Pax Christi Minnesota

PC Twin Cities invites you to join them for their upcoming Meditation and Prayer Gathering

Saturday, March 28

St. Joan of Arc Parish Center, 4537 3rd Ave. So. Minneapolis

These gatherings are open and welcoming to all who wish to join for reflection and prayer.  If you would like to volunteer to facilitate one of their upcoming monthly prayer/meditation gatherings, please let PC Twin Cities know and they would be happy to add you to their schedule.

Roy Wolff will facilitate and has provided the following reflection piece.

The Unbeliever and Christians
These are excerpts from “The Unbeliever and Christians” by Albert Camus, a chapter in his book Resistance, Rebellion and Death, which was published in 1960 but written during and right after World War II.

(From the Introduction by Justin O’Brien:  “It was as much for the positive stand Albert Camus took on the issues of the day as for his creative writing….. that he was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1957 at the early age of forty-three. Because, in everything he wrote, he spoke to us of our problems and in our language, without raising his voice or indulging in oratory, he illuminated ….. “the problems of the human conscience in our time.”  Over and above intellectual or political leadership, he provided the moral guidance the postwar generation needed.  By remaining flagrantly independent, he could speak out both against the Russian slave-labor camps and against U.S. support of Franco’s Spain.  By overcoming the immature nihilism and despair that he saw as poisoning our century, he emerged as the staunch defender of our positive moral values and of “those silent people who, throughout the world, endure the life that has been made for them.”  Indeed, one of the things that endured Camus to all of us is that he spoke for all.”)

(Below are parts of a 1948 statement made by Camus at a French Dominican monastery.)

I shall not ……… try to pass myself off as a Christian in your presence.  I share with you the same revulsion for evil.  But I do not share your hope, and I continue to struggle against this universe in which children suffer and die.

For a long time during those frightful years I have waited for a great voice to speak up in Rome.  I, an unbeliever?  Precisely.  For I knew that the spirit would be lost if it did not utter a cry of condemnation when faced with force.  It seems that that voice did speak up.  But I assure you that millions of people like me did not hear it and that at that time believers and unbelievers alike shared a solitude that continued to spread as the days went by and the executioners multiplied.

It has been explained to me since that the condemnation was indeed voiced.  But that it was in the style of the encyclicals, which is not at all clear.  The condemnation was voiced and it was not understood! ……… What the world expects of Christians is that Christians should speak out loud and clear, and that they should voice their condemnation in such a way that never a doubt, never the slightest doubt, could rise in the heart of the simplest person.  That they should get away from abstraction and confront the blood-stained face history has taken on today.  The grouping we need is a grouping of people resolved to speak out clearly and to pay up personally.

When a Spanish bishop blesses political executions, he ceases to be a bishop or a Christian or even a human being; he is a dog just like the one who, backed by an ideology, orders that execution without doing the dirty work himself. We are still waiting, and I am waiting, for a grouping of all those who refuse to be dogs and are resolved to pay the price that must be paid so that a person can be something more than a dog.   
   
We are faced with evil. And, as for me, I feel rather as Augustine did before becoming a Christian when he said: “I tried to find the source of evil and I got nowhere.” But it is also true that I, and a few others, know what must be done, if not to reduce evil, at least not to add to it. Perhaps we cannot prevent this world from being a world in which children are tortured. But we can reduce the number of tortured children. And if you don’t help us, who else in the world can help us do this?

Between the forces of terror and the forces of dialogue, a great unequal battle has begun. I have nothing but reasonable illusions as to the outcome of that battle. But I believe it must be fought, and I know that certain people at least have resolved to do so. I merely fear that they occasionally feel somewhat alone, that they are in fact alone, and that after an interval of two thousand years we may see the sacrifice of Socrates repeated several times. The program for the future is either a permanent dialogue or the solemn and significant putting to death of any who have experienced dialogue. After having contributed my reply, the question that I ask Christians is this: “Will Socrates still be alone and is there nothing in him and in your doctrine that urges you to join us?”

It may be, I am well aware, that Christianity will answer negatively. Oh, not by your mouths, I am convinced. But it may be, and this is even more probably, that Christianity will insist on maintaining a compromise or else on giving its condemnations the obscure form of the encyclical. Possibly it will insist on losing once and for all the virtue of revolt and indignation that belonged to it long ago. In that case Christians will live and Christianity will die. In that case the others will in fact pay for the sacrifice. In any case such a future is not within my province to decide, despite all the hope and anguish it awakens in me. I can speak only of what I know. And what I know—which sometimes creates a deep longing in me—is that if Christians made up their minds to it, millions of voices—millions, I say—throughout the world would be added to the appeal of a handful of isolated individuals who, without any sort of affiliation, today intercede almost everywhere and ceaselessly for children and for humanity.