The Theology of Peace and the Ethics of War:
Catholic Social Teaching and the Just War Tradition
Drew Christiansen, S. J.
July 12, 2002
When
I was first asked to make a presentation on Catholic Social Teaching and the
Just War, I thought a twenty minute framework was very tight, but do-able. When I was later told I had only ten
minutes, I said to myself, “Impossible.” But, as I have sometimes said when I
have been placed in similar situations, thank God for the Catholic practice of
the ten-minute homily.
I
have six points to make–briefly:
1.
In the whole corpus of
Catholic Social Teaching today, the Just War has a decreasing and
subordinate role. It is part of a
larger theology of peace.
2.
This theology of
peace consists of four elements: (1)
a theology and practice of human rights, (2) an ethics of development, (3) an
ethos of solidarity, and (4) an approach to world order.
3.
In official Catholic
teaching, the conception and application of just-war canons have been increasingly
stringent or restrictive.
4.
Both the subordination
of the just war to the theology of peace and the stringency of application to
current policy is illustrated by official Catholic responses to September 11.
5.
The role of the Just War
in Catholic teaching has also been affected by a growing appreciation for
the possibilities of nonviolence in world affairs.
6.
The evolution of
Catholic teaching on war and peace offers opportunities for
Catholic-Mennonite collaboration, which I will address in my closing remarks.
(1)
The Theology of Peace and the Ethics of War.
My first thesis is that the
Just War Tradition plays a limited, though significant role, in the broader
Catholic theology of peace. The Second Vatican Council called for Catholics to
look at war “with a whole new attitude.”
While the Council’s proposal initiated a great deal of discussion among
peace activists, in the Cold War setting the Church’s public posture often
depended more on the Council’s proviso for national self-defense than for
exploration of what it might mean to have “a whole new attitude” toward
war.
A number of trends, however, did contribute to a
stricter understanding of Just War and the evolution of a theology of
peace. Beginning with World War II,
there was a rapid rise in civilian victims of armed combat. In World War II,
civilian casualties numbered about forty-five per cent of the total. By
Vietnam, the percentage had risen to sixty-five per cent of the total. In
Panama, a so-called “limited conflict” where the U.S. government never revealed
its statistics, informal estimates ran between ninety and ninety-nine per cent
of the total casualties were civilians.
The rise of civilian casualties in conventional conflicts together with
the prospect of mutually assured destruction in a nuclear exchange raised the
stakes over the principle of non-combatant immunity as a rule of war very high.
Secondly, ecumenism and ecumenical collaboration in
anti-war movements led to an increased appreciation for the links between the
Just War Tradition and non-violence.
This linkage found its singular expression in the assertion of the 1983
U.S. bishops’ peace pastoral, The Challenge of Peace, that the Just War
and non-violence shared a common presumption against the use of force. (I’ll
have more to say about non-violence toward the end of my remarks.)
Thirdly, over the same forty year period, beginning
with Pope John XXIII’s encyclical letter Pacem in terris (Peace
on Earth), official Catholic social teaching was developing a positive doctrine
of peace which became the basis for Catholic involvement in international
affairs. It focused less on the resolution of conflict than on the construction
of just societies and a just international order, which are the essentials of a
peaceful world. It was summarized in Pope Paul VI’s much quoted sentiment, “If
you want peace, work for justice.” While the Cold War made it difficult to
address this agenda, there was progress; and the end of the Cold War helped
clarify how much the broad agenda of Catholic Social Teaching is a peace
agenda. Pope John Paul II summarized
this new understanding in his 1991 encyclical Centesimus annus when
he wrote, “Just as there is a collective responsibility for avoiding war, so
too there is a collective responsibility for promoting development.”
(2) The Theology of Peace. Development
is one of four components of the Catholic vision of peace. The others are human
rights, solidarity and world order. For now let me say just a word about human
rights and the peace agenda.
In addition to the Second Vatican Council, one of the
greatest legacies of Pope John XXIII is the Church’s labor on behalf of human
rights inspired by his encyclical Pacem in terris. That letter regarded the promotion,
safeguarding and defense of human rights as the end of all politics and the
substance of a peaceful world.
Arguably, the greatest practical contribution of Catholicism to public
life in the last half-century is the work of justice and peace commissions,
human rights offices and bishops’ conferences in defending the rights of people
in their own countries.
At the International Catholic-Mennonite Dialogue at
Thomashof, Germany, two years ago Mario Higueros, a Mennonite pastor from
Guatemala, presented one of three papers on the topic “What Is a Peace Church?”
His rather astonishing thesis was that in Guatemala the Catholic Church, and
particularly the Catholic Bishops’ Conference, was a peace church because of
its sustained defense of the human rights of the indigenous peoples and the
poor generally. Another indication of the effectiveness of the Church’s
teaching on human rights is the Nobel Peace Prize winners who received their
inspiration from Catholic Social Teaching, including Lech Walesa, Kim Dae Jung,
and Bishop Felipe Ximenes Belo of East Timor.
While among theoreticians and some activists, human rights work is often
seen as in tension with conflict resolution, Mario Higueros, like the Nobelists,
gives witness from the ground that human rights work is a form of peacemaking.
(3) Stringent Application of the Just War Norms. One of the challenges John Howard Yoder offered to
practitioners of the Just War Tradition was questioning “the conceptual adequacy”
of just-war norms to address the conditions of contemporary warfare. In
particular, he charged there was a kind of sliding scale by which Just War
would open itself up to justify whatever the current means of war required. Now, while some just-war thinkers may
exercise the criteria permissively, the consistent direction of official
Catholic just-war thinking has been to narrow the range of the permissible use
of force. Let me give some examples.
Addressing the threat of nuclear war, The Challenge
of Peace (1986) condemned nuclear war-fighting, rejected first use and even
limited use of nuclear weapons, and gave only strictly conditioned acceptance
to deterrence. A decade ago, following
the Gulf War, The Harvest of Justice is Sown in Peace, in light of
creeping policies of “personnel protection” offered a refined definition
of the standard of civilian immunity requiring that “military personnel must
take due care to avoid and minimize indirect harm to civilians.” It questioned
the Powell doctrine’s strategy of “decisive and overwhelming force”; it asked
for application of principles of accountability to air forces, and it
criticized the targeting of civilian infrastructure.
Many of these issues, whether in conventional or
nuclear warfare, are still live issues today, and they demand constant
vigilance. The task is daunting. The Harvest of Justice admitted that
“in the absence of respect for life and a culture of restraint, it will not be
easy to apply the just- war tradition, not just as a set of ideas, but as a
system of effective social constraints on the use of force.”
(4) After September 11. In the wake of
the attacks of September 11, Church officials did rely on the Just War
Tradition to assert the right and duty of states to defend their states against
terrorism. The reserve on the question
of the use of force in official Catholic responses, however, provides evidence
of the qualified state of just-war thinking in Catholicism today. Without in
the least excusing terrorism, the U.S. bishops in their “Living with Faith and
Hope after September 11,” attempted to set the use of force in a broader
context. “We still must address,” they wrote, “the conditions of poverty and
injustice which are exploited by terrorists.” They added, “Stopping terrorism
must be a priority, but foreign policy cannot be wholly subsumed under this
campaign.” As to the use of force, they wrote, “Because of its terrible
consequences, military force, even when justified and carefully executed, must
be undertaken with a deep sense of regret.”
The inclusion of the Just War in a broader theology of
peace was most evident in Pope John Paul II’s World Day of Peace Message, “No
Peace without Justice, No Justice without Forgiveness.” While the message opened with a reflection
on September 11, it primarily addressed two themes. The first was the Catholic
vision of peace built on the twin pillars of the protection of human rights and
equitable sharing in development. The second concerned the importance of
forgiveness to sustaining a just peace.
Pope John Paul has a long record of addressing issues of apology and
forgiveness, culminating in the Day of Pardon and his visit to the Wailing Wall
during the Great Jubilee of the Year 2000. The World Day of Peace Message for
2002 introduced forgiveness, not just as a need for the Church in relation to
its own history, the theme of the jubilee events, but as a requirement for the
peace of the world at large. The introduction of forgiveness as a component of
the Catholic theology of peace, I submit, points up just how far the Just War
as narrowly conceived has been transcended in this pontificate.
(5) Nonviolence.
More than any other factor,
the evolution of active non-violence in Catholic thinking accounts for the
changed status of Just War in contemporary Catholic teaching.
In World War II, pacifist Catholic conscientious
objectors went to prison without the official support of their Church. The
Second Vatican Council praised nonviolent activists and pleaded for national
laws to make room for conscientious objection, though in theory at least ‘CO’
status should have been a logical correlate of the notion of an unjust war.
After the anti-war movements of the ‘60s and early ‘70s and the nuclear debates
of the late ‘70s, the U.S. bishops allowed that there were two legitimate
Christian traditions with respect to war, nonviolence and the just war. But
according to the Challenge of Peace, nonviolence was only a personal
vocation; the state ethic was Just War.
By the 1990s, after the People Power Revolution in the
Philippines and the fall of Communism in Eastern Europe, continued reflection
on the experience of nonviolence and ongoing ecumenical dialogue led to an even
deeper assimilation of nonviolence to Catholic Social Teaching. In 1991, Pope
John Paul II in his encyclical Centesimus Annus attributed the
fall of communism to the Christian practice of nonviolence, and pleaded for the
use of nonviolence in domestic disputes and the renunciation of war in international
ones. By 1993, with the tacit approval of the Holy See, the U.S. bishops made a
dramatic move in The Harvest of Justice saying that nonviolence was a
public obligation incumbent on citizens, political leaders and government
policymakers. In a dramatic reversal, they even summarized Catholic teaching in
a novel way. They wrote:
1) In situations
of conflict, our constant commitment ought to be, as far as possible, to strive
for justice through nonviolent methods. 2) But, when sustained attempts at nonviolent
action fails to protect the innocent against fundamental injustice, then
legitimate political authorities are permitted as a last resort to employ
limited force to rescue the innocent and establish justice.
One bishop of the drafting committee, who probably
would prefer not to be named, said, “This is development of doctrine, and I
like it.” Catholic teaching on conflict today remains a hybrid consisting of
both nonviolent and just-war elements. But in the theology of peace,
nonviolence has a prominence and a priority that are quite remarkable
considering where the Church was fifty years ago.
(6) On Collaboration. Finally, a word about collaboration.
Mennonites have developed important tools for conflict
resolution and peacemaking, and are on the ground working for reconciliation in
many zones of conflict. Catholics, especially Catholic bishops, have been
called to be conciliators in many divided societies, and Mennonites are working
with Catholic Relief Service and others to improve our peacemaking skills
abroad. The Harvest of Justice, however, points us to our own American
institutions and asks that Catholics and Americans generally work to increase
the U.S. capacity for non-violent resolution of conflicts and to improve
education on a broad front on the practice of active non-violence. In
conclusion, I would propose that one way to build peace together is to
undertake a campaign to redress the lack or neglect of such institutions on the
part of our beloved country. An essential part of that effort, of course, must
also be fostering a culture of peace through the Christian communities of
virtue to which we belong. That, however, is another topic, which the
International Dialogue will take up in its five-year report, and one that I
hope we can address in our discussion.
Thank you very much.
Drew Christiansen, S. J.
Acting Director
Woodstock Theological Center
Washington, D.C.
Counselor for International
Affairs
United States Conference of Catholic Bishops