A
subsidiary
of Pax
Christi International,
Pax Christi USA (PCUSA) was founded
in 1972 by Bishop Thomas
Gumbleton
and a small
handful of
mostly lay Catholics,
to “create
a world that reflects the Peace of Christ by exploring, articulating,
and witnessing to the call of Christian nonviolence.”
Viewing military action as immoral and unjustified under all
circumstances, PCUSA
flatly “rejects
war, preparations for war, and every form of violence and
domination.” All
international disputes, says the organization, could and should be
reconciled “through
the United
Nations
and other channels.” Thus PCUSA engages in “peace
education” and promotes
“the gospel imperative of peacemaking as a priority in the Catholic
Church in the United States.”
Further,
PCUSA
seeks to “transform
structures of society”—most
notably the capitalist economic system that allegedly
spawns racism, militarism, and economic injustice. The
organization displayed its socialist leanings in 2000 when it endorsed
the Earth Charter, a document blaming the “[in]equitable
distribution
of wealth within nations and among
nations”
for many of the world's environmental, social, and economic woes.
In
1999, PCUSA launched “Brothers
and Sisters All,” a 20-year initiative designed to transform
the organization into an “anti-racist, multicultural Catholic peace
and justice movement.” Rooted in the premise
that the United States is a nation where “personal and systemic
racism continues to perpetrate deep spiritual and social brokenness”
against nonwhites, this program aims
to
combat “white
skin privilege” and “to
dismantle racism within our hearts, our structures, and our
culture.”
In the aftermath of the 9/11 terrorist attacks, PCUSA condemned
the Bush administration for pursuing “political expedience” via policies steeped in the
“scapegoating of peoples,” the “fanning of religious
intolerance,” the “curtailing of civil rights,” the
“justification of torture,” and the “moral bankruptcy of
pre-emptive war.” For instance, Pax Christi denounced the October 2001 U.S. invasion of Afghanistan as an ill-advised expression of “violence
and vengeance.”
In December 2002, PCUSA dispatched its own delegation
to Iraq to defend the legitimacy of Saddam
Hussein's
regime and to protest a war that would “slaughter
thousands of innocent [people] in a land already devastated by
sanctions.”
Pax Christi's contempt for the United States extends also to America's loyal ally,
Israel. In the spring of 2003, for instance, the organization blamed
the “vicious
circle of violence” in the Middle East chiefly on Israeli intransigence. By contrast, PCUSA
portrayed the Palestinians as a people who had already made an
“internal [psychological] transformation” and thus were “ready to go to peace
talks.” “Palestinian hostility,” said
PCUSA, was “not due to inborn hostility against the Israeli people”
but rather to Israel's persistent refusal to permit Palestinians to
exercise “their fundamental rights.” If only Israel would “put
an end to the occupation and ... create the State of Palestine,”
Pax Christi assured,
the Palestinians “will become friendly to Israel.”
In
2004, local chapters of PCUSA signed—along
with more than 200 other leftwing groups—a
letter exhorting members of the U.S. Senate to oppose Israel's
construction of an anti-terrorism
security barrier in the West Bank. The signatories characterized
the barrier as an illegal “apartheid wall” that violated the
civil and human rights of Palestinians.
In
October 2008, PCUSA launched “A
New Moment for Nuclear Disarmament,” a national initiative
encouraging the United States to dispose of its nuclear-weapons
arsenal.
Another PCUSA campaign advocates the closure
of the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation
(known until 2001 as the School of the Americas). Pax Christi
charges
that this Georgia-based combat-training school for Latin American
soldiers has produced many graduates who, in turn, went on to
torture, rape, and murder hundreds of thousands of Latin Americans.
SAKALA,
a Creole
acronym which translates into English as “The Community Center for
Peaceful Alternatives,” is a
collaborative Port-au-Prince-based project between Pax Christi USA &
Pax Christi Port-au-Prince that “blends sports, community building,
and peace education in an effort to provide safe environments and
empowerment for youth, women, and other community members.”
Pax Christi's
Global
Restoration Committee contends that
“our food choices impact the use of fossil fuels,” and thus
encourages people to eat locally-grown foods rather than “food
imported across thousands of miles”; to eschew meat and instead
“eat lower on the food chain”; and to plant their own gardens
using natural fertilizers and insect repellents.
PCUSA's Conscientious
Objection program encourages “those
[including American soldiers] who hold sincere convictions, motivated by conscience,” to refuse
to participate in war.
