Mary's experience at the Annunciation, Visitation, and the proclamation of the Magnificat offers a shining example of committed nonviolence to a world of brutal injustice and war. . . . Two thousand years after Mary's prophetic nonviolence, we have toned down her message and transformed her into someone more manageable, more tolerable, more passive. The culture's false image of Mary does not threaten the status quo. She no longer is portrayed as the model of active and prophetic nonviolence.

Mary understands the plight of all those who suffer from the world's unjust economic order and its wars. She is a woman of justice, a woman of disarmament, a woman of peace, a woman of revolution, a woman of action, a woman of nonviolence.

John Dear, Mary of Nazareth, Prophet of Peace