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Let's really go in peace: we need to break our personal and national addiction to violence if we hope to ever see an end to war.

Article Excerpt
To OUR MODERN EARS THE IDEA of heresy seems quaint and medieval--involving technical arguments about abstract matters. But I contend that heresy and its cousin apostasy are constructs of down-to-earth significance that we should keep in mind today. And for us Catholics, I submit, our chief heresy is violence.

We're all violent. We're violent to ourselves, our relatives, our neighbors, other Catholics and Christians--and most heretical of all, to our nation's enemies, beginning with the children of Iraq.

We pay taxes for war, tolerate executions, shrug at global warming, and regard corporate greed as the natural order of things. Some of us go to Mass in Los Alamos, New Mexico on Sundays and design and build nuclear weapons the rest of the week.

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In short, our lives betray that violence is our true spirituality. Our deepest, unexamined thoughts are that violence saves us, that might makes right. We're at home with a few notions contrary to the gospel: War is justified, war is God's will--even that God's very self is violent. We think these things normal, natural, perhaps even holy.

HOW TO RECOVER CLARITY? WE DO IT BY RESURRECTING what I regard as the most important Christian value-gospel nonviolence. That has been my own practice over the last 28 years. Jesus taught and demonstrated nonviolence,...

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