Blackwell Reference Online

Extract

On December 24, 1914, the first Christmas Eve of World War I, peace broke out spontaneously, up and down the front that divided Europe. The trenches that sliced through Belgium and France had left professed Christians brutalizing one another across a noman's-land of corpses and mud. But now the strains of Stille Nacht / Silent Night drew soldiers together in a makeshift truce, celebrating Christ's birth. Perhaps no chaplain offered the Eucharist or Lord's Supper, but some offered prayers. And soldiers did spread a kind of table, as they exchanged chocolates, cigarettes, a sample of their rations, and the ritual of improvised soccer. Then, a few days later, the killing resumed (Weintraub, 2001).On another Christmas Eve in the 1980s in Chile, members of the Sebastian Acevedo Movement Against Torture quietly attended mass in an upper-class neighborhood. They shared the Eucharist with supporters of General Pinochet's military dictatorship, people who either refused to believe or rationalized away the government's systematic use of torture as a tool to stifle dissent. After mass, on the steps of the church, they handed out Christmas cards with a simple and conciliatory message: “For a Christmas without violence and a New Year without torturers.” The reaction? Fellow Catholics, despite having just shared the table of the Lord, turned upon them, knocked them around, and turned them over ... log in or subscribe to read full text