FAST FOOD AD 2025: Fifteenth Helping

FORTY THIRD ANNUAL

FAST FOR THE TRUTH OF

GOSPEL NONVIOLENCE

(July1–August 9)

From the book, not the film, Quo Vadis, by Henrky Sienkiewicz, Nobel Prize Laureate in Literature, 1905: 

It is now only minutes before the Christians are to be herded into the arena of horror. Sobs, silence, and desperation alternately punctuate the air. An anguished widow pleads to God, “Give my son back to me, O Lord.” A Christian father repeats and repeats, “The hangmen raped my little daughters and Christ let it happen.” For another Christian soon to die, “the hair lifted on his head in terror” when he thought, “What if Caesar of Rome was mightier than Jesus of Nazareth?” The Apostle Peter quietly sits praying among the tormented faithful. Then he begins speaking, so low at the outset that hardly anyone hears him:

“I tell you in Christ’s name you’ve nothing to fear! Life waits for you, not death. Joy without end, not torments. Song waits, not tears and moaning….

I tell you as God’s apostle, widow, that your son won’t die but will be born in glory to a new life, and you will be together. I tell you, father, whose innocent daughters they’ve soiled, they’ll be as unblemished as the lilies of Hebron when you meet again. I say in Christ’s name to all you mothers who’ll be torn away from your orphaned children, all you who’ll lose your fathers, all who cry for pity, all who’ll witness the death of those they love, all who are sick at heart, unfortunate and fearful, and I say again to you who must die: You will wake as if from a dream into eternal light, and the Son of God will shine in your night.”

In the above truth Gospel Nonviolence, Jesus’ Nonviolent Love of friends and enemies, rests. As Jesus promised in all the synoptic Gospels,