Peacebuilding and Catholic Social Teaching

Theodora Hawksley

• Publisher: University of Notre Dame Press
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9780268044145, 9780268108458
• eBook ISBN: 9780268108472
• Topic: Politique et relations internationales
• Subtopic: Philosophie politique

The Roman Catholic Church, with its global reach, centralized organization, and more than 1.4 billion members, could be one of the world's most significant forces in global peacemaking, and yet its robust tradition of social teaching on peace is not widely known. In Peacebuilding and Catholic Social Teaching, Theodora Hawksley aims to make that tradition better known and understood, and to encourage its continued development in light of the lived experience of Catholics engaged in peacebuilding and conflict transformation worldwide.

The first part of this book analyzes the development of Catholic social teaching on peace from the time of the early Church fathers to the present, drawing attention to points of tension and areas in need of development. The second part engages in constructive theological work, exploring how the existing tradition might develop in order to support the efforts of Catholic peacebuilders and respond to the distinctive challenges of contemporary conflict.

Peacebuilding and Catholic Social Teaching is one of the first scholarly monographs dedicated exclusively to theology, ethics, and peacebuilding. It will appeal to students and academics who specialize in Catholic social teaching and peacebuilding, to practitioners of Catholic peacebuilding, and to anyone with an interest in religion and peacebuilding more generally.

NOTES

Introduction

1. See BBC News, “Pope Francis Kisses Feet of Rival South Sudan Leaders.” See also Jason Horowitz, “Pope Francis, in Plea for South Sudan Peace, Stuns Leaders by Kissing Their Shoes.”

2. ICIN, “New Hope Trauma Centre of Iraq.”

3. John L. Allen Jr., “Trauma Forms the Invisible Ruins ISIS Left Behind on the Nineveh Plains.”

4. Throughout the book, I generally refer to the Catholic Church rather than to the Roman Catholic Church. This signifies all churches in communion with Rome, so in addition to the Roman Catholic Church (the Latin Church specifically), it includes the twenty-three Eastern Rite Churches, of which the Chaldean Catholic Church is one example.

5. BBC News, “Pope Francis Warns on ‘Piecemeal World War III.’” See also the collected references in National Catholic Reporter, “World at War Is a Common View for Francis.”

6. O’Brien, “Stories of Solidarity,” 401.

7. “Peacemaking is not an optional commitment. It is a requirement of our faith. We are called to be peacemakers, not by some movement of the moment, but by our Lord Jesus. The content and context of our peacemaking is set not by some political agenda or ideological program, but by the teaching of his Church.” See USCCB, The Challenge of Peace, Summary II.C. See also Paul VI, Evangelii nuntiandi, §29.

8. See Hehir, “Catholicism and Democracy,” 25.

9. See, e.g., Todd Whitmore’s reflections on how the precarious nature of life in seriously poverty-stricken countries challenges the distinction in Catholic just war reasoning between direct and indirect threats to life. Whitmore, “Peacebuilding and Its Challenging Partners,” 155–89.

10. Sobrino, Witnesses to the Kingdom, 75.

11. Lisa Cahill’s Love Your Enemies is a fine example of a book that seeks to engage with the Church’s tradition of teaching on peace as a whole, and Kenneth Himes has also undertaken valuable mapping work in his “Peacebuilding and Catholic Social Teaching” and “Papal Thinking about Peace.”

12. Appleby, “Peacebuilding and Catholicism,” 5.

13. As far as I am aware, the term is first used in Benedict XVI, Caritas in veritate, §72.

14. Cahill, “Peacebuilding: A Practical Strategy,” 47.

15. The USCCB document, The Challenge of Peace, portrays pacifist and just war approaches as complementary in this way in §121. See also Miller, Interpretations of Conflict, 17–18.

16. Kenneth Himes disagrees with this tactic on the grounds that “sharing a presumption against violence is not enough to establish complementarity when one side considers the presumption absolute and the other does not.” See Himes, “Pacifism and the Just War Tradition,” 341.

17. Its most well-known advocate and practitioner is the Mennonite peacebuilder and sociologist John Paul Lederach. See Lederach, Building Peace.

18. The language of destructive patterns of relating I borrow from Liechty and Clegg, Moving Beyond Sectarianism, 103.

19. Lederach and Appleby, “Strategic Peacebuilding,” 34.

20. Drew Christiansen describes peace in Catholic social teaching as a “convoy concept,” including many separate but related requirements. See Christiansen, “Catholic Peacemaking, 1991–2005,” 22.

21. For more on this theme, see Hawksley, “Drawings for Projection.”

22. Lederach and Appleby, “Strategic Peacebuilding,” 28.

23. For the assertion that reconciliation cannot be less profound than the division itself, see John Paul II, Reconciliatio et paenitentia, §3.

24. The amount of Christianity still coursing through the bloodstream of most Western democracies means that quasi-theological beliefs about them can often to be found mixed up in even the most secular approaches to conflict.

25. The traffic is two-way: Séverine Autesserre’s work indicates that international peacebuilding interveners may also have something to learn from peacebuilding as conceived and practiced by Catholic agencies, whose emphasis on long-term accompaniment and supporting local partners makes them comparatively effective and allows them to avoid some of the pitfalls of agencies involved in short-term peacebuilding interventions. See Autesserre, Peaceland, 85–86, 103–5.

26. Francis, “Nonviolence, a Style of Politics for Peace,” §6, §1.

Chapter 1

1. For an overview, see Harnack, Militia Christi. James T. Johnson argues for a fairly continuous tradition of Christians serving in the Roman army. Johnson, The Quest for Peace, 15–17.

2. At the same time, Tertullian’s claim in his Apology, “We sail with you, we fight with you, and till the ground with you,” is one of the earliest pieces of evidence that Christians fought in the imperial army. See Tertullian, Apologia ch. 42.

3. Origen, Contra Celsum VIII.73–75.

4. Musto, Catholic Peacemakers, 95–96.

5. In an interesting critical comment on early Christian pacifism, Lytta Basset points out that both Tertullian and Lactantius emphasize divine vengeance and suggests that unable to act on their anger against their persecutors, they transferred it to God to enact in their stead. See Basset, Holy Anger, 31.

6. As Hunter points out, the prohibition on clerics taking arms and on the ordination of former soldiers suggests ongoing Christian unease regarding the ethics of military service and bloodshed. See Hunter, “A Decade of Research on Early Christians and Military Service,” 89.

7. Cf. James T. Johnson’s claim that these early fathers were writing in expectation of Jesus’s imminent return, and therefore urging a general withdrawal from public life and an “interim ethic.” See Johnson, The Quest for Peace, 13.

8. Cahill, Love Your Enemies, 41.

9. Origen, Contra Celsum VIII.73. See also Tertullian, Apologia ch. 30: “Looking up to heaven, the Christians . . . are ever making intercession for all the Emperors. We pray for them long life, a secure rule, a safe home, brave armies, a faithful senate, an honest people, a quiet world—and everything for which a man and a Caesar can pray.”

10. It is worth noting that this question does not go away: it is still being discussed in debates on the ethics of war in seventeenth-century Salamanca, expressed in terms of the relationship between the natural law (equated with the Old Testament) and the gospel.

11. Augustine, Contra Faustum XXII.70.

12. Miller treats Augustine’s thought on the ethics of war and killing in the context of a larger discussion on the presumption against harm. What distinguishes Augustine from the tradition that precedes him is the way he circumscribes the “duty of nonmaleficence . . . by distinguishing between realms of morality in three ways: self/other, interior/exterior acts, and private/public authority. Augustine restricts the force of nonmaleficence by confining it to the first term in each of these pairs.” See Miller, Interpretations of Conflict, 20–21.

13. Langan, “The Elements of St. Augustine’s Just War Theory,” 20. In City of God Augustine will emphasize still more strongly the tragic character of coercive violence.

14. In On Free Choice of the Will, Augustine reserves killing to those with proper judicial or military authority and argues that those lacking this authority may not kill, even in self-defense. See Augustine, On Free Choice of the Will I.4–6. See also Augustine, Letter to Publicola, §5. Cahill points out that this restriction of killing to those with proper authority may also concern the motivation that justifies the act, e.g., its use as punishment. See Cahill, Love Your Enemies, 69.

15. It is “when force is required to inflict the punishment, that, in obedience to God or some lawful authority, good men undertake wars, when they find themselves in such a position as regards the conduct of human affairs, that right conduct requires them to act, or to make others act in this way.” Augustine, Contra Faustum XXII.70.

16. Augustine, Contra Faustum XXII.75.

17. Augustine, Contra Faustum XXII.78.

18. Augustine, Contra Faustum XXII.71.

19. This is evident in his discussion of self-defense in On the Free Choice of the Will I.5, where he states that people should not kill in defense of those things (life, liberty, chastity) that can be lost. See Langan, “The Elements of St. Augustine’s Just War Theory,” 27; Miller, Interpretations of Conflict, 19...

Table of contents

• Title
• Copyrights
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• One The Early Church to Aquinas
• Two The New World to the Present
• Three Pastoral Accompaniment and Consolation
• Four Solidarity
• Five Social Sin
• Six Reconciliation and Catholic Nonviolence
• Seven Desire for Peace
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index