Recent Roman Catholic affirmations of nonviolence

Abstract

Cardinal McElroy notes that, given Pope Francis’s clear leadership away from providing moral justifications for war, “it is hard not to conclude that the church is abandoning the just war framework and seeking to construct a new moral framework that has not yet emerged.” The Catholic Nonviolence Initiative proposes Just Peace as that emerging framework.

Just Peace is a Christian school of thought and set of practices for building peace at all stages of acute conflict: before, during, and after. It draws on three key approaches—principles and moral criteria, practical norms, and virtue
ethics—for building a positive peace and constructing a more “widely known paradigm with agreed practices
that make peace and prevent war.” Just Peace principles and moral criteria guide actions that can assist institutional change and provide a framework for judging ethical responsibility. Just Peace’s practical norms provide guidance on constructive actions for peace, can be tested for effectiveness, and point toward a comprehensive just peace pedagogy and skills-based training. Just Peace virtue ethics teaches how to change our hearts. It asks what type of people we are becoming through the virtues we cultivate and shows us how to become people of peace. These three aspects form a head-body-heart approach. Just Peace is not merely the absence of violence but the presence of social, economic, and political conditions that sustain peace and human flourishing and prevent conflicts from turning violent or returning to violence. Just Peace can move Christians beyond war.