By the Editor, Fr Niall O’Brien

One of the dreams I had when I was a student in St. Columban’s Seminary was a picture of myself on horse back riding over distant hills as I brought the Mass and the sacraments to people who had not had a priest for years. Dreams come true because that was exactly what I did and enjoyed so much in my first few years in the island of Negros in the Philippines. And indeed in some parts of the world, missionary priests are still doing precisely that, though in the island of Negros now young Filipino priests have taken over, roads have been built and the scene has quite changed.

Justified revolution

It changed for me too when, almost by accident, I went to live on a sugar plantation as chaplain to a retreat house. On that plantation I saw conditions, which called to my mind what Ireland must have been like just before the famine of 1845. I was profoundly disturbed and I soon realized that being a missionary involved getting stuck in and confronting situations of injustice; but how should we go about it? Some of my friends felt that this was a case where a revolution by the people was justified and indeed we were aware of groups who already had taken up arms. At one level I could see the reasonableness of this decision; after all it had been alright for the French to do it in 1789 and for the Americans to do it in 1776 and for the Irish to do it in 1916 so why not for the Filipinos in the 1970’s. But then I was a missionary bringing the name and message of Christ…would he have taken up arms in this situation?

Active nonviolence

This was a dilemma, but I was helped no end by people like Gandhi, Martin Luther King and Daniel Berrigan, the American Jesuit who along with Thomas Merton was writing precisely on this problem. All of these were acutely aware of the sort of unjust situation, which existed in the Philippines, but their solution was unique. It was active nonviolence. That meant not that they were passive in the face of violence but rather that they opposed it with all their hearts but always by using nonviolent means. In fact I soon learned that active nonviolence was much more than a passion but it was a science, which must be studied and learned, and that genuine religion could play a very important part in it, as Gandhi and Martin Luther King had demonstrated. Suddenly the Mass and the Sacrament, which for a while had begun to pale in importance in my mind beside the great challenge of injustice, became more relevant than ever. Not only were they a support to our drooping spirits but some of the sacraments specifically reinforced the thrust for peace based on justice. By Baptism, for example, we join the Church of the poor and take their side in the struggle to build the Kingdom of Justice. Confirmation, among other things, is our public commitment to work for a just and peace-filled world and the Mass becomes the moment when we sacrifice ourselves with Christ to bring about a world where the lion will lie down with the lamb. In other words I found no conflict between my original dream and the dramatic circumstance, which I now found myself in. They worked together and if I separated them, I knew I would be in trouble.

Essence of Peace

I once got a computer print-out of all the places that the word “peace” appears in the New Testament. I could hardly believe my eyes at the length of quotations that the machine printed out. “Peace”, of course, in the New Testament does not just refer to the absence of war but rather the presence of that harmony which comes from people and peoples learning to live together in justice and love. In other words: SHALOM. Working for this Shalom may not at times be as dramatic as demonstrating in the streets against injustice or riding over that hill to bring the Mass to faraway villages but is nonetheless at the heart of evangelization and the missionary vocation.

And this vocation is needed in our age as never before. We are mesmerized by e-mails and internet and cell phones the size of a watch and we forget that no other age has seen such unspeakable horrors and wars as ours…Bosnia, Rwanda, Sudan, Palestine, Ethiopia and Eritrea, Kosovo, Chechnya; the graph of violence seems to go up and up. Surely never before were missionaries so much needed to bring the Gospel of Peace.