A Man of Peace Passes
by Michael Nagler
I FIND MYSELF DEEPLY MOVED by the passing of a great man who gave his critical blessing to the struggle for nonviolence from a quarter where, by a twist of human history, we had ceased to expect it. I refer, of course, to the first pope in history to take to himself the name of perhaps the greatest saint of his lineage, Saint Francis of Assisi. Saint Francis, you recall, risked his life to seek peace with Sultan Malik al-Kamel when the atter was besieging the Christian stronghold of Damietta on the Nile.
I was born into a diaspora Jewish family in New York where the emphasis was on assimilation, and became keenly interested in my own origins in that lineage later in life, and eventually an avid reader of the Jesus Seminar scholars who were following up the 1973 lead of Géza Vermes’ Jesus the Jew. In my opinion (none too humble, I guess) Jesus was the greatest Jew who ever lived. He was killed by the imperial might of Rome 𑁋 and then Rome became the global seat of his millennia-long worship. Irony can go no further. So be it.
One day some years ago I was standing on a street corner in New York, somewhere near my old haunt, Greenwich Village, with a former student, Jodi, and her friend Ann. Somehow the subject came up, and I heard something come out of me that I didn’t know was there, but it burst out of me with a passion that made Jodi and Ann gasp, then tear up: “They took Jesus from us.” It was one of those moments where it’s more like history speaking through you, in this case two thousand years of tragic history, than a personal comment.
For two main reasons I would like to say, if my Catholic friends will permit me, that Francis was my pope. The first is his unprecedented outreach to other religions: Orthodox Christianity, Judaism, Islam. He correctly sensed that if the world is to have peace then even though the religions as such are not fighting other as in days of his namesake, they will always be an important locus of reconciliation. Second, and if anything more to the point for me, is his outspoken support for nonviolence.
“Let us make nonviolence a guide for our actions both in daily life and in
international relations. And let us pray for a more widespread culture of
nonviolence that will progress when countries and citizens alike resort
less and less to the use of arms."
As a Jesuit friend of mine quipped when His Holiness convened an international meeting on the subject, ‘this is the first time nonviolence is being advocated in the Catholic Church since the Sermon on the Mount.’ I don’t know if that is literally true (cf. Geoffrey Nuttall, Christian Pacifism in History), but it is certainly true to the spirit of the great pope who has shed his body the Monday after Easter.