Lebanon: The Real War and the War of Words
Prof Ian Linden writes on the dangers of ‘euphemistic language, ignorance and disinformation’ in our analysis and understanding of the war s in the Middle East.
St Oscar Romero and the Lenten Way of Nonviolence – Sr Katrina Alton
‘On March 24, the Church commemorated the martyrdom of Bishop Oscar Romero, canonized as Saint Oscar Romero, a pastor whose life and death embodied the power of Gospel nonviolence’
Read Sr. Katrina’s reflection on St Oscar Romero here
Image: Portrait of St Oscar Romero by Luis Del Valle Peralta, commissioned by Christina Cox and the National Museum of Catholic Art and Library in honour of his Canonisation.
Reflections on Nonviolence
Joan Sharples reflects on nonviolence after listening to Nicholas Paz of the Catholic Nonviolence Initiative at an event in Liverpool
How the works of God are displayed
Paul McGowan compares the healing by Jesus of a blind man with the campaign to end Council investment in the manufacture of cluster bombs.
Zealous for the repair of potholes – indifferent to the destruction of lives.
Paul McGowan on a protest outside Council House, Coventry;
Hope in the Room
Martin Birdseye reports on a meeting in London with Melissa Parke, Executive Director of ICAN
Ash Wednesday, Repentance and A Disarming Peace
A reflection for Ash Wednesday from our National Chaplain Sr Katrina Alton
An Arms Fair in search of a home
Paul McGowan reports from the protests outside SDSC UK at the NEC in February.
Shenstone Revisited
Paul McGowan revisits the regular protest at an arms factory in Shenstone
Nostalgia is not a Strategy
Professor Ian Lindon reflects on Davos 2026 and the dismantling of the multilateral institutions on which the world can no longer rely as ‘the collective scaffolding intended to build a secure, peaceful, international order, we can rely on no longer.
Reflection on Hope – Martin Birdseye
How can we stay hopeful when it seems like the world is on fire? Well, here are two hopeful signs, of progress on nuclear disarmament:
One is what I have called the Nuclear Morality Flowchart project (now called “You Decide”), and the other is the TPNW (the Treaty on Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons).
Some of you will be very familiar with both of these, but I’ll briefly explain each one and identify the signs of hope.
The Flowchart is basically a tool: it enables people to examine the ethics of nuclear deterrence. If you think it is totally unacceptable for us to be engineering the means to destroy millions of innocent lives for the purpose of our “defence”, then you might be thinking that we don’t need such a tool. But you will also know that here in the UK for example, there is a mindset , centred in Government, but widespread everywhere, inherited from 20th Century history, that says that nuclear deterrence is effective and acceptable.
It is a complex question, and people are misled by simple answers. The flowchart presents all the relevant questions, assembled in a logical network, which anyone can answer for themselves. They may then find themselves facing their own moral inconsistencies. Most people don’t really want to do this. One person told me he would not be tricked into answering my questions! But it can be a powerful tool to help us all be more rational and then more effective in bringing our country nearer to a moral, and indeed physical, safety.
At a political level it could be an extremely powerful tool. In this field, policy makers effectively take moral decisions for us. Their moral decision path should therefore be transparent; their inconsistencies should be exposed to all, not just to themselves. We can challenge them to show us their route through the questions.
It’s not been an easy task, but here is new hope: In our time, I find more people commending the moral approach and recommending the flowchart. New people are open to the idea of it. We have a new person managing the project. (I’m talking of Jude Madubuike; he is here with us today). The project is now registered as a Community Interest Company. It has a new simple name: “You Decide” which calls us to take individual responsibility for nuclear deterrence.
And also for our hope, we have the treaty – the Treaty on Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons (TPNW).
Elimination of ‘Atomic weapons’ featured in Resolution No.1. of that first UN General Assembly, 80 years ago at Central Hall Westminster. But for more than 60 years the nuclear armed nations reserved this topic for themselves and effectively resisted progress towards an abolition treaty. You will know that the TPNW came about through several years of development and negotiation, not at the highest levels of nuclear state power, but of people at all levels, and all countries, focussed on the humanitarian consequences of nuclear weapons, not on the security of superstates. Eventually a draft text was agreed by 122 nations at a special meeting of the General Assembly.
It’s a different sort of treaty. In its objectives it acknowledges the ethical imperatives for nuclear disarmament. And it includes for example, provision of support for the victims of nuclear weapons, including those who suffer the effects of around 2000 nuclear test explosions.
In 2019 the Treaty came into force upon being ratified by 50 nations. Today we celebrate the 5th Anniversary of that event. And following the accession of Ghana in September 2025 we can now celebrate that more than half of all UN nations are signed up to the treaty. The nine nuclear armed nations are getting increasingly isolated. How can they rejoin humanity?
The TPNW is the treaty that will see the end of nuclear weapons. It is like no other nuclear treaty. It is not just an agreement on limitation, between the nuclear nations, it is explicitly a total ban, along with a framework and procedures to achieve that. When the first one of those nine nuclear nations can see the light, and decides to disarm, they will have the means to do it. They will be joining a club with established rules for a time-controlled, internationally-supervised disarmament process. In passing the necessary legislation, to ensure compliance in their own country, they will be following 100 other countries that have already done so. What we have here is the means to achieve the goal of abolition.
Now it is up to us. Many of us are the citizens of what I think will one day be called the former nuclear-rogue-states. We will assert the outcome of our moral discernment, and change the course of our governments. The weapons are incredibly dangerous, difficult to maintain, militarily useless and vastly expensive. Given the means, the TPNW, what sane government would not cast them aside in exchange for moral high ground and the chance to meet the real needs of its people?
Dare I suggest that two possible first steps arise from this reflection:
1. Send our flowchart to your MP and demand a morally-considered response.
2. Provide some active support for Jude; in launching the You Decide project.
And let us be, ourselves, signs of hope.
Martin Birdseye 22 January 2026
The Flowchart is at http://nuclearmorality.com/
Podcast for Peace Sunday – Pat Gaffney
One of our Vice Presidents, Pat Gaffney joined Christian Concern for One World for a podcast for Peace Sunday. You can listen via the CCOW website here:
www.ccow.org.uk/resources/peace-sunday-interview-with-pat-gaffney/
A Coventry Carol – Paul McGowan
Today (14th January) we held our regular protest outside the city’s Council House, to accompany the monthly meeting of the full city council. There were 20-25 of us, about half the size of the council, mostly members of the local Palestine Solidarity Campaign, plus sympathisers. It was cold and wet and the turnout was deemed good. Cars hooted their support. A café sent over cups of tea. Passers-by took leaflets. The councillors ignored us.
Coventry used to like to be known as ‘the city of peace and reconciliation’, but seems a little wary, or weary, of the description these days. This might just be due to its blatant refusal to give up the arms investments which it maintains in the West Midlands Pension Fund, and which now hang round its institutional neck for all to see. First drawn to public notice in January 2013 by the local Justice and Peace Group, the abomination of these investments has been magnified by successive conflicts and the Gaza genocide. Unbelievably, the city council is still formally welcomed into the iconic Coventry Cathedral every May, but not those citizens who carry the banner saying Our Council Tax Funds The Genocide. As they used to sing in the city’s old cathedral five hundred years ago:
Herod the king in his raging
Charged he hath this day
His men of might in his own sight
All young children to slay.
Lockheed Martin, Boeing, General Dynamics, Raytheon…. The list goes on. If they had factories here (and some have had), no doubt their owners would be welcomed too. Had it not been for the determination of the Justice and Peace Group and one Coventry councillor in 2017, this city, and the whole of the West Midlands, would still be funding the production of cluster bombs. We have seen that change is possible.
O sisters too, how may we do
For to preserve this day
This poor youngling of which we do sing?
Bye, bye, lully, lullay.
Healing the wounds of history, they like to say in these parts, is what the rebuilding of the city after 1945 was all about. Maybe so, but the wounds keep coming, some of them self-inflicted.
A word about the manner of these actions may be useful. The campaigning processes described here are the outcome of long-term and local movements. They involve members of Pax Christi, other Christian groups, other religious groups and secular organisations. At times, specific events transcend particular concerns, most recently the events in Gaza, for example, where opposition to the arms trade in all contexts coincides with a sharp reminder of where this trade leads in reality. We can be inspired by the dedication and perseverance of others, while continuing to draw on our own sources: Mark 9, Acts 10, Philippians 4 all point us towards an awareness of the Holy Spirit at work in unexpected places.
Paul McGowan
Nonviolence in a time of Moral Drift – Sr Katrina Alton
Within the Catholic tradition, nonviolent resistance begins not in strategy but in conversion. It is an interior act: a refusal to let fear corrupt conscience, distort sapientia, or blunt moral discernment. This is what Pope Francis means when he insists that “to be true followers of Jesus…includes embracing his teaching about nonviolence,” and that active nonviolence must become a way of life: a Spirituality, a discerned practice, and an effective tool for social change.
Interior conversion never remains private. It presses outward into the public square. Nonviolence becomes a sustained witness, rooted in caritas, guided by prudence, and grounded in the inviolable dignity of the human person. It publicly affirms moral boundaries no earthly power may legitimately force us to cross, even when the state claims “necessity” or “security.”
In Pope Leo’s recent World Day of Peace message, this commitment is described as peace that is “unarmed and disarming”, born of converted hearts and renewed minds. When governments normalize violence as a tool of policy, something deeper than law and order is lost. Our moral compass begins to spin. What once shocked us becomes routine. What once demanded accountability is reframed as inevitability. Fear moves into the space where conscience should live.
We see this erosion everywhere:
In Gaza, where mass civilian death is dismissed as “collateral damage.”
In Iran, where repression is renamed “stability”
In the United States, where ICE reveals how state power increasingly treats certain lives as expendable.
In the UK, where the detention of people seeking asylum has become a brutal, and brutalising, norm.
When violence becomes policy, fear becomes governance. And fear always asks us to look away. For Catholics, this moment is a test of our discipleship.
In his 2026 World Day of Peace message, Pope Leo warned that peace cannot be built through intimidation or force: “Violence disfigures not only the victim, but the soul of the one who permits it.” He called the Church to disarm hearts before attempting to disarm the world, naming fear as one of peace’s greatest enemies. Gospel nonviolence, he insisted, is not weakness, rather it is moral clarity lived publicly.
This is why active Gospel nonviolence matters. Not as a tactic when it seems effective, but as a way of life when it is costly. For we know that the Cross does not have the final word.
Gospel nonviolence does not guarantee success. All it asks is fidelity. And in a time of moral drift, fidelity to the way of the nonviolent Jesus may be the most radical resistance we have.
St Matthew’s Christmas – Paul McGowan
The way St Matthew tells it, the climax of the ‘Christmas story’ is the arrival of the Magi. Only the Magi understand what has happened (and this goes for Mary and Joseph too). In other words, only outsiders, foreigners, Gentiles grasp and are grasped by the event.
Matthew begins with the assertion that he is writing about the coming of the Messiah. The suspiciously symmetrical genealogy ends with a reminder about this. It all looks fine. The details of the conception and birth of the Messiah are left with Joseph. Mary says nothing.
Some time later, the Magi arrive. This brings the facts into the public domain for the first time, though the Magi themselves have privately struggled with what they think they know for two years. They are the first to know, outside the family, what changes are afoot, but not what they mean. Joseph ensured that the event remained, for these two years, a privare matter. Their arrival in Jerusalem precipitates the public crisis.
The Magi are obsessed with the star and where it will lead. They are so focussed on this that they consult the one man (Herod) they ought to have avoided. The religious authorities have the information the Magi need but are not interested in acting on it. Herod, though, has his eye on the ball. His instincts for political survival spot the danger at once. The Magi talk to Herod, Herod talks to the scribes, Herod goes back to the Magi with secret instructions and a cunning plan. This sequence of machinations is one reason for thinking there is historical substance to the story.
The end of their journey turns out to be a house, a baby and its mother. As Eliot drily comments, it was “satisfactory”. Though hardly dramatic. The drama begins when the Magi are finally released from their mission and slip away on the quiet. But their visit has consequences. In fact, all hell breaks loose. This is the second reason for thinking there is history to the story. Now everybody must pay for the Magi’s defiance. They have disappointed the tyrant. Flight, exile, mayhem, slaughter, terror, clandestinity. These are the distinguishing features of the Messiah’s manner of being an infant, the way St Matthew tells it.
Paul McGowan
On the Solemnity of the Epiphany of the Lord – Sr Katrina Alton
On the Solemnity of the Epiphany of the Lord, Pope Leo XIV delivered a message that cuts sharply against the grain of a world addicted to war. Reflecting on the Magi kneeling before the Christ Child, the Pope issued a stark challenge: “May the industry of war be replaced by the craft of peace.”
Epiphany is not a gentle feast. It is a revelation that disrupts empires.
The Magi cross borders, defy political paranoia, and refuse to return to Herod — choosing another road rather than complicity with violence. Pope Leo XIV reclaimed this radical edge of the Gospel, insisting that true worship of Christ demands the total gift of ourselves and a decisive break from systems that profit from death.
From a Catholic nonviolence perspective, the Pope’s words expose a brutal truth: war today is not an accident but an industry — engineered, marketed, and monetized. It thrives on inequality, fear, and dehumanization. Against this machinery of destruction, Pope Leo proposes not passive idealism, but craft: deliberate, skilled, patient peace-building rooted in justice, fairness, and communion.
“The greatest gift is to give everything,” the Pope said, echoing the widow who offered her last coins and the Magi who surrendered their treasures. Epiphany reveals that God does not save the world through force, but through vulnerable love made flesh. Kneeling before the Infant of Bethlehem is a rejection of domination and a declaration that violence will not have the final word.
As the Jubilee of Hope closes, Pope Leo XIV calls the Church to be weavers of hope — artisans who dismantle structures of war and rebuild relationships torn apart by conflict. Epiphany leaves no room for neutrality. To adore Christ is to choose another road: away from war’s industry and toward the demanding, subversive craft of peace.
Sr Katrina Alton, National Chaplain
