by Doug Pritchard

Twenty persons gathered at noon on December 12, 1998 at the "sword and the
cross" war memorial at St. Paul's Anglican Church in Toronto ON to commemorate
the death of Jean Donovan at the hands of the military in El Salvador on this
day in 1980.

Jean said before her death, "It's so much harder to fight for
your liberty in a nonviolent way than it is with a gun. It's
funny--people very close to me have been killed now, and yet I
still think that. So I'm starting to think maybe I really do
believe it. At the moment the only nonviolent voice in the whole country [El
Salvador] is the Church."

In response today, the vigilers wrote in their leaflets,
"Imagine if this could be said about the church in Canada, that
we had renounced all violence and all war!"

The monthly vigils at the "sword and the cross" war memorial grew out of that
hope, that church leaders would take down the sword attached to this stone
cross and transform it into a ploughshare as a public symbol of their
renunciation of all war and a witness to Christ's life-giving call to love our
enemies.

Anglican priest Don Heap, who was arrested for trespass during his vigil at
the monument in Oct. 1998, has been asked by his bishop to "desist from his
threats" to damage the sword on the war memorial and to "engage in dialogue"
instead. The vigilers did have a mutually respectful dialogue with St. Paul's
officials last May, but no further discussions have eventuated.

That same month, the General Synod of the Anglican Church of
Canada called on parishes "to study the Just War theory and its
implications for Christian responses to war and militarism" but these studies
have yet to commence.

In contrast, the Catholic vigilers have heard nothing from their
church leaders. However, an official of the Catholic Archdiocese of Toronto
did write to "The Toronto Star" last month, during a discussion on abortion,
saying that "we view the killing of anyone as wrong" and "killing is both
deeply, fundamentally, morally wrong and, as a tactic, massively stupid". When
CPT's Ontario Coordinator Doug Pritchard called about this, the Catholic
official hastened to add that this applied only to abortion and not to killing
in war.

So the vigilers at the "sword and the cross" continue to seek a
dialogue with the church and continue to pray for its renunciation of killing
in war.