Date:	November 6, 2007

For the seventh year in a row, peacebuilders from around the world gathered for the Catholic Relief Services-Kroc Institute Peacebuilding Institute.  Held on the island of Mindanao in the Philippines, this was the first year the Institute was not held on Notre Dame’s campus.  Between Oct. 21-26, 31 specialists from 16 countries explored the challenges and opportunities faced by the Catholic community working to build peace in conflict areas from East Timor and Burundi to Sudan and northern Uganda.

“The Catholic community has an enormous, but often untapped, capacity for peacebuilding” said John Paul Lederach, professor of international peacebuilding at the Kroc Institute. “The Church is most effective when peacebuilding efforts at every level are coordinated."

Lederach and two other Kroc Institute faculty members, Joe Bock and Jerry Powers, along with Catholic Relief Services’ staff Tom Bamat and Myla Leguro, facilitated the program, which focused on the Catholic Church’s involvement in ecumenical and inter-religious peacebuilding.

The institute’s host, CRS’s peacebuilding program in Mindanao, is known for its innovative programs to promote inter-religious peacebuilding. The programs have developed in response to three decades of armed conflict on the island among Islamic rebel groups and government forces in the predominantly Roman Catholic Philippines.

Guest speakers from the area this year included Imam Alim Elias Macarandas, a prominent Muslim leader, and Major General Raymundo B. Ferrer, who became an advocate of peacebuilding within the Filipino military after he participated in CRS’s annual Peacebuilding Institute in Mindanao.

Institute participant Paul Nantulya of CRS Sudan said the institute offered extremely pertinent insights into the dynamics and challenges CRS faces as it helps the country transition from a devastating war to a just peace in the midst of grinding poverty. Hanan Nasrallah of CRS Palestine said the institute helped confront the difficulties of encouraging “an openness to the perspectives of others, especially those causing conflict.”

“The convergence of peacebuilders from around the world is a source of hope and inspiration for Mindanaon peacebuilders,” said Myla Leguro. “After this meeting, we are indeed more inspired and more energized.”

Catholic Relief Services, the international relief and development agency of the U.S. Catholic community, reaches more than 80 million people in more than 100 countries. Since 2000, CRS and the Kroc Institute have brought together peacebuilders and practitioners for a week of intensive training in religious peacebuilding, conflict transformation, community-based peacebuilding, and related areas. Since the institute began, more than 300 peacebuilders – from presidents of bishops’ conferences to a wide range of CRS specialists – have participated in these institutes.  

In other collaborative projects:

• The Kroc Institute and CRS have been leaders in the Catholic Peacebuilding Network, a major initiative to enhance the study and practice of Catholic peacebuilding around the world.
• CRS provides semester-long internships each year for Kroc Institute graduate students in Mindanao, Cambodia, and Indonesia. 
• A CRS peacebuilding specialist spends one semester each year as a visiting fellow at the Kroc Institute.  
• The Kroc Institute and CRS recently published Reflective Peacebuilding, a manual on monitoring and evaluating peacebuilding programs.

For more information about the Kroc Institute-CRS Peacebuilding Institute or other joint initiatives, contact Joe Bock, Kroc Institute director of external relations, 574-631-5799, Joseph.G.Bock.5@nd.edu, or Tom Bamat, senior advisor for justice and peacebuilding at CRS, 410-951-7268, tbamat@crs.org.

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