|
COPYRIGHT 2008 Professors World Peace Academy
Since Pope Leo XIII's landmark encyclical Rerum Novarum (1891), modern Roman Catholic social teaching has been driven largely by innovative documents promulgated by the church's highest magisterial office. In the first half of the twentieth century, papal social teaching focused primarily on the economic challenges of the modern industrial state. Since World War II, the social thought of the modern popes has expanded dramatically to address problems of military conflict, terrorism, and global peace. Contemporary media coverage of papal social ethics concentrates almost exclusively on the papacy's resistance to selected elements of secular modernity's ongoing sexual revolution: feminism, reproductive freedom, and homosexual rights. A major dimension of papal social teaching in recent decades, however, has been mounting discontent with classic just war theory and unprecedented openness toward pacifism.
This essay investigates the modern papacy's turn toward the pacifist option. Contemporary Catholic intellectuals, increasingly skeptical of the just war tradition's relevance in the modern context and its ultimate compatibility with a consistent ethic of life, have explored alternative approaches to perennial questions of international strife and world peace. From John XXIII to Benedict XVI, the modern popes have been no exception to this trend. In a dramatic episode of the New Testament Passion narrative, Jesus disarmed the apostle Peter: "Put your sword into its sheath" (John 18:11). Based on a critical examination of contemporary papal teaching, this essay explores the ways in which the encounter with the brutality of modern war and a rediscovery of Christ's pacifist imperative have reshaped the moral vision of Saint Peter's most recent successors.
PACIFISM IN EARLY CHRISTIANITY
The modern popes have viewed the issue of warfare within a theological horizon determined by centuries of reflection on the problem of violence for a church dedicated to the "Prince of Peace." Today few serious scholars question the centrality of nonviolence in the rhetoric and ministry of the historical Jesus. His commands to avoid retaliation and "love your enemies," coupled with his high commendation of the role of "peacemakers," constituted distinctive elements of his countercultural ethic and made the Sermon on the Mount the charter for Christian discipleship.
Most contemporary church historians are also convinced that pacifism was the original pattern of Christian social engagement, predating all other approaches to violence. Moral theologian John Sniegocki summarizes the scholarly consensus this way:
Prior to the time of Constantine in the fourth century, we have no record of any church leader explicitly approving of Christians joining the military, while there exist numerous accounts of church leaders opposing military service. The reasons for this opposition were multiple, including concerns about idolatrous worship of the emperor and the sexual immorality that often characterized military life. The primary reason for opposition to military service, however, seems to have been the conviction that the act of killing (in war or any other context) constituted a direct and fundamental violation of the teachings of Jesus. (1)
Documentary evidence for the renunciation of violence in pre-Constantinian Christian practice can be found in the writings of early apologists and theologians such as Hippolytus, Origen, and Lactantius. North African church father Tertullian left a classic description of Christian pacifism in his early third-century text De Idololatria:
One life cannot be owed to two masters, God and Caesar. Of course--if you like to make a jest of the subject--Moses carried a rod and Aaron wore a buckle, John had a leather belt, Joshua led an army and Peter made war. Yes, but tell me how he will make war, indeed how he will serve in peacetime, without a sword--which the Lord took away? Even if soldiers came to John and were given instructions to keep, even if the centurion believed, the Lord afterwards unbelted every soldier when he disarmed Peter. (2)
JUST WAR THEORY
After the early phase of Christian history, the demands of the Sermon on the Mount were reduced to "counsels of perfection" for a spiritual elite and ideal norms for individual, not social, behavior. Since Constantine, when Caesar rearmed Peter and in a sense co-opted Christ, the crusade mentality and the just war theory have informed mainstream Christian approaches to peace and war. Pacifism became a minor current in Christian spiritual life--channeled exclusively for many centuries by the Catholic monastic tradition and after the Reformation by a variety of sectarian movements within Protestantism such as the Anabaptists, Quakers, Shakers, and Jehovah's Witnesses.
Today few Christians with integrity would uncritically endorse the crusade or holy war strategy. The just war theory, however, has long attracted Christians who believe that pacifism inadequately accounts for human evil. It continues to have many adherents among the world's two billion Christians. Based on the thought of Ambrose, Augustine, Gratian, and Thomas Aquinas, who also drew upon the classical natural law tradition, just war theory established criteria within Christian ethical reflection for the moral evaluation of violence. From the fourth century to the twentieth, it functioned within the Catholic tradition as the primary mode of assessing the moral acceptability of military force. To be morally justifiable, the doctrine stipulated, war must be defensive, must...
Read the full article for free courtesy of your local library.
|
Bookmark this article
Print this article
Link to this article
Email this article
Digg It!
Add to del.icio.us
RSS
