Fr. Louie Vitale, OFM, co-founder of Pace e Bene, has turned 90. We are grateful for all the life and love Louie has brought to us and to the world, all these years.

Louie Vitale’s tremendous journey for peace and justice is chronicled in a chapter of a new book by Paul Murray, Seeing with the Eyes of Jesus. You can also get a glimpse of this lifelong pilgrimage in my introduction to Louie’s book Love is What Matters: The Essential Writings of Louie Vitale (Pace e Bene Press, 2015), republished here.

Happy birthday Louie! Thank you for your life an for all the ways you have embodied the way of Saint Francis in confronting the violence and injustice in our world.

Louie Vitale was enthralled with the life and work of Francis of Assisi (c.1182-1226). The son of a wealthy merchant, Francis grew up steeped in the vision of chivalric honor and romantic love. He went off to combat in a war between Assisi and a neighboring city-state. During one of the battles he was captured and spent a year as a prisoner of war. 

After being ransomed by his father, he underwent a profound conversion experience. In 1208 Francis took radically to heart the thoroughgoing demand of Matthew 19:21—Jesus' call to the rich young man to give everything away and follow him. Francis, burning with the desire to imitate the poor and crucified Jesus, renounced his claims to his family's wealth and espoused "Lady Poverty" or "Holy Poverty" as his lifelong companion. Francis’ vow of voluntary poverty was an intuitive critique of the growing economic and social disparities in 13th century Europe as it witnessed the shift from rural to urban life, the rise of the merchant class, the coming end to feudalism and the emergent monarchies and nation-states.

Francis was convinced that God was the Most High who was Transcendent Goodness, a Goodness that was lavished especially on the poor. To become voluntarily poor is to share the plight of the poor but also to share in the life of the God who gives everything. This God was, for Francis, worthy of praise and endless gratitude. It was with these convictions that Francis finally became a self-described “troubadour” -- not a singer of earthly honor and romantic love, but a singer of the God who loves us with infinite mercy and tenderness. Gradually, others were attracted by this vision. Originally contemplating becoming a monk, Francis set off in a new direction: an itinerant, mendicant, apostolic life of preaching and witnessing to the life of God in Christ while remaining at the margins of society.

St. Francis vigorously counseled peace between warring city-states and between Christians and Muslims. His devotion to embodied peacemaking and nonviolent intervention is captured paradigmatically in the story of the Wolf of Gubbio where Francis brokered a resolution between an Italian village and a wolf by meeting the needs of both sides. This is even more compellingly demonstrated in his sojourn to visit with Malik-al-Kamil, the sultan of Egypt, during the fifth crusade in 1219 when he “in the midst of wartime, went to the enemy unarmed and loved the enemy as a brother.” (From: Marie Dennis, et al., St. Francis and the Foolishness of God, Orbis Books, 1999, 86.) Francis attempted to embody Jesus’ words to “love the enemy” and facing the enemy within.

Like Francis centuries before, Vitale had observed the implements and dynamics of war at close range. Vitale did not serve in a hot war – his stint in the air force took place between the Korean and Vietnam conflicts – but he was actively enlisted in the Cold War struggle between the United States and the Soviet Union. Although he felt the allure of Air Force fighter jets – “Those things still excite me, even after all these years in the peace movement,” he has said since then – Vitale nevertheless began to question the projection of U.S. power they represented. He also worried about the threat they posed. Once as he and his crew were flying a routine mission along the U.S.-Canadian border, they received orders to shoot down an approaching aircraft determined by headquarters to be a Russian military jet crossing into U.S. airspace. Vitale radioed his base three times for confirmation, and each time the order was reiterated. Finally, the crew decided to make a visual inspection. When they did, they saw an elderly, smiling woman waving to them. At the last moment they averted shooting down a commercial airliner. This incident contributed to growing qualms about remaining in the military. In contrast to the life of a jet pilot, he felt increasingly drawn to religious life.

The roiling social conflict of the 1960s – and the nonviolent social movements that were active then – became a kind of formation process for Vitale. In the 1960s and 1970s, he had worked actively on a number of social justice and peace fronts in addition to his anti-war and farm worker ministries, including solidarity work with welfare recipients and helping to found the U.S. Catholic Conference’s Campaign for Human Development.

Vitale founded and served on the staff of the Las Vegas Franciscan Center in 1970 after completing a doctorate in sociology at the University of California at Los Angeles. He became the pastor of St. James Catholic Church, a parish in a low-income neighborhood on the west side of Las Vegas. 

Vitale had been elected vice-provincial at the end of the 1970s by members of his province – a jurisdiction that embraces much of the western United States -- and was abruptly elevated to superior of the province when Provincial Minister Fr. John Vaughn, OFM was called without warning to Rome to lead the worldwide community of Franciscan men as the Minister-General of the Friars Minor of St. Francis of Assisi.

Through his active participation in the United Farm Workers’ struggle for the rights of the migrant poor and his visible opposition to the Vietnam War, Vitale was regarded as an emphatic advocate for justice and peace. In the wake of the heady days of the Second Vatican Council, Vitale was seized by the conviction that the work for peace and justice was central to the identity of Christians. This in itself was not unique. In the wake of Vatican II a growing number of Catholic clergy, women religious, and laity drew a similar conclusion and began to transform an insular church that had often supported social structures that reinforced injustice and war into a community prophetically seeking change. 

What set Vitale and a relative handful of others apart were not their theological conversion but how they put it into practice. In his case, he marched and fasted with Cesar Chavez, vocally and dramatically decried the U.S. war in Vietnam, and publicly counseled and stood with young men who burned their draft cards and defied conscription into the U.S. armed forces. He supported the nonviolent civil disobedience of Daniel and Phillip Berrigan and lent his support to a wide variety of other nonviolent social struggles. Fr. Vitale’s years in Las Vegas motivated him to work with others to launch the Nevada Desert Experience, a faith-to end nuclear testing at the nearby Nevada Test Site and to co-found Pace e Bene. 

Louie’s book, Love is What Matters, offers a glimpse into the journey of this pilgrim for peace and justice through a series of writings penned largely on the way, on the road, on the edges, on the pilgrimage to a world that works for everyone. It comprises reflections on the meaning of Saint Francis’s life and work for today, reflections on both the violence and nonviolent potential of our times, and, finally, reflections on his own experience of prison undertaken for a wounded and sacred world.

 To help him celebrate this milestone, people everywhere sent him birthday wishes! If you like, you can still send him a birthday greeting here. You can use that link to upload any pictures you might have of the two of you. If you’d like to send him a physical birthday card or hard-copy pictures, you can mail those to his long-time friend and colleague Anne Symens-Bucher at 1968 36th Ave. Oakland, CA 94601.