Sunday, September 20, 2026
Father Richard Rohr reflects on nonviolent resistance as the primary Christian response to a world of violence:
Mohandas Gandhi (1869–1948) observed that every world religion knows that Jesus taught nonviolence, lived nonviolently, and died a nonviolent death except one: Christianity! We don’t get it because it’s too close to home.
The Sermon on the Mount is perhaps the least quoted of Jesus’s teachings. It’s his major teaching, but Christians mostly pretend the Sermon on the Mount never happened. I’ve come to believe that understanding Jesus’s nonviolent teaching is almost impossible apart from a contemplative stance. The calculative and dualistic mind is incapable of living inside of the participatory mystery of our life in this world and in God. We simultaneously carry the burden of evil and the weight of glory.
Military solutions are accepted routinely as a matter of necessity even though first-century Christians would have considered that abominable. We have combined God and country, and the flag is often right there by the tabernacle. In most Christian countries, they’re pretty much inseparable.
The gospel and the church both teach nonviolent resistance. Some call it gentle firmness. I believe that it is the Christian moral response. It does not imply absolute pacifism or deny the right to legitimate self-defense, but it requires creative and constant firmness in opposition to evil. Each of us is complicit in this mystery of evil, violence, and harm. Seeking to justify wars, people say, “Well, someone has to die”—but the gospel says, “First of all, it’s you!” Jesus tells us to die to ourselves (see Luke 9:24). This process requires us to agree to carry some of the burden of sin and pain of the world.
Isaiah says, “All the nations are as nothing before [God]; they are accounted by [God] as less than nothing and emptiness” (40:17). Boundaries are not engraved in the earth. Because God is the God of all the earth, our first allegiance is to that universality— beyond nations and boundaries.
The journey of contemplative prayer leads us to a sense of universality, of bearing the burden and resisting the violence of the entire world and not just that of our own country. To be a true Christian, I think, means to be a giant juggler of all kinds of contradictions, all kinds of absurdities, all kinds of death, and all kinds of life. We are each being led to a depth of universal God experience that allows us, in our own spirit, mind, and heart, to know a gospel response to the world’s violence. I don’t think there’s any way we can call ourselves Christians without aiming for nonviolence as our ideal.
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Nonviolence: An Excess of Love
Monday, September 21, 2026
International Day of Peace
The priest and theologian Emmanuel Katongole considers how nonviolence reflects God’s love, modeled and experienced in the life of Jesus:
In a world addicted to violence, a commitment to nonviolence cannot but sound like both a crazy idea and a dangerous utopian fantasy…. Our imaginations have been dulled into believing the inevitability of violence. We have come to think that only violence will either make us safe or prevent the bad guys from harming us and those we love.
This is a lie…. I know this firsthand. I grew up in Uganda under the brutal dictatorship of Idi Amin (1925–2003). After my high school education, I decided to join the “liberation war” to fight Idi Amin. Looking back, I realize it was only by God’s grace that I was saved from this lie of liberation through violence, for the liberation war did indeed succeed in ousting Idi Amin from power. However, our “liberators” would soon turn into murderous dictators, and we needed another liberation war to get rid of the “liberators.” This is a story that has been repeated all over Africa—fighting to end fighting….
God creates, governs, and redeems the world in a nonviolent way. This is what is unique about God, as we have come to know God through the life and ministry of Jesus Christ: an all-powerful (omnipotent!) God who becomes human and suffers a violent death on the cross; a God who responds to evil through an excess of love. This is the way of God, the strange logic of the Gospel. As Archbishop Emmanuel Kataliko (1932–2000) reminded the Christians of Bukavu during a Lenten message in 2000: “The logic of the Gospel is a logic not of power, but of the cross. God has chosen the weak of the world to undermine the strong…. The only response to the excess of evil is the excess of love.” [1]
The excess of love is what shapes a revolution—a revolution of nonviolent love—into which God invites Christians. For, as Pope Francis reminds us, “The Son of God, by becoming flesh, summoned us to the revolution of tenderness.” [2]…
This revolution of nonviolent love is not a utopian fantasy. There are many stories of Christians whose lives bear witness to this revolution of tenderness and from whom we can learn the requirements of the way of nonviolence….
[Archbishop] Christopher Munzihirwa was pointing to this revolution when, shortly before he was assassinated, he reminded the people of Bukavu that every Christian is invited to enter “the way of Christ.” For Munzihirwa, entering the way of Christ was not simply a pious exhortation; it was an invitation into a social vision and engagement that leads to “the construction of true and durable peace.” [3]…
Surrounded by a cloud of witnesses, perhaps we too can dare to not only say no to violence, but to respond to violence through an excess of love. When we do so, we find ourselves as part of the revolution of tenderness.
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Individual Reflection
Where in your life right now are you waiting for someone else to change, apologize, or lose before you’ll consider what it would cost you to be the one who dies first?
Group Discussion — choose one
Where have you let your national identity and your Christian identity fuse together, and what would it actually cost to pull them apart?
Katongole says the only response to an excess of evil is an excess of love — where does that sound not inspiring, but impossible, to you right now?
Who’s the person or situation you’ve most recently decided only force (physical, verbal, political) could stop — and what would nonviolent resistance actually look like there, concretely?
