Blessed Peacemakers. Robin Jarrell
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continue to strive for a world in which, as pacifist Peter Maurin once said, it’s a bit easier for men and women to be good. All peacemakers bring different talents and temperaments to the task, and each has something valuable to contribute. What links them—and us—together is the shared desire to be, as a prayer attributed to Francis of Assisi puts it, “instruments of peace.” Our hope is that the entire year’s worth of peacemaker stories offered in this book helps sustain and focus that desire.
• • •
When we began thinking about this book, one of our worries was that we’d have trouble finding enough peacemakers to fill up an entire year’s calendar. It was a silly concern. As we progressed, we realized that our real problem would be figuring out how to hone down the hundreds and hundreds of candidates to a mere 365. It was exhilarating to discover so many fascinating and worthy peacemakers who have made the world a better place, but it was challenging—not to mention humbling!—to decide which ones to include and which ones to leave out. So we want to acknowledge here what will be apparent to discerning readers anyway: there are hundreds of celebrated peacemakers not included in this volume and unsung thousands who labor every day to end violence and promote justice. We know that many of you who will read this book could easily have been profiled in it, or that you know someone who could have been included. Our apologies, and our gratitude, to you all.
The 365 profiles are snapshots rather than fully developed biographies. Sometimes we’ve offered a biographical summary, but more often we’ve focused on a particular event or theme in the individual peacemaker’s life and work that especially reveals his or her character. In preparing the profiles, we combed through multiple resources: biographies and autobiographies, essays, letters, award citations, speeches, news articles, and obituaries. Readers wanting more information may consult the “For Further Reading” bibliography at the end of the book.
In organizing this book, we did our best to match up peacemakers and calendar days according to either their birth or death dates. We were usually successful. But because more than one peacemaker sometimes fit a single date, a few profiles had to be moved to nearby days of the calendar. Then, of course, there are a few other peacemakers, typically ancient but a few more recent, for whom we could find no definite birth or death days. We’ve scattered these throughout the book in a loving but calendrically arbitrary way.
We’re grateful to many people for their advice and encouragement. First and foremost, we’re glad to acknowledge that the initial inspiration for Blessed Peacemakers was Robert Ellsberg’s wonderful book All Saints: Daily Reflections on Saints, Prophets, and Witnesses for Our Time. What he did for saints we hope, in a much more modest way, to do for peacemakers.
We are immensely grateful to our copy editor, Jacob Martin, for his expert and conscientious grooming of our text.
In addition, our families and friends have been enthusiastic and helpful supporters of the project from start to finish. It was a rare week when one or the other of them didn’t suggest a new candidate for inclusion in the book or ask us who we happened “to be working on” at the moment. More specifically, Kerry thanks Karl Mattson and Sara Tower for their patience in listening to him think aloud about this project, and for their own inspiring peace work. But the bulk of his gratitude goes, as usual, to his wife, Kim, and his son, Jonah. Robin thanks the group PeaceWay for their continued inspiration and loving example in their daily working for justice and peace. Robin would especially like to thank Chris, Janine, and Sedona.
1 January
Telemachus
Died 1 January 404
Opponent of Gladiatorial Games
The church father Theodoretus reports that in the waning years of the Roman Empire, an ascetic monk “from the east” ventured into a gladiatorial stadium in Rome and tried to put a stop to the bloodthirsty contest that was a staple of Roman culture.
The gladiatorial game originated as a funeral gift for the dead. The first of these funeral rituals occurred in 264 BCE, when Decimus Junius Brutus ordered three pairs of slaves to fight in memory of his father. Over the next few centuries, gladiatorial combat became one of the symbols of Roman culture and authority easily recognized throughout the entire empire. It was also an integral part of the oddly named Pax Romana.
The Pax Romana kept the “peace” in three ways: the military, which used brutal and ruthless violence to keep the Roman “peace”; crucifixion, which served as a public method of execution to suppress any rebellion from conquered lands; and the stadium, the venue of violence for the common people that celebrated the military ideal of conquest through bloodshed.
In the latter part of the fourth century, Roman military might was fraying, stretched too thin by the hopeless task of policing the empire’s borders. Crucifixion had been abolished in 337 by Constantine when he converted to Christianity. The stadium’s gladiatorial combat, still as popular as ever, was the only aspect of the Pax Romana that remained relatively unscathed.
In Greek, Telemachus means “faraway fighter.” It’s an ironic name for a Christian who tried to put a stop to the gladiatorial games. He is said to have descended into the stadium “entreating the combatants” to cease fighting, but was beaten to the ground and killed.
The symbolism of Telemachus’ name wasn’t lost on the faithful in the fifth century. He “fights” (nonviolently) for Christ against the Roman Empire. From the “faraway” east, a place unsullied by the values of the violent Roman culture, he steps into a gladiatorial fight for the sake of the peace of Christ and is martyred.
The historical details about Telemachus’ death are obscure. Some records claim he was killed by the gladiators he confronted, others that he was stoned to death by the spectators, who were furious that their sport had been interrupted. Regardless of how he met his end, Telemachus’ fifth-century biographer Theodoretus clearly saw the death of the ascetic monk from the east as a symbol of Christianity’s repudiation of violence. And whether killed by sword or stone, Telemachus’ death was the catalyst that prompted the Emperor Honorius to end the practice of gladiatorial games in Rome. According to tradition, the final gladiator game in the empire took place on 1 January 404, which is also accepted as the day Telemachus met his end.
2 January
Willi Graf
1 January 1918—12 October 1943
Silence Is Complicity
Born in the final year of World War I to Anna and Gerhard Graf, Willi Graf was one of four children. His family was devoutly Roman Catholic. By the time he was fifteen, the same year that Hitler came to power in Germany, he was a leader in a Catholic youth organization with distinctly anti-Nazi sentiments. When the Nazis outlawed all young peoples’ groups except the Hitler Youth, Graf distanced himself from friends who joined it, even refusing to associate with them. In 1934, disgusted with Nazi policies, he joined the illegal Grauer Orden, another Catholic youth group. His membership led to his arrest four years later. Luckily for him, authorities dismissed the charges as part of the national celebration of the German annexation of Austria.
Graf’s first two years of medical studies in Munich were interrupted in 1940 by his conscription into the German army. His military service took him to the Polish ghettoes in Warsaw and Lodz, whose scenes of horror he never forgot, and finally to Russia. In 1942 he returned from the eastern front convinced that his Christian faith obliged him to resist the Nazis. To his dismay, he discovered that most of his Catholic friends were unwilling to join him. Although they were as opposed to Hitler as Graf himself was, they rejected any kind of action against the Nazis as hopeless. Graf found such inaction in the face of evil unconscionable. For him, silence was complicity.
Eventually Graf discovered and joined the White Rose, an underground organization dedicated to nonviolent resistance of the Nazi regime. Launched in the summer of 1942 with the publication of four anti-Nazi pamphlets distributed from Munich throughout Germany, the White Rose grew to a sizable student movement that outwitted the Gestapo for two years. During a time when buying paper or stamps in large quantities was