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COMMMENTARY: Recent papal statements are best understood as a passionate appeal for an end to violence, not a rejection of the long Catholic tradition on war and peace.
Recent comments of Pope Francis that “war can never be justified” made headlines around the world. That’s not exactly what he said, though; in the context of remembering the Holocaust, the Holy Father said that the “logic of hatred and violence” can never be justified.
Nevertheless, this week’s comments are part of a pattern of strong statements against war. Some have wondered whether that means that the Holy Father has set aside the Catholic tradition on just-war teaching. That is not the case, but the question does bear examination.
The world does not want the pope to be a cheerleader for war; there are too many of those already. Rome serves as a witness to peace and its possibility, perhaps never more dramatically than in the 1963 encyclical letter of St. John XXIII, Pacem in Terris (Peace on Earth), written in the months after the Cuban Missile Crisis brought the world to the brink. While most encyclicals disappear from memory, the 60th anniversary of Pacem in Terris was widely observed last year.
In recent weeks, Pope Francis has spoken about war with increasingly urgent rhetoric. The Holy Father has referred for years to a “third world war being fought in pieces.” Two years after the full-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine, and three months into the Israel-Hamas war in Gaza, escalating wars have heightened the frequency and intensity of papal condemnation of war. The last two years have occasioned several such condemnations.
Continued below.
www.ncregister.com
Recent comments of Pope Francis that “war can never be justified” made headlines around the world. That’s not exactly what he said, though; in the context of remembering the Holocaust, the Holy Father said that the “logic of hatred and violence” can never be justified.
Nevertheless, this week’s comments are part of a pattern of strong statements against war. Some have wondered whether that means that the Holy Father has set aside the Catholic tradition on just-war teaching. That is not the case, but the question does bear examination.
The world does not want the pope to be a cheerleader for war; there are too many of those already. Rome serves as a witness to peace and its possibility, perhaps never more dramatically than in the 1963 encyclical letter of St. John XXIII, Pacem in Terris (Peace on Earth), written in the months after the Cuban Missile Crisis brought the world to the brink. While most encyclicals disappear from memory, the 60th anniversary of Pacem in Terris was widely observed last year.
In recent weeks, Pope Francis has spoken about war with increasingly urgent rhetoric. The Holy Father has referred for years to a “third world war being fought in pieces.” Two years after the full-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine, and three months into the Israel-Hamas war in Gaza, escalating wars have heightened the frequency and intensity of papal condemnation of war. The last two years have occasioned several such condemnations.
Continued below.
Pope Francis Hasn’t Repudiated the Catholic Doctrine of Just War
COMMMENTARY: Recent papal statements are best understood as a passionate appeal for an end to violence, not a rejection of the long Catholic tradition on war and peace.
