In imitation of Jesus and in response to his teaching, from the earliest days of the Church some Christians have renounced the use of violence, even in self-defense. Christians such as the Church Father, St.Martin of Tours; the medieval mystic and preacher, St.Francis of Assisi; and in our own time, Dorothy Day and Monsenor Oscar Romero, resisted the evils of their time but did so without recourse to personal or state violence. The Catechism of the Catholic Church teaches (1), “Those who renounce violence and bloodshed and, in order to safeguard human rights, make use of those means of defense available to the weakest, bear witness to evangelical charity, provided they do so without harming the rights and obligations of other men and societies. They bear legitimate witness to the gravity of the physical and moral risks of recourse to violence, with all its destruction and death.”(2)  At the Second Vatican Council the Church formally recognized the legitimacy of Christian non-violence for Catholics when they called for the legal protection of conscientious objection to war.(3)