The University’s Responsibility for Peace and Nonviolence
The Vatican’s Journal Educatio Catholica has published Ken Butigan’s article, “The University’s Responsibility for Peace and Nonviolence,” which was based on a keynote speech he delivered at the “Just Peacemaking through Nonviolence Conference” at Seton Hall University, New Jersey on October 1, 2019. Read the entire article here.
In this harrowing time of global violence and injustice, each of us is called to grapple with these monumental challenges and to seek a new, more nonviolent course forward. Universities are uniquely situated to play a leading role in this important task. This is especially true of Catholic universities in light of the institutional Church’s growing embrace of the universal ethic of nonviolence and its promotion of a culture of peace. In Christian theological terms, this is a Kairos moment – a moment of great decision, a time for choosing a way forward toward a more nonviolent world—to which institutions of higher education around the world are being called.
This article examines the powerful responsibility that Catholic universities possess to nurture such a nonviolent shift by reflecting on the following four ideas:
The way of peace and nonviolence is not a narrow specialization but a calling to all
The way of peace and nonviolence is a comprehensive ethic
The way of peace and nonviolence is increasingly being recognized by the institutional Catholic Church as a universal ethic central to the life of the Church and the world, and
The Catholic university has a special role in integrating the way of peace and nonviolence in the Church and the world
Peace and Nonviolence: All Are Called
As someone who has been part of the academy for many years, but also involved in peacebuilding and the work of nonviolence for decades, I have long seen the university as an environment for discovering, teaching and training in the ways of peace. My own vision of higher education is that it is a culture where all constituencies – students, faculty, administration and alumni– are called to be agents of nonviolent change.
This vision, however, has not always been shared. Sometimes there has been hostility to what is perceived as an activist agenda at odds with the neutrality and objectivity that the university is supposed to maintain. Or sometimes the obstacle has not been opposition but specialization. When I taught for several years in a Franciscan seminary, any mail that came to the school regarding peace, justice or nonviolence was invariably put in my mailbox. While I understood that this was organizationally efficient, I felt it was communicating the idea that peace was only the purview of the professor who happened to teach classes on it rather than the responsibility of the entire community. Peace has often been pigeon-holed, and not simply in schools (including Franciscan seminaries), but throughout the Christian community and tradition, and, of course, in the larger world.
The way of peace and nonviolence is not a specialization. It is the work and calling of every person. It is at the core of existence and at the very heart of every human life. It is foundational to our thriving as human persons and our survival as a human species. It is constitutive of being human. In fact, our core identity as human beings is to be peacemakers.
Each of us faces a lifetime of conflicts. If we are going to wage those conflicts successfully – and, most importantly, learn from them and build a world where their root causes are transformed – then all of us must become the peacemakers we are called to be.
The good news is that many members of the human family have, knowingly or not, activated basic peacemaking skills from the beginning of time. As a species we have endured because our deeply-embedded tendencies toward nonviolent options have found ways to trump our deeply-embedded tendencies toward violence.
When Mohandas Gandhi said “nonviolence is as old as the hills,” he meant this not as a rhetorical flourish but as a matter of the human record. Without nonviolent options and practices, violence would have spun irretrievably out of control long ago, propelled by its retaliatory and escalatory logic. We likely would have disappeared as a species had we not used the “breaks” of nonviolence. Called by many names over the millennia, ad hoc practices of nonviolent peacemaking, peacebuilding, and peacekeeping have often neutralized that logic and spawned a saner alternative.
Unfortunately, we have tended to remember our violence much more sharply than our nonviolence. Violence persists in our memory because it is dramatic, because it sparks the lust for revenge, and because it unleashes trauma’s corrosive half-life. Nonviolence has generally not had its chroniclers tracking the moment-to-moment, hour-to-hour, day-to-day peace accords that many millions of us have struck over our long history. It is, however, those often-unreported processes of conflict resolution and restorative justice that have gotten us through. We have survived thus far by the skin of our teeth because of nonviolence.
Read full article here.
