Peace Be with You: Justified Warfare or the Way of Nonviolence

I had a five minute conversation with Eileen Eagan in 1972. The experience taught me nothing, in fact I had no real idea who she was. I was expecting to be drafted, and had been briefly introduced to her at a holiday party. The headlines were then echoing the disquiet of the final fury of the Vietnam war. I asked her about the morality of war, and she did not give an easy answer. She said she had given thought to a book on the subject. Only in the last couple of years have I learned that she spent a very busy life, far below the radar, closely associated with a collection of people who made headlines. She was a Catholic nun. Among her close friends were Dorothy Day and Mother Teresa. She had a long and prolific career as an author and was a pacifist, and her life's work is the story of all the major social causes from the 40's through her death in 2000. "Peace Be With" You struggles with an unseen adversary, and the conclusion of the struggle is not clear. Beginning with Jesus, who does not take up arms against an empire, the same moral conflicts repeat themselves in war-stories from the interests of Christians in the defense of imperial Rome through the last wars of the twentieth century. The author seems outraged by the human and moral costs of Vietnam, Kuwait and Bosnia. At the same time, war-resistance itself is sliding on a "slippery slope". The first hundred pages of the book are the history of the slow acceptance of justified warfare by Christianity, which culminates in Francis of Assisi making a "separate peace" with Islam after the Thirteenth Crusade, meeting muslims on a human level. The later 200 pages are purely twentieth century. The author attempts to weaken and dislodge the "Just War" theory, but she does not claim to have defeated it. After spending the length of World War II writing for the Catholic Worker, increasingly unpopular for its insistent pacifism, the author offers an anguished conversation with Dorothy Day in 1945: - If I had known all this while it was happening, would I have been able to maintain my pacifism? -Mahatma Gandhi was in perfect agreement with Jesus on non-violence, but once said that he had yet to meet a Christian! I am glad someone wrote a book on this subject. Since Kuwait it has become more instinctive to justify warfare, because there are wars fought in the name of democracy and preservation of freedom. The valor of young soldiers, and the fragility of our freedom make it difficult to keep a balance. The service owed to peace gets pushed out of the picture. Eileen Egan is one of those people who "have seen a lot". Her accounts of her "Prophets of Nonviolence" are often firsthand. She lived a valiant life of service, and she wrote an interesting book.

I used this book as a primary source for a research paper I was writing on the just war theory and pacifism. Loaded with loads of historical analysis and information, Egan really makes a strong case for the rise of pacifism. The author herself was instrumental in the American Catholic group Pax Christi, until her death in 2000. Her contemporaries (and friends) included noted activists Mother Theresa and Catholic Worker founder Dorthy Day. Egan uses not only the the first hand knowledge she has from her participation with Dorthy Day during Second Vatican Council's Gaudiem Et Spes formulation and the subsequent U.S. Bishops' The Challenge of Peace, she also researched the origins of just war (Aristotle) and of surrounding issues.Chocked full of useful information, the book is by no means a light read. For a thoughtful reader willing to learn lots. You'll never see the world the same way again.