Kateri Tekakwitha Peace Conference

Bishop Thomas Gumbleton will be coming to the Albany diocese next month to kick off the 16^th Annual Kateri Tekakwitha Peace Conference at the National Kateri Tekakwitha Shrine in Fonda.

Bishop Gumbleton is a retired auxiliary bishop of the Detroit archdiocese and a leading voice for peace, justice, and civil rights in the United States. He will be leading a retreat on Friday, August 15, starting at 10 a.m. His topic is Active Love and Nonviolence: The Only Moral Response To War.

Here is some of his biography from http://www.bishopgumbleton.com/

One of the first bishops to speak out against the Vietnam War, he is a founding member and past president of Pax Christi USA, the American Catholic peace movement. He is also a founder and former president of Bread for the World.

Since becoming a bishop in 1968, he has traveled throughout the world calling for an end to war and the abolition of nuclear weapons. He has spoken out courageously on behalf of the victims of sexual abuse within the Catholic church, and he has advocated for the full participation and the rights of women and homosexuals in the Catholic Church. He has met with victims of war in Iraq, Afghanistan, Vietnam, El Salvador, Nicaragua, Guatemala, Israel, Palestine, Colombia, Haiti, and Peru. He led a delegation to visit the American hostages in Iran in 1979. Among his many awards and honorary degrees are the 2007 Detroit Spirit of MLK Award and numerous lifetime achievement awards for peacemaking. His homilies are read by thousands each week in the National Catholic Reporter. 

Friday’s retreat will be followed by an evening cruise on the Mohawk River. On Saturday, there will be several workshops:

Panel 1  - “Priorities, Engagements and Commitments" - In the light of the evolving  and Intensifying  crises which confront us, what new models are you imagining,  working on or see developing which offer the possibility for a sustainable life affirming future.
    

Panel 2 - "Daring To Think - To Be Truthful - To Love" - What are the major obstacles that stand in the way of building a peaceful, sustainable, life affirming society? What stands in the way of your own work psychologically/societally? How are you personally confronting these obstacles? What models of resistance seem effective to you? 

Panel 3 - " Sustainable Transformation" - What are the strategies and actions needed to move us forward toward what Fuller thought of as "beautiful solutions". What actions, commitments, work in our personal lives, our local communities, nationally , globally  should take priority in order to successfully  move people to rise up, revolutionize and create the new models which will ensure that we will be "the architects of the future rather than its victims".

For more information about the conference, or to register, go here.