. . DEMOCRATIC PARTICIPATION . .
Email received from Pace é Bene (see authors below)
We are happy to announce that Ken Butigan, a long-time Pace e Bene trainer and organizer, has been selected to be the co-director of the Catholic Institute for Nonviolence. He will continue to serve as Strategy Consultant at Pace e Bene, where he has worked for many years.
With Pope Francis’ blessing, the institute was launched in 2024 with the aim of making nonviolence research, resources, and lived experience more accessible to Catholic Church leaders, communities, and institutions worldwide. It is a project of Pax Christi International’s Catholic Nonviolence Initiative, with which Pace e Bene has been actively involved since CNI was established after a landmark conference ten years ago this spring. [The institute is based in Rome.]
Ken Butigan and Marie Dennis in St. Peter’s Square, October 2024. Photo: Pax Christi International.
The “Nonviolence and Just Peace” conference was held at the Vatican and cosponsored by the Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace and Pax Christi International in April 2016. It brought scores of theologians, scholars, Church leaders and, most significantly, practitioners from war zones and other hot spots around the world together to gather in hope of seeing this 2,000 year-old institution actively re-embrace the nonviolence proclaimed and lived by Jesus.
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How can we develop the institutional framework for a culture of peace?
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After a year of planning (which Ken Butigan and John Dear, representing Pace e Bene, were part of with so many others, including Marie Dennis of Pax Christi), the conference was a dazzling, multi-layered conversation that culminated in an assembly-wide, consensus-based document entitled, An Appeal to the Catholic Church to Re-Commit to the Centrality of Gospel Nonviolence.
CNI was formed as a project of Pax Christi not long after the conference, with leadership from around the world, including Pace e Bene. CNI has been at it ever since, building relationships at the Vatican and with partners worldwide, holding two other conferences in Rome, publishing books, papers and articles; sponsoring many webinars and seminars, and organizing countless meetings. All of this has been focused on inviting the Church to come to a richer and deeper understanding of a nonviolence that combines the power of rejecting violence, the power of refusing to harm others, and the power of love in action. We have been heartened by the prophetic call to nonviolence Pope Francis made repeatedly and that Pope Leo has continued.
The spirit of nonviolence is present in the pope’s recent encyclical, Magnifica Humanitas, including its call to “disarm AI” and its declaration that “the ‘just war’ theory, which has all too often been used to justify any kind of war, is now outdated. Humanity possesses far more effective and capable tools for promoting human life and resolving conflicts.”
Ken is grateful for all the ways Pace e Bene has supported CNI and the Catholic Institute for Nonviolence. We look forward to deepening and broadening our ongoing partnership in working to advance nonviolence in the Church and the world.
Peace and all good,
Erin, Ken, Rivera, Stacie, Layal, Rosie, Mili, and the Pace e Bene Team
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