by Johnny Zokovitch
It has been more than 10 years since a ground-breaking conference brought participants from around the world – including cardinals and bishops, leaders of religious orders, theologians and peace practitioners – to Rome to explore the call of nonviolence and just peace in the framework of Catholic thought and practice. Co-sponsored by what was then the Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace (now the Dicastery for Integral Human Development) and Pax Christi International, participants in the conference ended their time together by issuing a statement, An Appeal to the Catholic Church to Recommit to the Centrality of Gospel Nonviolence, which called on the Catholic Church at every level to rededicate itself to Gospel nonviolence.
The conference and the statement issued were prescient in anticipating how nonviolence and just peace were poised to move from the margins of the Catholic discussion on war and peace to its center. The progression of this discussion is especially marked by Pope Leo XIV’s assertion in his recent encyclical, Magnifica Humanitas (On safeguarding the human person in the time of artificial intelligence) that the just war theory, the dominant Catholic teaching on war and peace for centuries, is “outdated.”
“Today, more than ever, without prejudice to the right to self-defense in the strictest sense, it is important to reaffirm that the ‘just war’ theory, which has all too often been used to justify any kind of war, is now outdated,” wrote Pope Leo in paragraph 192.
The participants in the 2016 conference, and hundreds of their colleagues in the 10 years since, have continued to explore both the promise and challenge of nonviolence and its applicability to the problems that the just war theory was originally proposed to solve.
Over the intervening years, a primary focus of the discussion is how the original intent of just war theory – to avoid violent conflict – has been twisted in such a way to justify it instead. Key components of the tradition – from war being a last resort to the resolution of conflict to an insistence on the proportionality of means and ends to the agreement on a just cause – have become the rationale for waging war instead of constraining it.
Anticipating the pope by a decade, one of the participants in the 2016 conference called to mind the failures of the just war theory to speak to the realities of the world today.
“I came a long distance for this conference, with a very clear mind that violence is outlived,” said Archbishop John Baptist Odama of Gulu, Uganda. “It is out of date for our world of today.
“We have to sound this with a strong voice. Any war is a destruction. There is no justice in destruction. … It is outdated.”
Since that original conference, the effort that it launched, the Catholic Nonviolence Initiative, has continued to center nonviolence and just peace in the Church’s ongoing conversation. Global roundtables, additional conferences, and inclusion in the Synod on Synodality have examined questions and concerns related to how just war theory functions to undermine nonviolent solutions, how to dismantle an entire structure built in support of war, and how to spur greater investment in nonviolent strategies to interrupt the march toward war.
Next month, the newly minted Catholic Institute for Nonviolence will hold a training in Rome for people who are serving on the front lines in situations of war and violence in places like South Sudan, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Guatemala, and Palestine, as well as in cities racked by gang violence, poverty, deportation, and racism. Together they’ll explore the power and practice of courageous active nonviolence as lived and taught in the Gospel tradition and applied to today’s most urgent social and personal challenges.
Following the training, the Institute will mark the 10-year anniversary of the launch of the Catholic Nonviolence Initiative with the “Unarmed and Disarming Peace” conference, part of their continuing effort to articulate an inspiring vision of an unarmed and disarming peace as consistently emphasized by Pope Leo.
Ten years ago, participants in the 2016 conference ended their time together by jointly agreeing that “the time has come for our Church to be a living witness and to invest far greater human and financial resources in promoting a spirituality and practice of active nonviolence.”
That work continues.
Johnny Zokovitch is the former executive director of Pax Christi USA. He currently serves on the board of the Pax Christi International Fund for Peace and is in pastoral leadership at St. Cronan Catholic Church in St. Louis. Read more from Johnny at https://johnnyzokovitch.substack.com/ and sign up there to receive his articles directly to your email inbox.