![]() Some vindication came in 1946, when the Supreme Court upheld the right to religious freedom and made citizenship available to the Canadian pacifist and Seventh-day Adventist James Girouard. Schwimmer remained a stateless person and an active pacifist until her death in 1948. held that the Constitution does not exclusively protect popular or widely accepted opinions but rather guarantees “freedom for the thought that we hate.” In a 6–3 ruling, the court denied her citizenship and held, in the words of Justice Pierce Butler, that “the pacifism that Schwimmer professes may hinder her ability to develop the nationalism that the country attempts to foster.”īut in his landmark dissenting opinion, Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. citizenship to Schwimmer, citing her “Un-American utterances and unpatriotic character,” seen at the time as a reference to her stalwart pacifism.īranded in the court of public opinion as a communist and socialist, Schwimmer came before the Supreme Court in 1929. In January 1924, the American Legion called for the denial of U.S. Schwimmer returned to Hungary and briefly served that country’s ambassador to Switzerland before political instability prompted her to move to Chicago in 1921. (She was also accused of fueling Ford’s venomous anti-Semitism.) She attracted further criticism for her confrontational personality and Jewish heritage, with some blaming Madame Schwimmer, as she was called, for the embarrassment of the Ford peace tour. press after a fruitless meeting with President Woodrow Wilson and the collapse of the peace mission. She was the driving force behind the Peace Ship, which in 1915 journeyed to Europe with the industrialist Henry Ford and other activists intent on ending World War I before the United States joined the fray. citizenship in 1924, Schwimmer had courted her fair share of controversy. citizenship nearly one century ago.īy the time she applied for U.S. More common are cases like that of Rosika Schwimmer, a Budapest-born pacifist who was denied U.S. We now view certain activists who embraced nonviolence as national heroes (a large public memorial to Martin Luther King Jr. Seven months after the pope’s speech to Congress, Michael Sean Winters of the National Catholic Reporter commended the witness of Catholic pacifists but concluded that “just war theory still reflects the demands of justice in an often brutal world.” Earlier, in 2009, the Catholic writer Austen Ivereigh bluntly stated that followers of Christ “must be willing to wage war in defence of the oppressed,” among other reasons.Įven with Pope Francis’ pastoral emphasis on nonviolence, not many Catholics call themselves pacifists. This was not unusual: Since his installation in 2013, the pope has received significant media attention for his work against violence and his push for the worldwide abolition of nuclear weapons.īut even with Francis’ pastoral emphasis on nonviolence, not many Catholics call themselves pacifists. ![]() In his address to a joint session of Congress in September 2015, Pope Francis praised three Americans-Thomas Merton, Dorothy Day and Martin Luther King Jr.-for their persistent efforts against war and the perpetuation of violence.
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