This is about the four Christian PeaceMakers who are still held hostage in Iraq. They are the real PeaceMakers. Two of which are Canadian who have been abandoned by the government to their fate. Former hostage Waite offers help to families of abducted Canadians
Outside of a blundered statement made by Foreign Minister MacKay,MacKay apologizes for raising hopes of hostages' families their plight has been kept in the news by their families.Loney's family makes another appeal for his release
Vigils to Mark 100 Days Since Peacemakers’ Abduction
Saturday, Mar. 4, 2006 Posted: 5:20:30PM EST
Christian Peacemaker Teams (CPT) has made a worldwide appeal to churches to hold a candlelight vigil on the first Sunday of Lent with 100 candles marking the days since the four western peace activists were kidnapped in Baghdad.
Is it because they are pacifists, witnesses for the oppressed or because they are anarchists?
James Loney one of the hostages was once a member of the Catholic Workers League, which despite its religious name was anything but Catholic.
In attempting to describe Casa Juan Diego, Mark talked about Catholic Worker values of voluntary poverty and pacifism, but made an egregious error by mentioning that a core value of the Catholic Worker was anarchism. People gasped! The Catholic representative who supported our getting the money fell off his chair!The founders of the Catholic Worker movement preferred to use the word personalism instead of anarchism because of the confusion of the word anarchy with chaos.
By 1913 Dorothy Day, still a teenager, had read Kropotkin. She and Maurin were twenty years away from their first meeting, and she had no explicit religious faith. Yet, like Maurin, she was drawn to Kropotkin's vision of how society could be reorganized so as to eliminate the injustice of wage slavery. She describes Kropotkin's influence on her in her autobiography, The Long Loneliness:
"Kropotkin especially brought to my mind the plight of the poor, the workers, and though my only experience of the destitute was in books, the very fact that The Jungle (by Upton Sinclair) was about Chicago where I live, whose streets I walked, made me feel that from then on my life was to be linked with theirs, their interests were to be mine; I had received a call, a vocation, a direction to my life." Roots of the Catholic Worker Movement: Peter Kropotkin inspired inspired Peter Maurin and Dorothy Day
The Christian Peacekeppers Movement is non-demoninational, but is supported in Canada by the Mennonite church and the Mennonite movement. The Mennonites are Anabaptists, like the Amish, Hutterites and Dukuhebours. The Anabaptists were perescuted in Europe from the late 19th Century through WWI because of their refusal to fight in the internecine imperialist wars of that time.
The next historical outbreak in which one finds Anarchist theories conspicuous, was that of the Adamites, who appeared in Bohemia and Moravia late in the fifteenth century' and whom Ziska eventually attacked and almost annihilated. A more notable sect, however, was that of the German Anabaptists, who arose early in the sixteenth century. Apart from all religious questions such as that of re-baptism, various political and social matters were prominent features of the programme of the Anabaptist sect. When the peasantry of Franconia and Swabia rose in 1525, Munzer, Carlstadt, and in particular Nicholas Storck, a disciple of Luther's, preached not only the doctrine of absolute equality, but independence of all civil authority as well. Like John Ball, moreover they denounced all laws and all lawyers, whilst with respect to property their doctrine was simply Communism. At Munster, under Bockhold the Dutchman, better known as John of Leyden, they ultimately practiced polygamy and free-love. Virtually the only difference between the modern Anarchist and the German Anabaptist of those times, is that the former (unless he be of the Tolstoyan school) entirely rejects religion.Ernest Alfred Vizetelly. The Anarchists: Their Faith and Their Record. Turnbull and Spears Printers, Edingurgh, 1911.
Again the anarchist Peter Kropotkin is linked to these movements in that he promoted their immigration to Canada and the United States to avoid further persecution. He reccomened the Canadian prairies for the Slavic Anabaptists and Russian Duhkbours .