What follows is the text of a talk delivered at the Sojourners Summit for Change earlier this year. This transcript has been lightly edited for online.
Tuesday, Sept. 11, 2001 — a clear and sunny day in Washington, D.C. — started out as just another day for me to teach class in the Pentagon like I did every week, teaching military and government officials in Catholic University's off-campus graduate programs. A dead car battery kept me out of harm's way that morning.
My students were not so lucky. People fled the capital [city] on foot. Armed troops appeared on the streets. I prayed and scrambled to reach my students, but phone and e-mail connections were down. I knew my students were in the part of the building that was now a fiery hole.
Over the next hours and days my students checked in, one by one. Miraculously, they had lost colleagues but they had escaped, saved by the position of the water cooler or the desk or some other unexpected protection.
Our class studying terrorism found itself under terrorist attack.
You might expect these military men would be first in line calling for the use of force. You would be wrong. Veterans of the first Iraq war, they, like Gen. Colin Powell, warned that starting a war would be easy, but accomplishing anything good by the use of force in the region would be hard. Military attacks would "rearrange the rubble" and incite retribution and further cycles of violence. They urged other responses — political engagement, diplomacy, [and] legal and financial instruments.
As advisors to the U.S. Catholic Bishops, we also urged using “just peace” methods. Pope — now Saint — John Paul II urged President Bush not to invade Iraq but to pursue a just peace. The U.S. invasion would de-stabilize the entire region, cause worse bloodshed, and do more harm than good.
Today, as then, the military and religious leaders agree. We ought to notice.
I recount this story not to say, "We told you so," but to point out [that] it's never too late to do the right thing. Peace is breaking out around the world today, in places where conflict has reigned for decades — such as Colombia and the Philippines. A just peace approach is ending these previously intractable conflicts.
After 9/11, we founded a group, the Catholic Peacebuilding Network, that works to help build the peacebuilding capacity of religious actors in war zones. All wars end. Whether they end well, with a sustainable just peace, or in continued cycles of violence, depends on engaging in just peacebuilding. The principles of just peace recognize the sacred dignity of all people, even those who have blood on their hands. No one is beyond redemption, beyond engagement. Just peace requires the participation of all in creating right, respectful relationships.
Reconciliation and restoration of the human beings and human communities, not just roads and bridges, are key to creating a sustainable peace.
One of my students, Lt. Col. Will Zemp, briefed President Bush on 9/11 after [the president’s] zigzag trip across the country. The president later sent him to war in Iraq, on several deployments, where he was blown up and shot pretty badly, receiving the bronze star and purple heart.
Yet Will became a champion of Iraqi reconciliation programs — even in the most violent parts of Iraq, [in] "the triangle of death."
Everywhere these just peacebuilding tools have been used, they have yielded positive results. Everywhere these tools have been ignored, as in Iraq and Syria, they still remain available to us.
Inclusion and participation, right relationships, reconciliation, restoration for sustainable peace — it is never too late to do the right thing.
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