Blessed Are the Peacemakers — If Peacemakers There Are

Peace-deficient planet Earth lost several peacemakers already this month. Nelson Mandela, needless to say. And Alec Reid, and Paul Mayer.

Alec Reid was a Redemptorist priest in Northern Ireland; as the go-between for Gerry Adams (head of the Irish Republican Army’s military wing) and the British and Irish governments, he was the “most important person in the entire peace process, bar none.”

Father Reid was virtually unknown to the wider public until 1988, when he was captured in a photograph kneeling over the bloodied, spread-eagled corpse of a British soldier whom he had tried but failed to save minutes earlier from execution by the Irish Republican Army. It remains one of the most haunting images of “the Troubles,” the violent struggle that tore at Northern Ireland for three decades.

Paul Mayer was one of the circle of peacemakers — controversial of both ends and means — who gathered around Daniel and Philip Berrigan in the late sixties. Born a Jew, he became a Catholic (and a devotee of Thomas Merton), then a Benedictine brother, then a priest — and then a husband and a father, all the while insisting that, in the life of the spirit, at least, he remained a Jew and a priest.

He marched from Selma to Montgomery in 1965; he was arrested with Occupy Wall Street in 2011. Occupy’s website tells of his role in communicating the story of the Wilmington Ten, civil-rights activists who were convicted of arson in North Carolina in 1971 after a racially charged trial — and then were pardoned earlier this year.

Did Mayer & Co. bring peace, or the sword? Reasonable people can disagree, and many have.

Until these two men died, I’d hardly heard of either of them. That says something, I think, about the attention our society pays to peacemakers.

Here’s hoping there’s a fresh generation of peacemakers doing work that will get the attention of the obituarists, if nobody else.

• 10 December 2013