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Sarajevo 2018 — six hundred Catholic ethicists picked a post-war city to talk about peace

In July 2018, six hundred Catholic theological ethicists from every continent gathered in Sarajevo for the third global plenary of Catholic Theological Ethics in the World Church. The theme was Building Bridges. The book of plenary papers — edited by Kristin E. Heyer, James F. Keenan SJ, and Andrea Vicini — appeared from Orbis Books in 2019. Sarajevo was the classroom. The lessons were for Chicago, Manila, Nairobi, and Hong Kong.

By Nedim Hadzimahmutovic · Sarajevo

In July 2018 roughly six hundred Catholic theological ethicists, women and men, priests, nuns, laypeople and academics, flew into Sarajevo airport from every continent for a week-long conference. The conference was the third global plenary of a Jesuit-initiated network called Catholic Theological Ethics in the World Church (CTEWC), founded in 2003 by Fr. James F. Keenan SJ of Boston College. The first plenary was held in Padua in 2006, the second in Trento in 2010. The third, in July 2018, was in Sarajevo.

The book that came out of it, Building Bridges in Sarajevo: The Plenary Papers from CTEWC 2018, edited by Kristin E. Heyer, James F. Keenan SJ, and Andrea Vicini, published by Orbis Books of Maryknoll, New York in 2019 (vii + 228 pages), is the record. The choice of city is the story.

The Sarajevo that had been in the theological journals

By 2018, Sarajevo had already had a long life in Catholic theological writing, but almost entirely as a warning. Theologians of the 1990s used the siege as the standard European reference for what happens when communal identity hardens into weaponised division. The Vijećnica in flames, the National Library burning, Aida Buturović dying while carrying books out, all of it appeared in ethics textbooks under headings like “the failure of intergroup solidarity” or “the pathology of memory.”

The 2018 conference reversed the polarity. Sarajevo was not the warning any more. It was the classroom. The organisers’ opening argument, in the words of Cardinal Blase Cupich of Chicago (quoted at p. 162 of the volume), was that as “too many nation-states and communities have been seduced into ecological indifference, destructive conflict, divisiveness, and the building of walls, there is a desperate need for a new historical dynamic through which God manifests.” The dynamic they came to Sarajevo to study was the one that had already been happening on the ground here since the mid-1990s: how do people who have every reason to remain enemies actually organise, day by day, to live in the same city again?

Eight plenary sessions, six continents on the roster

The programme moved through eight plenary sessions, each one drawing speakers from three or four continents. The full sequence:

  1. The Opening — the official welcome, in Sarajevo, from the Archdiocese of Vrhbosna;
  2. Our Origins and Contexts: Why We Network — the CTEWC self-history;
  3. Continental Reflections since Padua and Trento — how the field had shifted since the 2006 and 2010 conferences;
  4. Challenges We Confront Today — climate ethics and political ethics;
  5. Ethics and Public Discourse;
  6. Dialogical Theologies of Reconciliation — the specifically Sarajevo-shaped session;
  7. Networking for Social Impact;
  8. A Prophetic Sending Forth.

Named speakers from the book, all working ethicists at named institutions: Sr. Ann Marie Chenginimattam of India on “daring steps” toward inclusion (p. 30); Zoltán Kovács on “digging up hidden talents” (32–33); Ssebunya of Uganda on the voices of women (39); Christian Lado on the voices of the laity (126); Antonius Irawan of Indonesia on the voices of youth (66); Emilce Cuda of Argentina on the theology of the people (83); Antonio Auterio on fundamental virtues of courage and perseverance (23); Victor Carmona and Kate Ward on humility and solidarity (94); Pablo Blanco on humility and tenderness (208); Emmanuel Katongole of Uganda on ecological virtues and the observation that “all theology is a form of political theology” (214); Linda Hogan of Trinity College Dublin on everyday virtue as “the moral language that resonates with most people” (218); Anne Achieng on structural violence and the African palaver as a dialogical model; George Kodithottam on the seventy-percent decline in Indian agricultural water access since 1963; Teresa Vila of the Philippines on the “willingness to lovingly cause and endure conflict” (150); and Mary Mee-Yin Yuen of Hong Kong on “contemplative prayer as a way to non-violent, liberating action” (131).

Eli S. McCarthy of Georgetown University, in his 2019 review of the volume, summarised the through-line: “It is especially important for scholars and Catholic leaders from traditionally dominant cultures, countries or regions to be receptive to and engage in this way of bridge-building and transformation. We each have an opportunity and responsibility to develop these new bridges and build additional ones.”

What Sarajevo taught the room

The volume’s Sarajevo-shaped session was chapter six, Dialogical Theologies of Reconciliation, and it drew, deliberately, on the mechanisms Sarajevans had used to reconstitute their city after 1996. The book does not romanticise. There are honest passages about how partial the reconciliation has been, how much remains unresolved, how many of the same institutional divisions from the Dayton settlement are still calcified into daily life. But the book’s argument is that Sarajevans have, over three decades, worked out one clear practice: you build bridges by naming, publicly, the humanity of the person your community is asked to consider an enemy.

That is not a soaring rhetorical claim. It is what Sarajevans point at when foreign visitors ask them how do you live like this?, the Hardaga family who hid the Kavilio family in 1941 and were sheltered in return in 1993, the interfaith commemorations at Kovači cemetery, the muezzin who calls to prayer next door to the Sacred Heart Cathedral. The CTEWC delegates came here to study that practice, and to bring it back to their own conflict-scarred cities.

The classroom is now Sarajevo

The largest global network of Catholic ethicists chose Sarajevo, not Rome, not Manila, not Washington, as the classroom for their 2018 argument about how communities put themselves back together. The book’s publication by Orbis in 2019 sent that argument into every seminary and theology department that stocks Orbis titles, which is most of them, worldwide.

The city that was, in 1994, the world’s most reproduced photograph of a broken community is now, in the theological literature, the case study on the opposite side of the ledger. That is an institutional shift Sarajevans themselves have not always had time to notice — they have been busy actually doing the work — but it is real and documented in a $42 book you can order from Orbis this week.

The whole volume is 228 pages. Cardinal Cupich’s opening is on page 162. Linda Hogan’s line on page 219 is the one to underline: we are bodily beings, we are from another, “already given over,” and implicated in lives that are not our own. Sarajevans have been living that line since long before the conference.

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