CPF Launches "We Go On Record" Website

The Catholic Peace Fellowship is happy to launch its newest web project: We Go On Record, www.wegoonrecord.org.

We Go On Record is an "online community of conscience," a space on the internet for people to express their opposition to war in their own words and to draw inspiration from others--including military servicemembers--who have also publicly expressed their opposition to war.

Significantly, We Go On Record will provide the first way for people concerned about a draft to register their objection to war on the web. We Go On Record will be a permanent archive of public statements of conscientious objection (CO) to war, viewable on the web, but also periodically backed up to ensure that no CO statements are lost. Statements submitted to We Go On Record would be permissible as evidence before a draft board under current law.

We Go On Record also makes available, again for the first time on the web, long excerpts of applications for CO from recent veterans. These statements, a few of which are currently available under the "Military Objectors" section of the site, make for uniquely moving reading. They are personal conversion stories of people who turned their backs on war and embraced nonviolence.

CPF welcomes all who object to war in any form, whether they are pacifists or follow the just war tradition, whether veterans or civilians, whether draft-eligible or not, to join us in going on record against war. We encourage you to post your own CO statement to We Go On Record!

Pope Benedict XVI on Christ's Peace

Pope Bendedict XVI recently expounded on the Peace of Christ from the Papal Summer Residence at Castel Gandolfo. Below are some excerpts from his address. He proclaimed:

• "Anyone who has even the slightest knowledge of Christ's Gospel knows that it is a message of peace par excellence; as St Paul wrote, Jesus himself "is our peace" (Eph 2: 14), the One who died and rose in order to pull down the wall of enmity and inaugurate the Kingdom of God which is love, joy and peace."

• "Christ's words mean that the peace he came to bring us is not synonymous with the mere absence of conflicts. On the contrary, Jesus' peace is the result of a constant battle against evil."

• "Thus, following in the footsteps of the Lord Jesus, in accordance with St. Francis of Assisi's famous words, Christians become "instruments of peace"; not of a peace that is inconsistent and only apparent but one that is real, pursued with courage and tenacity in the daily commitment to overcome evil with good (cf. Rom 12: 21) and paying in person the price that this entails."

• "The Virgin Mary, Queen of Peace, shared until his martyrdom her Son Jesus' fight with the Devil and continues to share in it to the end of time. Let us invoke her motherly intercession so that she may help us always to be witnesses of Christ's peace and never to sink so low as to make compromises with evil."

Read more of the Holy Father's words from his recent Angelus address on the Peace of Christ - here.

Lt. General Alludes to the Possibility of a Draft

In an interview on National Public Radio's program, All Things Considered, U.S. Army Lt. Gen. Douglas Lute, assistant to the president and deputy national security adviser for Iraq and Afghanistan, (widely known as the "war czar" ) commented that, from a U.S. military standpoint, the possibility of a draft should be considered and discussed. Listen to the inteview here.

In Christ's Peace,
The CPF Staff