In its September issue, US Catholic interviewed Maryann Cusimano Love on the aftermath of 9/11 and Catholic understandings of peacebuilding. Cusimano Love is a friend of Bridgefolk who teaches at the Catholic University of America in Washington DC. Among her reflections are these:
That nonviolent resistance can be very effective is something most Catholics don’t understand, but we’ve seen it in Egypt and Tunisia. Sometimes it takes an outside example to help us draw on our own tradition.
For the U.S. military, peace is the absence of the use of military force right now. So if nothing’s blowing up today, that’s peace in Iraq, right?
The Catholic Church says, not so much. You have to rebuild social relationships, restore people who have been traumatized by violence, reintegrate refugees and internally displaced persons back into their communities, and rebuild the human infrastructure.We think about peace in a sustainable and holistic way, as being about education and development.
When the U.S. military or other state organizations talk about building peace, they’re really talking about construction projects. How many roads and bridges can we put in?
The Catholic Church says building peace is not just about bricks and mortar. It’s about rebuilding the people and the human community. If you don’t do that work, then the bricks-and-mortar stuff you rebuild today is going to be blown up tomorrow.