Becoming a Catholic Peace Church: A Conversation with Gerald Schlabach

This is Episode Eleven of Season Three, featuring Dr. Gerald Schlabach, an emeritus professor in the Department of Theology at the University of St. Thomas in St. Paul, Minnesota, where he taught for twenty years and also served for six years as chair of the Department of Justice and Peace Studies. Previously he taught history at Bluffton College, a Mennonite liberal arts college in Ohio. Gerald received his doctorate from the University of Notre Dame, where he studied ethics in the Department of Theology.

During much of the 1980s, he worked in Central America with Mennonite Central Committee, an organization dedicated to peace, justice, Christ-like service and global education. A Roman Catholic as of Pentecost 2004, Gerald is a Benedictine oblate, is deeply involved in the Bridgefolk movement for grassroots dialogue and unity between Mennonites and Catholics, and continues to call himself a “Mennonite Catholic.”

He is the author of numerous books. Check them all out at his website. I will mention here a few of them, Sharing Peace: Mennonites and Catholics in Conversation, Unlearning Protestantism: Sustaining Christian Community in an Unstable Age, and the book we will focus on here A Pilgrim People: Becoming A Catholic Peace Church

Gerald and I were colleagues for twenty years and you can hear in our conversation what those who have worked alongside him know: he is thoughtful about his faith and he takes seriously the need to live out his faith in community, with care and support for those who have been marginalized, and in tune with the Gospel. His work in Guatemala continues to this day. With author Juan Ajtzip, Gerald is helping to bring to English readers A Mayan Witness to Blessed Stanley Rother. Juan Ajtzip was the first Mayan director of La Voz de Atitlán, a radio station founded by the missionary team from Oklahoma that included Father Stanley Rother, a missionary priest from Oklahoma, who has been declared a martyr for the faith (December 2016) and was beatified by Pope Francis (September 2017). He served and lived with the Tz’utujil Maya people of Santiago Atitlán, Guatemala, from 1968 until his assassination on July 28, 1981.

I really appreciated his book A Pilgrim People: Becoming a Catholic Peace Church, and what it means to be a peace church, Catholic or otherwise, and how to live out non-violence. I asked Gerald about the accusations that non-violence is simply naïve, not attuned to the harsh realities of life, too idealistic, and Gerald movingly spoke of how one has to deal with feelings of anger created by war and conflict, drawing on Bruce Cockburn’s searing song “If I Had a Rocket Launcher.”

But Gerald challenged the assumption that war works, that war is the best way to solve problems, and argued that non-violence works better than we might expect. Does violence really work? It might be more realistic, less naïve, to invest in strategies of non-violence. He cited Why Civil Resistance Works: The Strategic Logic of Nonviolent Conflict by Erica Chenoweth and Maria J. Stephan by Columbia University Press. Non-violence they argue from the data is 4x as likely to succeed, 10x as likely to result in a durable, sustainable democracy 10 years later than violence and war.

For Christians in general, Catholics in particular, we need to recognize that national identity should not trump the Sermon on the Mount. If you want to make an argument for Just War, going back to Augustine, then this requires taking seriously the demands of this late antique theory, which is serious and limited. But we ought to ask ourselves first: how can we avoid violence? How can we work for pacifism instead of Just War? How can we have a proper patriotism but love all of our neighbors? How does violence create and relate to immigration? Gerald recommended Jonathan Blitzer’s book, Everyone Who Has Gone is Here: The United States, Central America, and the Making of a Crisis to understand how violence brought about so many of the issues related to immigration in the USA today.  

So, we need to ask, what can we do to build a civilization of love?

The pilgrimage we need to take is one of love, which does not avoid or evade hard questions, and takes seriously the fears and worries of others, and our own sinfulness and anger, but the biblical visions of love need to be our end goal on our journeys, our attempt to help create a new earth. This might seem particularly difficult now in an age when politics seems to be getting uglier and uglier and crueler and crueler. But now is the time to put it into practice. If Christian nationalism is wrong what is right? If Constantinianism is wrong, what is right? For Christians, it has to be love across borders.

What Matters Most is produced by the Centre for Christian Engagement at St Mark’s College, the Catholic college at UBC. The CCE is a centre at St. Mark’s College that explores the Christian and Catholic intellectual tradition and seek to learn from others, other Christians, members of other religious traditions, and from those who do not claim any particular or formal religious affiliation. Our goal, then, is to talk to a lot of people, to learn from them, to listen to them, and to find out what motivates them, what gives them hope, what gives them peace, and what allows them to go out into the world to love their neighbors.

And now some news on upcoming podcast episodes:

Coming up next is Dr. Don Baker of UBC on Catholicism in Korea and why Catholicism is such a respected religion there and Dr. Tim Pawl, a philosopher, on virtue and maybe we can get him to talk about the Trinity too.

Let us know what you want to discuss next on Pop Culture Matters. Follow us at our Instagram page, @stmarkscce, newly revived, and drop us a line as to what you want to see or hear. Or email us with your suggestions to jmartens@stmarkscollege.ca or cceconferences@stmarkscollege.ca.

Upcoming Conference: 

You can now register for The Promise of Christian Education: Past, Present and Future, MAY 1-3, 2025, at ST. MARK'S COLLEGE, VANCOUVER, CANADA.  Consider joining us in Vancouver in 2025 for the conference. The cost will be minimal to attend the concurrent sessions of the conference itself, only $60 and I think you will find it stimulating and challenging. It will be exciting. The link is in the show notes to both the conference website and the registration page.

Three confirmed keynote speakers are Dr. Margaret MacDonald, Dr. Samuel Rocha, and Reverend Dr. Stan Chu Ilo. These keynote or plenary sessions are free for all, so look for the registration information on our website now.

Other Events:

On January 27, 2025, Dr Ray Aldred offered the third annual Laudato Si’ lecture, bringing together Indigenous and Christian thought on how to care for creation, our common home. It is already available on YouTube. 

On February 10, 2025, Dr. Michael Higgins will be speaking about his new biography of Pope Francis called the Jesuit Disruptor. You can register online at Eventbrite now!

On March 3, 2025, Father Andrew Laguna S.J. will be offering our annual Jesuit Lecture on Immigration and Ignatian Spiritual Discernment.

A few thanks are in order. First of all, I am grateful to Martin Strong, who guides me in the podcasting world. Second, the episodes are edited, engineered, and produced by Kevin Eng who is the first listener to all the episodes and helps me pick out those opening snippets which do so much to set the tone for each episode. Thank you, Kevin, for all of your expertise and support. Finally, to the Fang Fang Chandra, the CCE assistant, who helps me bring this podcast to you, but also makes the CCE run so much more smoothly.

I also want to thank our donors to the Centre, whose generosity enables this work to take place at all: Peter Bull, Angus Reid, and Andy Szocs. We are thankful to their commitment to the life of the academic world and of the work of the Church in the world by funding the work of the CCE. I am also thankful to the Cullen family, Mark and Barbara, for their support of the ongoing work of the CCE through financial donations that allow us to bring speakers to the local and international arenas.

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Thanks again for listening and remember what matters most.   

John W. Martens

Director, Centre for Christian Engagement, St. Mark's College at UBC