behind a façade of radically impersonal statistics. Homicidal violence without a unique and irreplaceable face as its victim does not exist as a reality for its perpetrators. Hence, part of the importance of also remembering the illiterate, alcoholic from the slums of Buffalo, William Kemmler, on August 6.
For each who dies on August 6, 1945 dies as William Kemmler dies on August 6, 1890. Each dies his or her own, very personal death at the hands of other human beings. The common denominator between the two August 6-events is that both are the enfleshment of exactly the same wicked spirit. The spirit that kills William Kemmler on August 6, 1890 and the spirit that kills tens of thousands of human beings on August 6, 1945 is precisely the same spirit that possesses Cain, kills Jesus and is acting through every person who has ever intentionally destroyed the life of another—or played at destroying the life of another. August 6 should be the day when the world community and I myself examine conscience and consciousness and unequivocally commit or re-commit to exorcising not only nuclear weapons but also this spirit from our presence.
William Kemmler, August 6, AD 1890
-Emmanuel Charles McCarthy
THIRTY-SEVENTH HELPING:
Our Lamb has conquered; Him let us follow.
“Homicidal violence without a unique and irreplaceable face as its victim
does not exist as a reality for its perpetrators.”
https://ashita2010.blogspot.com/2010/11/ashita-trailer.html
(4 minutes. Do watch full screen.)
-Emmanuel Charles McCarthy
THIRTY-EIGHT HELPING:
Our Lamb has conquered; Him let us follow.
Tomorrow’s high-tech and low-tech brutalizer in politics, in finance, in commerce, in the military, and in religion lie in their cribs today. Also, the well paid or poorly paid pawns who will do their brutalizing for them lie in their cribs today. So do those whom they shall brutalize lie in their cribs. tonight. So do tomorrow’s saints.
How many there will be in each group depends on how many are taught and nurtured from the crib onward, by the two generations before them, those values, attitudes and beliefs, those stories, heroes and gods who will foster and justify the brutalization of other human beings, under certain and ever expanding conditions
How many there will be in each group will also depend on how many are taught and nurtured from the crib onward by the two generations before them those values, attitudes and beliefs that flow logically and inescapably from Jesus’ primal revelation that God is Abba, the Father of all, that God is love (agape), that there is no violence or cruelty in God, that God creates us in the Divine image and likeness, that God makes us this way so that we can know and live in and out of that image and likeness, that God becomes a human being, Jesus of Nazareth, to help us to know and to live in the true image and likeness of the Holy One, that God clarifies the true image of the Divine, which is Love, by Jesus’ words and deeds on earth, and that Jesus also while on earth clarifies the authentic likeness of God, within which human beings are called to live, by ceaselessly willing only one thing, to love as God loves, because the Father eternally wills only one Reality, Love—and Jessu comes only to do the will of the Father.
The bishops of the Church are commissioned by Jesus (Mt 28:20) to be the teachers and nurturers of the latter option, not the former. Sorrowfully, history broadcast, with indisputable evidence as its witness, that since the fourth century to this minute, the bishops and their Churches have ceaselessly and successfully taught and nurtured in their Christian people from Baptism to death the values, attitudes, beliefs, morals and god necessary to motivate, support and justify in the name of Jesus the brutalization of other human beings privately and on a grand scale. The historical evidence of the history of holy brutalization by the Christian Churches, their people and their leadership under the auspices of the name of Jesus rises higher than Mt. Everest.
The Church by its very existence is supposed to be the contrast-nurturer of children in the world, if it is going to Baptize children. It is not supposed to be an adversarial society but a contrast-society, not simply in its rituals, but in its values, attitude, beliefs and morals it lives while serving all the sons and daughters of the Father of all. It is supposed to live in and out of “God who is love,” as revealed by, with and in Jesus in the Gospels. From the crib onward the leaders of the Churches and the people themselves, who are the two generations before the child in the crib, should be imbuing that Christian child, bestowing on that Christian child all the flows logically and inescapably from Jesus’ primal revelation that God is Abba, the Father of all, that God is love (agape).
If you do not do this now for your children and grandchildren, nieces and nephews, who will protect these boys and girls from the pleasant, courteous, intelligent but brutal mind that is part of the air we breathe? Who will help them put on the contrast-mind, to “put on the mind of Christ” for a lifetime—the mind of which the center, circumference and everything in between is God is Abba, the Father of all, God is love.
-Emmanuel Charles McCarthy
THIRTY-NINTH HELPING:
Our Lamb has conquered; Him let us follow.
We’ve got some difficult days ahead, so pray much. Work hard to stay focused on the Truth, the Good News, revealed by Jesus in the midst of the alternating currents of lies and violence in which we must now live. But our faith in Jesus tells us that there is something infinitely greater in reality in which we move and live and have our being, namely, the love for us of God, who is love (Rm 8 :28-39). —-ECM
“God is my Father.
These simple words proclaim
the most important prophecy
concerning human beings,
and answer every question
raised by the mystery of life.
This prophecy hovers over all creation, answers every question, appeases every craving, fulfills every hope, justifies every delay, illuminates the darkness and tells every person who he is and who she is.
St. Paul tells the Ephesians, “He has predestined us to be his adopted sons and daughters” (Ep 1:5) The lowly heart has always sensed it and from it has drawn his or her will to live. Yes, human beings have intuitively grasped this. Not for nothing did Tertulian write that a person is born naturaliterChristianus, being predisposed to the message of Christ.
And, Christ’s message is this, “God is my Father,” and “God is your Father.” But, this absolute was already in the human heart. Yes, the human being has intuitively sensed his and her destiny, however confusedly, and in this has found the courage to live in the Way of Jesus and the strength to wait and endure.
Yes, if God is my Father, I can be calm and live in peace; I am secure for life, for death, for time and for eternity.
And what security is mine!”
by Little Brother of Jesus, Carlo Carretto
Summoned by Love (1978)
-Emmanuel Charles McCarthy
FORTIETH HELPING:
Our Lamb has conquered; Him let us follow.
“Get hold of ‘Abandonment to Divine Providence’ by Jean-Pierre de Caussade, the John Beevers’ translation, and comfort yourself with that. It’s done more to help me these past years than any other spiritual writer.”
(Dorothy Day to Catherine deHueck Doherty, August 9, 1936)
-Emmanuel Charles McCarthy
