I was blessed to be a classmate and a dear friend of the late Fr Niall O’Brien. He was a wonderful person, artistic, intelligent, an excellent writer, a man of deep spirituality with an infectious sense of humour. He had a gift for learning languages and quickly became proficient in the dialect of Negros in the Philippines.
He was zealous in serving people, deepening their faith, helping them make the Bible their own, and organising Basic Christian Communities. He wrote, “You have a Christian Community when you lay down at night knowing that in your village no one is sick who is not being attended, no one is persecuted who is not being helped, no one is lonely who is not being visited.”
Niall learned from the people. He wrote: “… the more I put myself above the people the more I locked myself out of the way of grace, and the more I melded into the community as another human being, notwithstanding my special task as a priest, the more I became a disciple”. Above all, Niall could not turn a blind eye to the widespread injustice and violence which threatened his people.
He wrote, “I felt that a lot of talk about prayer, yoked with little justice, was the best formula for producing atheists in the next generation.” The choice seemed to be to either do nothing, or to respond to violence with violence.
Niall advocated a third way: the way of active non-violence inspired by the life of Jesus. He trained his parishioners to do things that were within their capacity, but which stretched their courage even a little. And so, he led them in their thousands to protest against violence and injustice. Embarking on a long protest walk, showing solidarity with the people of a neighbouring parish, was a way of confronting the authorities which was legal.
Many people were reborn to a sense of their own dignity on such protest walks. This led to Niall’s own imprisonment and to being falsely accused of murder. He feared that he would be assassinated while in prison.
In prison he wrote, “We asked the Carmelite Sisters to make special stoles for each of us. The design showed a dove hovering over barbed wire, looking for a place to land. A hand has grasped the barbed wire, making a spot for the dove to land. So it is, we feel that in the growing spiral of anger, hate, and war, some people must grasp the sharp barbs and absorb the pain, and thereby give the dove of peace a space to descend upon the earth.”
Niall’s major contribution was to a theology of non-violence, spelled out in his three published books. As I reflect on the challenges of our world today, I am convinced that it is this theology, so neglected down through the centuries and yet so central to the life of Jesus, that is the absolutely crucial Christian contribution needed today. Niall’s life and his writings show us the way.
Fr Cyril Lovett is from Ireland. He worked for many years in the Philippines and then in Brazil. He was Editor of Far East until he retired in 2016.