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22 January 1930—

Marked for Peace

In 1942, twelve-year-old Hildegard Mayr witnessed the growing terror in Vienna as communists, pacifists, and Jews were arrested and taken away by Nazi thugs. Even her own parents, both Catholic pacifists, were under surveillance. But despite the danger facing her whole family, she refused to go along with the “Heil Hitler!” waves of jubilation that swept over her fellow students every time another Wehrmacht victory was announced. As she recalled, “I felt a huge force pressing on me . . . and I said to myself, ‘you have to resist . . . don’t raise your hand even if they lynch you.’” This will to resist the evil of violence, developed at so young an age, marked her for life. She knew even then that she had to choose between “the forces of death and the spirit of revenge, or the forces of life that are able to overcome evil at its root.” She chose life and nonviolence.

Hildegard and her family managed to survive the terrible Nazi years, and she went on to study philosophy in France and the United States, eventually earning a doctorate. She joined the International Fellowship of Reconciliation in 1953, a year before she married Jean Goss, a World War II combat veteran turned pacifist. The couple traveled around the world, teaching nonviolence and conflict resolution to laypeople, nuns, and priests in such countries as Brazil, Mexico, and the Philippines. Whether opposing the Cold War nuclear doctrine of mutually assured destruction (MAD) in the 1960s, working in Africa in the 1970s in the struggle against colonialism, or being arrested in Brazil in 1975 for teaching firmeza permanente, a tactic similar to Gandhi’s practice of meeting violence with persistent firmness, Goss-Mayr and her husband were at the forefront of peace work in the second half of the twentieth century.

A regular feature of Goss-Mayr’s approach to teaching peace was to remind her students that peace was as much an inner attitude as an external change in policy or economic and social structures. Without the cultivation of both, neither was possible in the long run. As she said in 1984 while helping Filipinos devise nonviolent strategies to end President Ferdinand Marcos’s repressive regime, “The seed of violence is in the structure, of course, and in the dictator. But isn’t it also in ourselves? It’s very easy to say that Marcos is the evil. But unless we each tear the dictator out of our own heart, nothing will change.”

Her husband and coworker, Jean, died in 1991. Goss-Mayr continues to train peaceworkers in nonviolence and to advocate for justice, proving herself, as fellow peace worker John Dear says, “the greatest living peacemaker.”