on one of Millvale’s hills and shepherded by Franciscan Father Albert Zagar.
Throughout eight weeks in the spring of 1937, worshippers at early morning mass observed a thin man with a goatee industriously working on a series of dry fresco murals on the interior walls of St. Nicholas. The artist, Maximilian Vanka, had been commissioned by Father Zagar to decorate the sanctuary with religiously themed paintings. Vanka worked from early morning to late night on the project, Father Zagar frequently praying at the altar while Zagar painted.
Vanka’s eleven murals included stunning depictions of the four gospelists, St. Francis receiving the stigmata, the creation, and the crucifixion. Overall, the mood was celebratory. But when Vanka returned to St. Nicholas four years later to complete a second cycle of murals, the paintings took on a much more somber tone and message. War had been raging in Europe for months, and Vanka’s anguish over the killing and destruction there was reflected in his work. The new murals included breathtaking images of a crucified Christ stabbed by a bayonet-wielding soldier, the Holy Mother throwing herself between opposing armies, and the burial of a lad killed in battle. The new murals also reflected Vanka’s outraged realization that war was good business for unscrupulous profiteers. Two of his panels offer a grim contrast between an impoverished working family and a wealthy capitalist. Together, this second cycle of murals is one of the most haunting indictments of war-making ever created by an artist.
Maximilian Vanka had firsthand acquaintance with poverty and war. Born in Zagreb, he was a fachook, or noble bastard, sired by a member of the Habsburg nobility. Abandoned while still an infant, he was raised by peasants until he was eight, when his maternal grandfather learned of his existence and took him in. Vanka displayed a talent for drawing from an early age, and his grandfather encouraged him to study art in Zagreb and Brussels. When World War I erupted, Vanka, a firm pacifist, served with the Belgian Red Cross and witnessed horrors that later found expression in his St. Nicholas murals.
After the war he lived for a few years in Paris and exhibited throughout Europe. He married an American woman and in 1934 immigrated with her to the United States. They settled in Pennsylvania, where Vanka taught art at a number of colleges while continuing his work as a freelance artist. Today he’s recognized as one of this nation’s finest immigrant artists. But none of his work is more gripping than the St. Nicholas murals.
3 February
Carlos Filipe Ximenes Belo
3 February 1948—
Protector of East Timor
Until less than a decade ago, the Southeastern Asian state of East Timor was a troubled country. A Portuguese colony from the sixteenth century until 1974, the tiny island enjoyed its status as a free state for only two years before it was invaded and annexed by Indonesia. Over the next quarter-century, the East Timorese endured a foreign occupation marked by indiscriminate killings—well over one hundred thousand—and destruction. The ferocity of the Indonesian occupation was fueled by religious differences. East Timor’s population is overwhelmingly Roman Catholic, while Indonesia is a Muslim nation.
The rest of the world knew little and cared less about the turmoil in East Timor until the Roman Catholic Apostolic Administrator and later Bishop of Dili, the nation’s capital, demanded that it take notice. He was Carlos Filipe Ximenes Belo, a Salesian priest who had trained in Portugal and Rome before returning to his native land. Belo’s appointment was approved by Indonesian governmental authorities because they thought he would be timid and pliable. They were mistaken.
In 1983, Belo’s first year in office, Indonesian military forces on the lookout for Timorese resistance fighters swept over the village of Kraras. When they departed, they left behind three hundred dead villagers. The Sunday following the massacre, Belo delivered an impassioned sermon in Dili Cathedral denouncing the atrocities, appealing to the Indonesian occupiers to restrain themselves, and calling on the international community to intervene in the name of justice. Immediately after the sermon, he began initiating as much contact with the outside world as he could, reaching out to dozens of journalists, human rights activists, diplomats, and political and religious leaders, in the hope of bringing East Timor’s plight to their attention.
Belo advocated nonviolent but firm resistance to the Indonesian occupiers and was tireless in his public denunciations of the torture, imprisonment, execution, and disappearance of East Timorese citizens. His work on behalf of his countrymen enraged the Indonesians, putting Belo himself at risk of assassination or disappearance. Conservative elements in the Roman Catholic Church also criticized him for using his position as the nation’s religious leader to speak out against political injustice. But Belo saw no conflict of interest between his commitments to Christ and his advocacy for the East Timorese people, whom he described as “dying” under the Indonesian occupation.
Belo’s commitment to nonviolent change, his persistence in denouncing atrocities, and his efforts to draw the world’s attention to East Timor finally paid off. Bowing to international pressure, Indonesia surrendered its claims to Belo’s country, and the newly independent East Timor elected its first president in 2002. Belo, who was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1996, resigned his bishopric and traveled to Mozambique, where he remains today as a missionary.
4 February
Rosa Parks
4 February 1913—24 October 2005
Tired of Giving In
On 28 August 1955, a black teenager named Emmett Till was brutally murdered in Mississippi because he flirted with a white woman. He was tortured, shot, and dumped in the Tallahatchie River. His mutilated body was recovered three days later.
Two months later, Rosa Parks, a black seamstress in Montgomery, Alabama, who had been a member of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) since 1943, attended a meeting in which Till’s murder was discussed. Three days later, anger at Till’s murder and years of accumulated weariness at being mistreated because of the color of her skin prompted Parks to do something that would spark the first large-scale campaign of active nonviolence in the United States. As Martin Luther King Jr. later said, “no one can understand the action of Mrs. Parks unless he realizes that eventually the cup of endurance runs over, and the human personality cries out, ‘I can take it no longer!’”
Coming home from work on 1 December, Parks refused to give up her bus seat for a white passenger, as local custom required. The enraged bus driver had her arrested. Within hours Montgomery’s black population, which accounted for 75 percent of the regular riders on the city’s buses, had heard about the incident. Two days later, Martin Luther King Jr., at the time an unknown young Baptist preacher, urged blacks to quit using public buses until the segregation policy was dropped. The boycott lasted for over a year, with forty thousand blacks getting to work—in some cases traveling as far as twenty miles from where they lived—any way they could without availing themselves of public transportation. City buses stood empty, the bus line lost thousands of dollars, and the eyes of the nation became focused on the problem of racism in the Deep South. In the end, the city agreed to the boycott organizers’ demands. The boycotters had demonstrated to the nation that nonviolence works.
The general assumption after Parks’ arrest was that she had refused to give up her seat because she was worn out from working all day. But she was quick to point out that she wasn’t physically tired at all. Instead, she said, “the only tired I was, was tired of giving in. I did not want to be mistreated, I did not want to be deprived of a seat that I had paid for. It was just time. I had not planned to get arrested. I had plenty to do without having to end up in jail. But when I had to face that decision, I didn’t hesitate to do so because I felt that we had endured that too long. The more we gave in, the more we complied
