On the Road to Peace

In the year 295, the 21-year-old son of a Roman veteran publicly refused to be drafted into the Roman army. As a result, the young man was arrested and brought to trial. His testimony was written down in a document called the Passio and later recited during Mass throughout the Church as an example of true Christian discipleship. His life and death became one of the great witnesses in the early Church. We need to reclaim his courage and testimony (which was meticulously recorded) as we try to stand up today against the U.S. war machine.

As I follow the regular, dire reports on global warming, I recall my visit two years ago along the foothills of the Himalayas, near the border of China and Nepal, north of Dehredun in India. There I met Dr. Vandana Shiva, a leading anti-globalization and environmental activist, a brilliant, engaging scientist and Gandhian activist.

She has taken up a formidable challenge -- to resist globalization and protect farmers, not to mention the earth itself. Her strategy -- to harvest every endangered seed and indigenous plant, restore the soil to its original richness, and save the seeds from corporate patent theft by creating “seed banks.” A modern-day Noah, gathering for the future the herbs of the world.

This week, my troublemaking friends and I might, after several postponements, be standing trial for our attempt in Santa Fe Sept. 26 to pay a visit to Sen. Pete Domenici and urge him to sign the "Declaration of Peace," a pledge to help end the U.S. war on Iraq. To aid our case we boldly subpoenaed the good senator, who is up to his ears in problems for his role in the firing of prosecutors. His lawyers are wrangling to keep him out of the courtroom, so our trial may well be postponed again.

Voices in the Wilderness founder Kathy Kelly called April 21 with alarming news. Our dear friend, Mairead Corrigan Maguire, the 1976 Irish Nobel Peace Prize winner, hailed as one of the world's great voices for nonviolence, was shot the day before by Israeli soldiers. She was in the middle of a Palestinian nonviolent vigil for human rights at the Israeli-built separation wall in the Palestinian village of Bil'in. (See NCR story: Nobel laureate injured in West Bank.)

We of the Santa Fe protest group, nine of us, had ourselves braced for trial last Thursday in federal court in Albuquerque. We are embroiled in legal difficulties for our efforts last fall to urge our senator to sign a "declaration of peace." Wary guards blocked our entry. So in the lobby elevator we sat, its controls disabled and its doors wide open. And there we held a liturgy featuring a solemn reading of the names of Iraqi and American dead.