Response to Called Together to Be Peacemakers
Eoin de Bhaldraithe O.Cist.
Bolton Abbey, Moone, Co. Kildare, Ireland
eoinwaldron@eircom.net
The official Catholic-Mennonite dialogue which had just been published. Called Together to be Peacemakers is a beautiful title and, thank God, we all accept that this is our calling today. As a Catholic, however, I found it disconcerting to read their account of the persecutions. It is clear that a huge amount of hard labour went into producing the report, so the negative comments which follow are only meant to make a very good document even better.
About 5,000 persons, they said, died for their faith in the sixteenth century. About half of those were Anabaptist men and women, the majority of them being executed in Catholic territories. So between a thousand and fifteen hundred Mennonites ‘were executed for their religious beliefs’ – Catholics apparently are reluctant to call them ‘martyrs’. Then comes a remarkable paragraph which seems to me to say: ‘You Mennonites must realise that we Catholics have also suffered persecution, especially in England. A number of Catholics “were brutally martyred for their faith” (note the different terminology). Even if we did kill a thousand Mennonites we had about a hundred martyrs of our own.’ It seems to me that this is a great flaw in the document. It is so self-defensive when it should manifest profound repentance. A ‘Martyrs’ Conference’ has been established between the two sides and has already met twice. One hopes this will lead to a better understanding of ‘dying for the faith’ and ‘killing for the faith’.
Perhaps the Catholics were offended by the Mennonite assertion that they cannot trust us on persecution, despite our Decree on Religious Freedom from Vatican II. From the time of Augustine on, we have stoutly defended our right to persecute dissenters. The Catholics could have admitted that our newfound tolerance is indeed a tender plant and that the whole movement led by Archbishop Lefebvre was aimed at destroying this Decree.
There is an assertion that Catholics realised that some Anabaptists were pacifist only after the Muenster war (1535) and yet the Confession of Schleitheim was formulated by the former Benedictine, Michael Sattler, in 1527. This is surely one of the greatest Christian statements of the imperative of non-violence. But the Catholics did not seem to be able to acknowledge this.
I use the word ‘imperative’; but the Catholics on the commission said that for us the non-resistance recommended by Jesus is only ‘a counsel of perfection’. One wonders how this old chestnut got in. The exegesis was that Jesus told the rich young man that if he wanted to be perfect he should sell all. This was not for every Christian, according to medieval Catholic thought, but only for those called to perfection. The discourse on love of enemies expounded another part of this optional calling, as its last words were, ‘Be perfect as your heavenly father is perfect.’
St Augustine had said that you must love your enemy even as you kill him in war. St Bernard thought this was too difficult, so he told the Knights Templar that they should ‘hate their enemies with a perfect hate’ as the psalmist had said. So this was another form of perfection.
It seems to me that to persist in the use of the this term ‘counsel’ is to contradict the current papal magisterium. In the introductory pages to Veritatis Splendor, we are told that the ‘selling all’ in the story of the rich young man is ‘meant for everyone’ (papal italics). On the positive side, should not we Catholics emulate the modern Mennonites who have moved from ‘non-resistance, to active non-violence and to a position of just peacemaking’.
There are some minor apologies included in the texts of Vatican II but, fortunately for the Commission, these are now superseded by the Day of Repentance staged by the Pope in the millennium year. There he repented for the role of the Catholic Church in Christian disunity. One thinks of Cardinal Humbert in 1054 but everyone could add their own favourite incident to the list. It reminds me of the Martyrs’ Memorial in Oxford. One of our community was at an ecumenical meeting in Oxford some years ago and went along to pray at the Martyrs’ Memorial, thinking the martyrs were Catholic. It was a shock to learn that the Catholics were actually the persecutors.
The Pope also repented of ‘sins committed in the service of the truth’. He insisted that the cultural conditioning of the time is no reason for not repenting of the past. Once again our Commission could not bring itself to mention the Inquisition which was obviously in mind.
‘We have mutually condemned one another’. This is like saying, ‘Perhaps we should not have condemned you but remember that you did condemn us too.’ This attitude just will not work. If we or our church condemned someone wrongly, it is a sin and we must repent before God. The existence of sin in the other party is irrelevant when coming before God. We cannot say, ‘Since you forgive me I will forgive you’. We repent even if there is no repentance on the other side.
The best example of this is the Pope’s apology to the Greek Orthodox bishops for the sack of Constantinople. The Catholics ‘sinned’ against the Orthodox; in other words, not only did it offend the Orthodox but it also offended God. The sack still causes ‘suffering to the spirit of the Greek people’ and so it must be that we who defend or even try to ignore the episode, aggravate that suffering. ‘It was a case of “the mystery of iniquity” at work in the human heart.’ He means the heart of the Latins. This is full repentance before God and humanity with no eye on the faults of the other side. Now, wouldn’t it be lovely if our Catholic Commissioners could have used that model!
The Schleitheim Confession is so important that it deserves a commentary on the scale of the Common Declaration on Justification agreed with the Lutherans. I pray that our Commission will do that for us some day.
Eoin de Bhaldraithe O.Cist.
Bolton Abbey, Moone, Co. Kildare, Ireland
eoinwaldron@eircom.net