The Challenge of Peace

In keeping with our consistent ethic of life, the Church sees war as a grave violation of the dignity of the human person.  Peace, wrote Blessed John XXIII, is a gift from God, to be sought, treasured, and safeguarded.  While the Church does acknowledge that there are times when a use of force may be justified to correct a manifest injustice, these “just-war conditions” are quite limited (see the Catechism, 2309).  “The best way to avoid war is to safeguard peace by letting go of the anger and hatred that breed war and by eliminating the poverty, injustice, and deprivation of human rights that lead to war” (The United States Catholic Catechism for Adults, p. 395).
 
What does the Church say about peace?

Peace is not just the absence of war. It involves mutual respect and confidence between peoples and nations. It involves collaboration and binding agreements. Like a cathedral, peace has to be constructed, patiently and with unshakeable faith.

Wherever the strong exploit the weak; wherever the rich take advantage of the poor; wherever great powers seek to dominate and to impose ideologies, there the work of making peace is undone; there the cathedral of peace is again destroyed. Today, the scale and the horror of modern warfare—whether nuclear or not—makes it totally unacceptable as a means of settling differences between nations. War should belong to the tragic past, to history; it should find no place on humanity’s agenda for the future.

Pope John Paul II at Coventry, England, May 30, 1982

Peace is a life issue

No society can live in peace with itself, or with the world, without a full awareness of the worth and dignity of every human person, and of the sacredness of all human life (Jas. 4:1-2). When we accept violence in any form as commonplace, our sensitivities become dulled. When we accept violence, war itself can be taken for granted. Violence has many faces: oppression of the poor, deprivation of basic human rights, economic exploitation, sexual exploitation and pornography, neglect or abuse of the aged and the helpless, and innumerable other acts of inhumanity. Abortion in particular blunts a sense of the sacredness of human life. In a society where the innocent unborn are killed wantonly, how can we expect people to feel righteous revulsion at the act or threat of killing noncombatants in war?

The United States Bishops, The Challenge of Peace, 1982

Archbishop Hunthausen on peace

Nonviolence requires at least as much of our lives as war does.  The truth is found in Jesus’ nonviolent teaching of the cross:  to lay down our lives out of love, not while taking the lives of others but by revering them more deeply… I am challenged increasingly by the nonviolent truth of the cross, by the calling of the God of Love to lose our lives for peace.  What further steps that will mean in my life, I hope to leave to God’s will, as that will is revealed in response to prayer.

Archbishop Raymond G. Hunthausen, October 24, 1981

Given the new weapons that make possible destructions that go beyond the combatant groups, today we should be asking ourselves if it is still licit to admit the very existence of a ‘just war.’

Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger (Now Pope Benedict XVI) May 2, 2003

The United States has now achieved the capacity to wage major warfare over many years without greatly burdening its economy or its general citizenry. . . We have managed to create and field an armed force that is very lethal without the society in whose name it fights breaking a sweat.

Most Rev. Robert W. McElroy, Auxiliary Bishop of San Francisco
 

A prayer for peace

Don’t stop after beating the swords
Into ploughshares, don’t stop!  Go on beating
And make musical instruments out of them.
Whoever wants to make war again
Will have to turn them into ploughshares first.

Yehuda Amichai