Arts festival expands horizons for W. Virginia parishes: Croatian children's art cries out against atrocities everywhere

National Catholic Reporter, June 28, 1996 by Michael J. Farrell

In one picture, bodies are sprawled every which way at the bottom of a black pit. In another, a group of soldiers shoot down a dove signifying peace. Barbed wire on every side. Refugees huddled. Again and again the mass graves. The images are already etched on the world's consciousness by one of the most cruel wars of the century brought home to us on TV.

Now the Bosnian tragedy is rendered again in Croatian children's art that cries out against atrocities everywhere. But art, however grim the subjects, can patch up the heart and paint the world over.

Martinsburg, W. Va., is a striking example of what can be done in today's harsh political and social climate where there is little regard and less money for art. Politicians vie for the reputation of destroying the National Endowment for the Arts and other such instruments of personal and national uplift. This fanatical crusading is usually done in the name of morality and strives to identify contemporary art with perversion and decadence. Most people, in any case, can scarcely muster the aesthetic energy to care about art in such an inhospitable landscape.

Hedgesville, W. Va., where Sister of the Holy Child Jesus Catherine Callaghan is pastoral associate, might seem such an inhospitable spot. In an area of few Catholics, Callaghan's youth ministry could not afford "the same razzle-dazzle ministries as the Protestants." Much the same could be said for nearby Martinsburg, heart of St. Joseph Parish, where the pastor, Fr. John V. DiBacco Jr., says the growing community spilling over from Washington, D.C., has not yet overrun the simple, wholesome environment that was so recently countryside.

On the grounds that there was strength in numbers, the six parishes of the Catholic deanery organized their youth events as a unit. That was how Callaghan, working on the legendary shoestring but with an obviously ardent army of teenagers, found herself organizing "Comfort My Children," also described as an International Peace and Art Exchange Festival. Just down, or up, the road from the barbarians in the capital, they turned a little parish event into a project that grew feet and walked, then grew wings and flew.

The resourceful Callaghan reached out in many directions, and the art community, by its nature generous and eager to spread itself and its wares and awareness, responded.

Children's Art Bridge provided an exhibition by photographer Lazaros Psaltopoulos, "Life After Death." Working with victim children in the former Yugoslavia, some of his more poignant pictures show children standing over their parents' graves.

Directed by Alana Maubury Hunter, Children's Art Bridge is described as an international arts exchange project that connects children and aid organizations globally through exhibitions of art works by and about "at risk" children.

"The heart of (the founders') efforts has been what they call `love intervention,' with an emphasis on creativity as a means for encouraging resilience, nonviolence and teaching of tolerance," their brochure explains.

Hunter, human rights activist and artist, is anchored in Washington, but her activities have taken her from the Middle East to Lithuania to Russia several times. "They're dying for creativity programs because it's so much a part of their culture," Hunter said of the Lithuanians, something she could say of many cultures.

Children's Art Bridge also provided a photo exhibition by Mickelle Seick, "Children in the Violence."

"You can see little children playing in the line of fire," Callaghan explains. "If their parents were alive, they would not be there." She mentions in particular a photo of a child in a cemetery carrying around the lid of a baby's casket.

Another group responding to the Martinsburg festival was Lifeline Network for Peace, founded by Beverley Britton, a therapist who deals with stress reduction and especially crisis intervention with rape victims. When Britton, whose work has earned her a Nobel Peace Prize nomination, heard of the Bosnian Serb policy of using rape as a war weapon, she founded the World Alliance for Humanitarian Assistance for Bosnia.

Britton happened to be in Sarajevo for the "Marketplace Massacre" of February 1994. Her reaction was to start the Children's Peace Quilt Project. "Its purpose is to give all the children of the world a voice to express their pleas for world peace," she writes. "The world's future will be in the hands of today's children."

Orphans and wounded children from Sarajevo and devastated East and west Mostar painted the first peace patches for the quilt in July 1994. Writes Britton to would-be quilters: "The Children's Peace Quilt journey continues to cross war-torn borders, both past and present, from Vietnam to Chechnya. It is an ongoing project that reaches to embrace all the children of the world with its message of an ethical world peace by the year 2000."

At Britton's invitation, the children of Martinsburg deanery collaborated on a West Virginia panel for the international quilt.