Renegade Priest Denounces United States, Pentagon

on April 4, 2014

The tone for this year’s Ecumenical Advocacy Days, the annual gathering of liberal Christian activists in the Washington, D.C. area, was set fairly early on. As I detailed previously, the theme of this year’s gathering was “Jesus Weeps – Resisting Violence, Building Peace” and focused on ending violence in all forms. In practice, that amounted to a strict pacifism, as articulated by the opening keynote speaker, Rev. John Dear. But the Catholic priest’s peace rhetoric slipped into to generic anti-Americanism, and occasionally conspiracy theories and outright falsehoods.

Rev. John Dear is a anti-nuclear and peace activist who, by his own admission, has been arrested over 75 times. The longest of Rev. Dear’s jail stints was eight months for what the EAD calls “plowshares disarmament action” and the rest of us call “sneaking into an Air Force base and attacking a military plane with a hammer”. Previously a member of the Jesuits, the international council of the Society of Jesus kicked him out by a unanimous vote last year. Rev. Dear accused the Society of having abandoned their social witness, while the Jesuits say he was dismissed for being “obstinately disobedient to the lawful order of Superiors in a grave matter.” Rev. Dear told Religion News Service he was “not sure if I will remain a priest,” as he cannot function as a priest without the permission of a bishop.

So clearly, Rev. Dear was the best man to represent Catholicism at an ecumenical gathering. He began by telling the story of how he decided to devote his life to peace activism after watching Israeli jets drop bombs during the 1982 Lebanon War. “I researched it since then. It was all orchestrated at the Pentagon. We killed 60,000 people. It was called Operation Peace for Galilee.”

Rev. Dear’s understanding of the First Lebanese War is more than a little flawed. For one thing, only 20,000 Arabs were killed in the course of the war (including civilians). But more importantly, even the Reagan administration’s harshest critics only claim that the US tacitly allowed the invasion after the fact. No serious scholar put forth the idea that US government planned an entire war for the perfectly capable Israeli Defense Forces, a war that broke a ceasefire that the US itself had brokered.

Blaming the United States government for acts they didn’t commit appeared to be a theme for the night. Not much later, Rev. Dear told of his service in El Salvador at a time when “the United States was bombing the countryside.” While the US government supported the Salvadoran government during the civil war, our military never bombed the country. At another point, Rev. Dear claimed that Martin Luther King Jr. was “killed by our government.” I won’t waste your time by listing the myriad of reasons that claim is stupid.

It seems bizarre that he felt the need to attribute to the US government violence that is easily attributed to groups the average EAD attendee would already despise (Israel, right-wing military juntas, white supremacists). But as with many peace activists, Rev. Dear seemed solely obsessed with the United States. “I think this center next to us, the Pentagon, is the greatest center of death in human history. Tens of thousands of people, mostly Christians, working for death.” The United States, Rev. Dear said, was “thrilled to be having a war if we could with Iran, or Ukraine and Russia. China is our goal.”

In between bouts of America-bashing, Rev. Dear taught the EAD participants unconditional pacifism. “Wars can’t stop terrorism, because war is terrorism. War never brings peace.” He denounced what he termed the “false spirituality” of war and just war theory. “War is never justified; war is never blessed by God.”

One can’t help but to wonder how Rev. Dear could possibly make such a sweeping claim with the many, many Old Testament examples of God not simply blessing wars, but commanding them. Even in the New Testament, Jesus Christ, John the Baptist and Peter each heal or baptize Roman soldiers without giving any indication that their chosen profession is displeasing to God. In fact, Acts 10’s description of the Roman centurion Cornelius says the exact opposite: “At Caesarea there was a man named Cornelius, a centurion in what was known as the Italian Regiment. He and all his family were devout and God-fearing…”

The Pentagon, only a five-minute walk from the Doubletree Hilton hotel where Rev. Dear was speaking, is full of Corneliuses: men and women who work tirelessly to defend their country, stop the spread of evil, and live pious Christian lives. They do not deserve to be accused of being a “center of death” or that the duty they perform is “terrorism.” The Pentagon has seen actual terrorism, and it killed 184 Americans.

If the Ecumenical Advocacy Days crowd objected to anything in the speech, they kept it to themselves. Rev. Dear got a standing ovation.

Video of the speech can be seen here.

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