"We are developing more and more effective weapons of war. Third World countries are given loans to acquire 'weapons of defense'! The glorification of violence is destroying us. Our people are interiorizing the idea that the normal response to a stressful situation is violence.
"In the United States, domestic violence has reached its highest level. Statistically speaking, the most dangerous place for a woman to be at night, the place where she is the most likely to be beaten up and hurt, is not in a bar, the street, or a dance hall, but at home with her husband.
Violence in our schools is phenomenal. The latest statistics seem to indicate that many children now take guns to class at some time — not play weapons but real guns. We have interiorized the understanding that the normal response to a stress situation is to kill. It happens at the domestic level, at the level of sexual differences, at the level of war games, and at the level of international politics. When we are threatened — send in the army!
"I was personally horrified at the U. S. reaction to the 1991 Iraq crisis. I do not know what it was like in Europe but our people sat there, watching television and cheering as if the war were a game. No one asked how many were being killed nor about the suffering. We still have not been told how many were killed or buried alive. It was 'a very clean war' from our perspective and we looked upon it as another video war game. Where are the heroes in this? Look at our movies and the glorification of ugly, destructive violence. The image given is that the more violent you are the more human you are.
"We need to question the new world order that we are entering. So often the mind-set is that if you do not like something — attack! The great heroes — Gandhi, Martin Luther King, Jr., Archbishop Romero, Ita Ford, Jean Donovan, Dorothy Kazel, Maura Clarke, the Jesuit martyrs in Salvador with their house staff — all worked for peace in different ways. And they were all killed.
"I recall a priest, a classmate of mine who was killed some years ago in Guatemala because he was labeled as subversive. He was teaching people how to farm and how to read and write. This was not acceptable to the forces of law and order in Guatemala, and so he was killed.
"I recall a statement made by Archbishop Romero: 'My love for my people is greater than my fear of death.' When he was asked whether he should have guards to protect him, he said: 'No! No, if God wants me to have the ultimate privilege of being a martyr, that will be God's praise, but my love for my people is all I have.'
"There are prophets like Dam Helder Camara and Dam Pedro Casaldaliga today in Brazil. There is the great Latin American theologian Gustavo Gutierrez, a man who has known suffering in the most incredible ways. He speaks always about the God of life, about the Paschal mystery, and about finding new ways to eliminate violence. This is not the way of a world which prepares for peace by preparing for war! This is the way of Jesus. Our world today needs prophets of peace to unmask the fragility and the falsity of the myth that weapons of war will lead us to peace."
