Martin Luther King’s meeting with Paul VI. The Second Vatican Council and the message of non-violence
“Martin Luther King was a preacher; his acts of protest were spoken in the evangelical voice and were, therefore, like a slap in the face to conformists — to those who, by the millions, vegetate on this earth, clinging to ideas they consider exact and infallible only because they are echoed in the gestures of the masses, in the conventions of class, and in the fashions of their time.
It cannot be denied that the end of Martin Luther King is reminiscent of the crucifixion: the instigator here has also become a material executioner, and the results of the crime are always the ancient ones of a defense of social privileges. Even the existence of the Nobel Peace Prize winner mirrored the evangelical model as closely as possible: constantly threatened — outwardly by modern-day
‘publicans’, and inwardly by what he himself described as torment. What did the assassin hope to achieve with the bullets from the same kind of rifle already tested in Dallas in 1963? King was murdered because he sought to organize a march in support of striking sanitation workers in Memphis.
He himself said: ‘No work is insignificant. Every work that uplifts humanity has its dignity and importance and should be done with diligence and perfection. If a man is called to be a street-sweeper, he should sweep the streets just as Michelangelo painted, or Beethoven composed music, or Shakespeare wrote poetry; he should sweep the streets so well that all the legions of heaven and earth should stop and say: Here lived a great street-sweeper, who did his work well’”.
(Salvatore Quasimodo, Speech at the Circolo De Amicis in Milan, 11 April 1968)
Paul VI at the United Nations
“Listen to the clear words of a late great, of John Kennedy, who four years ago proclaimed: ‘Humanity must put an end to war, or war will put an end to humanity’. Not many words are needed to proclaim this supreme end. It is enough to recall that the blood of millions of men and countless untold sufferings, useless slaughter and formidable ruin sanction the pact that unites you, with an oath that must change the future history of the world: no more war, no more war! Peace, peace must guide the destinies of peoples and of all mankind!
[…]
Gentlemen, you have accomplished and are accomplishing a great work: the education of humanity for peace. The UN is the great school for this education. We are in the great hall of that school; whoever sits in this hall becomes a pupil and becomes a master in the art of building peace. When you leave this classroom, the world looks to you as the architects, the builders of peace.
And you know that peace is not only built with politics and the balance of forces and interests, but with the spirit, with ideas, with works of peace. You are already working in this sense. But you are still at the beginning: will the world ever come to change the particularistic and warlike mentality that has so far woven so much of its history? It is difficult to predict; but it is easy to say that the new history, the peaceful history, the truly and fully human history, the history that God has promised to men of good will, must be resolutely set out; and the paths are already marked out before you; and the first is that of disarmament”.
(Speech by Pope Paul VI to the United Nations Organization, 4 October 1965)