Enduring in Peace

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(This article originally appeared in the TAU-USA Summer 2025  Issue #116)

Canticle of the Creatures Reflection – Part 2

By Joseph Makley, OFS

Justice, Peace and Integrity of Creation Commission Chair

The first time I heard about Father Louis Vitale, OFM, was when he joined the protests at Fort Benning’s infamous School of the Americas. As a fairly new Secular Franciscan, I was studying the Rule: “Let them individually and collectively be in the forefront in promoting justice by the testimony of their human lives and their courageous initiatives…” Father Louie spent six months in jail on two occasions for stepping past those gates at Fort Benning. A year in jail is something to be endured in peace.

Fort Benning did not have the School of the Americas when I first visited there in December 1969. It was a major training area for Vietnam-bound soldiers. I was in the car when my mother drove through those gates to take my older brother, Philip, back to the base after Christmas leave. I saw troops marching along the roads and heard their songs of bravado. I was a senior in high school with my own choices to make soon, and my mother, Elroyce, had to find a way to endure her son’s deployment in peace.

Father Louie had been busy long before the protests at SOA. He had led an impactful movement to stop nuclear testing for years and had co-founded Pace e Bene, an organization that provides training in nonviolence. As an air force veteran, he felt a special responsibility to bring his  love in action to military installations. In 2006, he was at Fort Huachuca, in Sierra Vista, Arizona, protesting the torture training manuals being produced there after 9/11. He was arrested, along with two others.

At the same time, down the road in Tombstone, my brother Philip, who had survived the war, was playing Doc Holiday in the gunfight recreations at the OK Corral. He was never the same after the war, but he had supported himself by driving deliveries for the Jacksonville school system. This was his retirement dream: to be a cowboy. He had serious health issues, but he always endured what came in peace. In August 2008, I travelled back to Tombstone to be with Philip, who was finally succumbing to the effects of his exposure to Agent Orange on the docks at Long Binh port. We celebrated his 60th Birthday and he died that fall.

It’s like Faulkner said, “The past is never dead; it’s not even past.” We all bear the wounds of every war that was ever fought. And Pope Francis never let us forget, “No more war. Never again war!” Father Louie worked for justice and human dignity, both of which are necessary for peace. He emptied himself for peace and for the movement of active non-violence. He endured long periods of incarceration in deep love and peace. Reading something he wrote gave me a clearer picture of how he experienced jail time:

“These days [in jail]

are a journey into a new freedom and a slow

transformation of being and identity: an invitation to

enter one’s truest self, and to follow the road of

prayer and nonviolent witness wherever it will

lead.” 1

So, enduring in peace doesn’t mean just to wait out periods of tribulation. It means to grow through them, to love through them, to continue to reach out toward all people of goodwill for the chance to establish a just peace in this temporal world.

1 Ken Butigan (2023, Sept. 6) Nonviolence in Action:

Remembering Louie Vitale. Pace e Bene Nonviolence Service.

Paceebene.org