The International Prayer for Peace, 2006
Wednesday and Thursday this week, the Community of Sant' Egidio, an international Catholic lay organization, will be bringing a wonderful pro-peace event to Washington DC: the International Prayer for Peace: "Religions and Cultures: the Courage of Dialogue".
I am honored to have been invited by my friend Andrea Bartoli, a Sant' Egidio representative in New York, to take part in a discussion he's organizing Thursday morning as part of this, titled "Religious Contribution to Genocide Prevention."
It should be a weighty discussion. There will be an Armenian bishop, someone from Great Rabbinate of Israel, a Methodist priest from Nigeria, a Muslim representative, and someone from the Swedish Foreign Ministry who works on genocide prevention full-time.
I am excited at the thought of there being a large, Catholic-led peace event right there in Washington DC. In the lead-up to the invasion of Iraq, I sorely missed the strength, wisdom, and political muscle that US Catholics could and should have brought to antiwar movement... They were consumed at that time with the challenge of dealing with the painful legacies of their years of institutionalized child abuse....
But now, maybe we can see them come more strongly into the field of pro-peace activism, led by the wonderful people of Sant' Egidio. I was glad to see that the Archbishop of Washington DC will be opening the event. Excellent.
"I sorely missed the strength, wisdom, and political muscle that US Catholics could and should have brought to antiwar movement... "
Iraq does have a significant Catholic community and the Catholic church did oppose the sanctions on Iraq. However, the situation in the U.S. was odd because the opposition was coming from the top down. Usually it is the other way around.