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The Last Word
Addressing the Reality of Violence
By Raymond Bucko, S.J.
“To bring peace in war conditions is to
announce the message of love in a violent world, in the Pascal faith
that, in the end, not hate but love will have the last word.”
— The Very Rev. Peter-Hans Kolvenbach, S.J.,
Superior General of the Society of Jesus
This past fall, the Jesuit Curia in Rome hosted a conference titled
“Advanced Workshop on Violence and War: Cultural and Economic
Interests.” It was a perfect match for a Jesuit anthropologist,
and I was selected to go.
The experience was profoundly transformative for me. Forty-five Jesuits,
religious and lay men and women, literally from all over the world,
were represented. There were people who were practitioners of peace
initiatives in their own strife-torn communities, as well as a healthy
dose of scholars from such diverse disciplines as sociology, economics,
peace studies, theology, ethics and anthropology. Some, like me, primarily
lead academic lives, and others work almost exclusively in the field.
There were men and women, young and mellowing, and individuals from
a variety of Christian traditions as well as a Muslim from the Philippines.
To my delight, there were three other anthropologists, two from the
Philippines and one from India.
The conference was organized according to plenary and small group
interactions. My own group, for whom I developed a profound care and
deep respect, was from the Philippines, Colombia, India, France, Belgium,
Italy, Croatia and the United States. We differed not only nationally,
culturally and by gender but also in our basic premises and methodologies.
Some in the group insisted on direct action and community organizing;
others wanted to look at larger issues of systems of violence; still
others, not surprisingly, focused on the embeddedness of violence
in cultural systems and the very possibilities of social change.
Through intense conversation and interaction, prayerful reflection,
reading, extended analyses of specific examples of violence in Chad,
Colombia and India, topical lectures, story telling, common prayer
and liturgies, social events, and even an anthropological analysis
of identity and inequality provided by this author, we employed a
variety of approaches to attempt to answer the basic question we were
gathered to address: How do we as members of the Jesuit family and
how should the Society of Jesus as an international apostolic body
address the reality of violence and the urgency of peacemaking in
the modern world? The results of these deliberations were brought
to the Very Rev. Peter-Hans Kolvenbach, S.J., the worldwide leader
of the Jesuit religious order, and our work will be promulgated to
the entire Society of Jesus.
Meanwhile, back in Omaha, my Introduction to Native American Studies
students carried on their studies online with me. They also, in a
virtual way, participated with me in the conference in Rome: viewing
photos of the participants, reading accounts of the sessions, and
making their own comments and observations on the proceedings. They
heard stories of the Rwandan genocide told by Jesuits who had lost
relatives in the tragedy, testimony by those personally affected by
the violence in Colombia and India, and observed a very diverse group
of people committed to addressing the issues of violence and peace
in today’s world, the same world they are preparing to enter
and whose healing will ultimately be in their hands.
The conference profoundly changed my view of the international Society:
not so much in its ability to solve global problems instantly but
in its commitment to admit its inability to solve problems alone and
willingness to enlist its energy and resources to work collaboratively
toward solutions, both within our institution and outside.
Returning to Omaha, my teaching of Native Studies has also changed
and has been energized by a new urgency for peacemaking and reconciliation
in the historical encounter between Natives and Europeans that was
often marked by violence and is still in need of healing and reconciliation.
Finally, the encounter also made me very proud of Creighton, a Jesuit
institution that was willing to contribute resources as part of this
important conference, and the Creighton NAS students, who through
their willingness to let their professor teach from far away, themselves
were able to participate in the essential work of peacemaking. At
Creighton, the last word IS peace.
You can view the conference website, hosted at Creighton and created
and maintained by Fr. Bucko, S.J., at: http://puffin.creighton.edu/jesuit/peace/
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