that weapon indicted for war crimes.
Hauser, an Italian gynecologist who studied in Innsbruck and lives in Cologne, first became familiar with rape as a strategy of war when she traveled to Bosnia in 1993 to treat sexual assault victims of that region’s conflict. Her experiences led her to found Medica Mondiale, which has worked with over one hundred thousand victimized women in such war-torn nations around the world as Afghanistan, the Congo, Israel, Liberia, Albania, and Bosnia-Herzegovina. Medica Mondiale’s mission is to create local support structures and counseling centers for women who have been sexually violated in wartime, to advocate for women’s rights, and to lobby for the official recognition of sexual violence in wartime as a war crime and not simply a civil one.
Hauser is especially concerned with eliminating the social stigma that wartime sexual assault victims often have to endure at the hands of their fellow countrymen. By ostracizing rape victims, notes Hauser, “society at home almost always continues the work of the rapists. Communities ostracize raped women and girls as blemishes on masculine/national honor or force them to remain silent if they want to survive socially.” This “non-recognition of rape as a form of torture and grave human rights violation” constitutes an indifference to it that Hauser sees as nothing short of shameful.
Throughout the history of warfare, but especially in the conflicts of the last century, women and children have been the primary casualties of armed conflict. The poverty, famine, and diseases exacerbated by war are typically seen as the chief causes of their victimization. But Hauser and Medica Mondiale are helping the world to see that sexual assault is another powerful way in which women become wartime casualties who must live with the scars of their experiences for years afterwards. She has devoted her career to accompanying “tens of thousands of traumatized women on their path towards reclaiming their lives.”
25 February
Jacob Hutter
ca. 1500—25 February 1536
Founder of the Hutterites
On an icy winter day in 1536, Jacob Hutter was stripped of his clothing, whipped half to death, drenched in brandy to make him combustible, and then burnt alive before a mob of mostly jeering onlookers. According to one of the few sympathetic witnesses to his execution, Hutter “gave a great sermon through his death, for God was with him.” Hutter’s crime was subversion of both political and religious authorities. A member of the Radical Reformation group that came to be called “Anabaptists,” Hutter preached a Christianity closely modeled on the Acts of the Apostles’ description of the communal life of the early church and Paul’s second letter to the Corinthians extolling the primacy of love in the Christian life. Christians, he told his congregations, should hold property in common and distribute a sizable chunk of it to the needy; practice absolute pacifism, which included a refusal to pay war taxes; and practice as best they could the lifestyle taught and modeled by Jesus.
Hutter was born in the Tyrol region of modern-day northern Italy. A hatmaker by trade, he was exposed as a young man to the teachings of wandering Anabaptists, converted, and soon began preaching himself. Leaving his homeland in 1533 to escape persecution, Hutter traveled to Moravia, a region in what is now the Czech Republic, and lived there for two years, building and shepherding a number of congregations. When largely Catholic Moravia expelled the Anabaptists two years later, Hutter was arrested and transported to prison in Innsbruck. He was held there for several months and regularly tortured to force him to recant his religious views and to divulge the whereabouts of other Anabaptist leaders. Hutter refused to be broken, however, and the authorities, enraged by his stubbornness, sentenced him to his horrible death. Had Hutter cooperated, they would have settled for “mercifully” beheading him.
The followers of Hutter, who call themselves Hutterites, continue to practice the communal ownership and absolute pacifism he defended and died for. Persecuted numerous times by both church and state over the past four hundred years, the Hutterite community nearly died out in the nineteenth century. But several rural settlements in North America are now flourishing, keeping Jacob Hutter’s ideal of Christian nonviolence alive.
26 February
Naim Ateek
2 February 1937—
Following the Way
Only two percent of the people in Israel and the Occupied Territories identify themselves as Christian. The overwhelming majority of their neighbors are Jewish and Muslim. So a Christian Palestinian is apt to feel doubly vulnerable: first as a second-class citizen because of Jewish domination, second as an outsider among his own mainly Muslim people.
The Reverend Naim Ateek knows this vulnerability firsthand and has turned it into a tool with which to promote justice and reconciliation. Born in the Galilee region, he and his family were forcibly relocated by Israeli soldiers to Nazareth in 1948 when their family home was taken over by Jewish settlers. He studied in the United States, was ordained an Episcopal priest, and returned to Nazareth to practice his ministry.
During his many years of parish work, he had ample opportunity to reflect on the parallel between the story of Jesus’ persecution and crucifixion and the ongoing plight of the Palestinian people. Ateek came to see the subordination of Palestinians, especially Christian ones, as a replay of Christ’s passion. Influenced by the liberation theology then being developed by Latin American thinkers, he came to the conclusion that the very vulnerability of Christian Palestinians gave them a vantage point from which to preach Christ’s message of peace, nonviolence, and reconciliation. “We are Palestinian Christians,” he writes. “This is certainly not our only agenda, but if we are not concerned with justice and peace and reconciliation, what is our faith really about? It’s part of our responsibility as Christians—part of being faithful to the truth and to our baptismal covenant—to respect the dignity of every human being and speak out about injustice.”
To help his fellow Palestinian Christians grow into the ministry of justice and peace, Ateek founded the Sabeel Ecumenical Liberation Theology Center in 1989. Based in Jerusalem, Sabeel strives to “make the gospel relevant ecumenically and spiritually” by defending the Christ-centered “sanctity of life, justice, and peace.” Through education, advocacy, and public witness, the Sabeel Center’s intent is always to preach a “spirituality based on love, justice, peace, nonviolence, liberation and reconciliation for the different national and faith communities,” and thereby break the cycle of violence between Israelis and Palestinians on the one hand and Christians, Jews, and Muslims on the other.
Ateek chose the name “Sabeel” carefully. It’s the Arabic word for “the Way,” a reference to what the earliest Christians called the nonviolent teachings of Christ. But it also means “a spring of water,” testifying to Ateek’s deep conviction that nonviolence offers living and revivifying water to a land long parched by conflict.
27 February
Gautama Siddhartha
ca. 563 BCE—ca. 483 BCE
Nonviolence and Enlightenment
Prince Siddhartha, born into the powerful warrior caste in what is now Nepal, had a protected and pleasure-filled childhood. His father, hoping to insulate the boy from life’s miseries, kept him a virtual prisoner inside the extensive palace grounds. But young Siddhartha, increasingly curious about the outside world, finally persuaded a servant to take him beyond the palace gate. Once outside, he encountered scenes that shocked him to his depths: hungry and emaciated children, ill, lame, and aged people, and corpses being prepared for cremation. In one fell swoop he realized that life is full of suffering. Shaken to his roots, he fled the palace in the dead
