While this year marks the sixtieth anniversary of Pope John XXIII’s encyclical Pacem in terris, which was issued on April 11, 1963, the past fifteen months have served as a reminder of the continuing threat and reality of bellum in terris. Indeed, Pope Francis has remarked more than once that “a third world war fought piecemeal” is underway not only in Ukraine, but also in Syria, Myanmar, and “everywhere in Africa.” As the pope has also noted, the people of Ukraine are being “martyred” by Russian aggression, and the consequences of this war are affecting other people, especially the poor and vulnerable, in places such as Africa. Finally, the risk of escalation from conventional to nuclear war—with repercussions for the whole world—has weighed heavily in statements by Pope Francis and others.
At the same time, Pope Francis has been criticized for suggesting that NATO’s expansion was partly to blame for Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, and for failing to denounce more explicitly Vladimir Putin and the Russian forces. But in his Angelus on March 6, 2022, the pope did say that what is happening is not merely a “military operation [Putin’s euphemism], but a war that sows death, destruction, and misery.” Likewise, a week later Francis referred to the “unacceptable armed aggression,” obviously with Russia in mind. Yet he added that “those who support violence profane” God’s name, since “God is only the God of peace.” Did this last judgment refer only to the forces of the aggressor or also to Ukrainian men and women who have felt compelled to take up arms in defense of their country and fellow citizens? Again, after the massacre in Bucha, Pope Francis deplored the “ever-more horrendous acts of cruelty done against civilians, unarmed women and children, whose blood cries out to heaven and implores, ‘End this war. Silence the weapons. Stop sowing death and destruction.’” While clearly condemning Russia’s indiscriminate violence against Ukrainian civilians, the pope’s plea “to silence the weapons” sounded to some as if it could be directed at both countries. A year later, at his Sunday Angelus on March 19, 2023, Francis prayed, “Let us not forget to pray for the battered Ukrainian people, who continue to suffer due to war crimes,” but he went on to pray for “the mothers of the Ukrainian and Russian soldiers who have fallen during the war”—thereby, as one report put it, “continuing the path begun by Vatican diplomacy since the conflict began in February 2022, trying to stay equidistant between Russia and Ukraine.”
Massimo Faggioli has argued in these pages that “Russia’s war in Ukraine, where there is clearly an aggressor and an attacked,” tests the Vatican’s position of permanent neutrality in international relations, a policy that risks “drawing moral equivalence between Russia and Ukraine.” I would add that this war also tests the recent narrowing of the Catholic ethic of war and peace to nonviolence. On several occasions—including in a recent call for people to pray during the month of April for a culture of nonviolence and peace—Pope Francis has claimed that “any war, any armed confrontation, always ends in defeat for all.” Accordingly, he implores us to reject violence: “Let us make nonviolence a guide for our actions, both in daily life and in international relations.”
This emphasis on nonviolence appeared in Francis’s 2017 World Day of Peace message, “Nonviolence: A Style of Politics for Peace,” which he wrote at the request of the Catholic Nonviolence Initiative, a project of Pax Christi International. In April of the prior year, Pax Christi International and the Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace sponsored a Nonviolence and Just Peace Conference that issued an “Appeal to the Catholic Church to Re-Commit to the Centrality of Gospel Nonviolence.” While urging the Church to promote education and training in active nonviolence, the Appeal asserted “that there is no ‘just war’” and that “often the ‘just war theory’ has been used to endorse rather than prevent or limit war.” Although “often” is not the same as “always,” the Appeal went on to recommend that the Church should “no longer use or teach ‘just war theory.’” Pope Francis has appeared sympathetic to this recommendation, writing in his 2020 encyclical Fratelli tutti that “it is very difficult nowadays to invoke the rational criteria elaborated in earlier centuries to speak of the possibility of a ‘just war.’ Never again war!”
David DeCosse observes that an increasing “Catholic skepticism about the moral justification of war at all” has developed in recent years. According to Lisa Sowle Cahill, proponents of this move toward “a pacifist direction,” though still a minority, have “considerable” sway and see “all military action as a moral failure.” This view is reflected in the prayers and remarks of Pope Francis, as well as in op-ed pieces by some Catholic theologians—most notably Eli McCarthy, one of the more influential promoters of nonviolence, just peace, and the rejection of just-war theory.
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