Catholic Peace Traditions
Encyclopedia
The following article will trace the ideas and practice of peace
in the Catholic Church from its biblical and classical origins into the 21st century. This Catholic tradition, because of its long history and breadth of geographical and cultural diversity, encompasses many strains and influences of both religious and secular peacemaking
and many aspects of the traditions of Christian pacifism
, just war
and nonviolence
.
We cannot discuss the history of peacemaking in the Catholic tradition without first defining what the word “peace” means today for us and what it has meant in the past. Peace means a great many things, depending on the context and, very often, the user. The sections below, however, are intended to provide the raw materials for deriving a modern, workable definition of the term that will unify the materials in the following sections, We will therefore discuss modern dictionary definitions, the Greek word for peace, eirene, Roman pax, and Roman ideas of virtue and dominance. We then conclude with the meanings of peace as shalom
found in the Hebrew Bible
. In the next sections we will then trace the development of Catholic traditions of peacemaking from a historical, rather than a thematic, perspective.
and St. Augustine’s “tranquility of order.”
Finally, there remain the religious meanings of peace, as in the New Catholic Encyclopedia
, where peace also has internal and external meanings but where these meanings are tied to positive virtues, such as love, and to the personal and social works of justice.
Notice how our English definitions of peace make so little mention of peace as a dynamic force for good or for change, as a nurturing and creative force or state. Peace as justice is mentioned only in a religious context. The term “pacifism,” which came into existence only in the late nineteenth century — among the elite opponents of religious peacemaking — is defined as opposition to war or nonresistance
, that is, as passivity.
The New Testament
Greek meanings for peace, contained in the word eirene, evolved over the course of Greco-Roman civilization from such agricultural meanings as prosperity, fertility, and security of home contained in Hesiod
’s Works and Days, to more internal meanings of peace formulated by the Stoics, such as Epictetus
. In his Meditations, or To Himself, the Roman Emperor Marcus Aurelius uses the Greek language to express the loftiest and most complex ideas of Hellenistic culture. Among these are peace as a state of unperturbed tranquility. Like the Roman Empire itself, the Stoic remains unassailed by external enemies, be these violent, or simply stupid, people. In the face of these assaults the true Stoic avoids any external sign of hatred or ill will that might offend the gods.
The reader may notice the similarity between such ideas and the first definitions of both external and internal peace found in Webster’s and the OED. On another level, however, the Stoics preached a highly ethical way of life that matched inner tranquility with a belief that all humans shared a common nature. They taught that humans ought to live for, and in accord with, truth and justice linked to the common good.
Roman peace could mean an absence of war, imposed political domination, inner calm (as in Cicero
’s use of the term pax) and external political tranquility, as with its use by the Stoics.
, or the Christian Old Testament, is generally viewed as a book of wars. The Hebrew word for war, milhamah, in fact, is used more than three hundred times in the Hebrew Bible; and the history of Israel has generally been viewed as one of holy war to conquer and then to retain the Holy Land.
Yet even the political history of Israel, when seen in the overall context of the Hebrew Bible, is one of a movement away from war and toward new, peaceful definitions for the state of Israel. These abandon armies and eventually come to identify the state as a union of people who do God’s will under the Covenant
. They live in expectation of a new kingdom and a new messiah. This process, and this consciousness of eventual political and spiritual liberation, is summed up in the Hebrew word for peace, shalom.
It is difficult to give any one and precise meaning to shalom or to translate it consistently into English. The word has twenty-five meanings in the Hebrew Bible, beginning with the sense of security, absence of war, calm and prosperity for an agricultural society also found in ancient meanings of pax or eirene. Like Greco-Roman ideas of peace, shalom could also mean good health, wholeness, harmony, or success for an individual or a community, an alliance between parties or nations, even success in war. These were all the meanings also implied in the greeting “shalom!”
The New Testament
is first and foremost the “gospel of peace.” In the New Testament God is described as the God of peace and love itself. Christ is the peaceful king, the way to peace, and peace itself. Jesus’ message is the summation of peace found in the Hebrew shalom. Yet here all the meanings of peace inherited from the Jewish tradition and translated into the Greek of the New Testament are deepened and expanded. Christ brings reconciliation of humanity to God and of humans to one another, healing, nourishment, and renewal to the world, liberation to the poor and oppressed. He fulfills the promise of the messianic kingdom and the peace that the prophets preached, and he brings wholeness and fulfillment, the deepest meanings of peace. Jesus' Sermon on the Mount
(Mt. 5:1-16) and his Sermon on the Plain
(Lk. 6:20-45) combine with Jesus' call to "love your enemies" (Mt. 5:38-48) encapsulate his teachings on peacemaking.
Eirene is the word that the New Testament generally uses for peace, one of the twenty words used by the Septuagint, which is the Greek version of the Hebrew Bible used in the largely Greek-speaking Jewish communities throughout the Greco-Roman world. It is chiefly through the Septuagint’s use of Greek that the Greek word eirene became infused with all the religious imagery and richness of the word shalom in the Hebrew Bible that had evolved over the history of the Jewish people. Eirene therefore contains not only the earliest meanings of shalom, such as the opposite of war, security, order, harmony, and a greeting or farewell, but it also takes on all the meanings of healing, forgiveness, reconciliation, and wholeness that Jesus taught was the new meaning of the kingdom.
Subsequently, the use of the Greek Bible as the basis for St. Jerome’s Vulgate
translation into Latin then brought all the new meanings of eirene to the Latin word pax and transformed it from a term for an imposed order of the sword, the Pax Romana, into the chief image of peace for Western Christianity.
in love and grace; and fourth, reconciliation with God that is both the gift of God and the fruit of that gift, what theologians call justification
. By reconciling humanity with God Christ brings unity, the healing of division, the end of the Old Covenant
and the creation of a new humanity, in short, “peace.”
, or Book of Revelation, do followers of Jesus inflict suffering. Instead, their very suffering helps issue in the new kingdom; and it is the heavenly, spiritual, army that actually defeats God’s enemies.
The author of the Apocalypse has also left the peacemaker a vivid image of peace: Jerusalem as the vision of peace and of peace itself as the renewal of creation. This is appropriate, for the goal of the peacemaker is the new city created in heaven, one that consigns the Romes of human power to oblivion and that transforms the earthly Jerusalem, the paradigm of human institutions, into the new kingdom. Its final descent is also a revelation, for it comes to us not through our own efforts, or even in spite of our own frustrations, but as a completely free gift of God to those who seek the kingdom, who are open to grace, and who attempt to live it in this life.
From the start the church established itself as a foe of pagan society. Christians identified themselves as a new and separate political people, a new world empire or oikumene, as Basil the Great called it (Homilies on the Psalms 48.1, 59.3; Letter 66.2). In imitation of Christ, the Christian movement sought to liberate the victim of oppression and marginalization. Yet their struggle was not to destroy the old world but to convert it.
This process of conversion worked on two levels. The first was that of intellectual persuasion carried on by the educated, Hellenized Christians who moved within the moral and intellectual tradition of the ancient world and could rebut it on its own terms. These were the Apologists, the Greek word for “vindicator” or one who explains. Among them were Ignatius of Antioch
, Justin Martyr
, Tatian
, Athenagoras
, Minucius Felix, Clement of Alexandria
, Tertullian
, Origen of Alexandria, Cyprian of Carthage, and Arnobius
. On another, ethical and broad-based level, Christians sought to live the injunction to love their enemies while resisting their evil, even if this involved persecution and death: these were the martyrs
, the Greek word for “witness.” While the Apologists have left behind a large collection of written texts, some of which we shall examine below, the testimony of the martyrs derives from eyewitness accounts or later written tradi-tions. Together they demonstrate that peacemaking is a process that involves all types of people, all forms of witness, and that draws on all the talents and sacrifices that are unique to individuals, as they are.
Another theme worth examining here is the distinction between peacemaking
and nonviolence
. While the two are generally associated — since by its very nature peacemaking must be nonviolent — nonviolence itself is only one aspect of peacemaking. In a Catholic sense peace is the pursuit and creation of justice and this tradition makes the connection between Christian nonviolence and the love and pursuit of justice that characterize the peacemaker. The Apologists also specifically responded to and emphasized Christian abhorrence to violence or a refusal to participate in military life. This narrow focus, in the context of debate over specific issues, should not mislead the modern reader into believing that the overall outlook of these writers was equally narrow or purely negative.
The word “martyr” is the Greek for “witness.” The literal meaning of the word is nothing else: the martyrs were simply witness to the fact that if one were to live as a child of God, to share in God’s reign, one had to live a life of open love as the outward manifestation of the inner conversion that God’s grace has brought about. The martyrs took the commands “love your enemies” and “overcome evil with good” at face value. They forged the character of early Christianity in the tradition of the Jewish figures Daniel and the Maccabees
, heroes who were willing to give up their lives for the sake of God’s kingdom.
The sufferings of the martyrs were therefore not an act of suicide or some masochistic form of passive weakness that found its fulfillment in torture and death at the hands of the Romans. Their nonviolence was a political and public act of commitment carried out in the public arena, designed to show the enemy the nature of God’s reign: what is worth living for is also worth dying for. In so doing they sought to win the enemy over to the truth. This passionate commitment to the truth was quite the opposite of the Cynic's removal from public life or the Stoic
’s notion that error can be overcome by a withdrawal into a state of unperturbed tranquility. Like the Stoics, however, the martyrs did share an essential religious insight, an appreciation of a central paradox in life: that one cannot fully love life without its opposite — a willingness to let go of it — which also implies an ability to let go of a precious possession, the fear of death.
The early Christians actively opposed the Roman world system; and their opposition brought suffering and death to them, not that they sought either as an end. Ultimately, however, like Gandhi, Martin Luther King, or Jean Donovan
and the women martyrs of El Salvador
, they were willing to undergo it if there were no other choice in remaining true to their beliefs. What distinguished this willingness, however, was that the martyrs did not simply meet their deaths passively but chose their own time and place to make a fight of it, to publicly confront the system before the very people they hoped to convert. Their struggle turned the Colosseum
and countless other public arenas where the Romans had celebrated the bloody survival of the fittest into something quite distasteful to the ancient world: the place where gentleness won the final round over the sword.
Many factors enter into this consideration, however. One is that under the Roman Empire from the second to the fourth century military service (militare) was generally peaceful police work: traffic and customs control, fireman duty, the apprehension of common criminals and bandits, quelling street brawls, and performing the roles of engineering, clearance, and other works of building for which the Roman army was well known. Torture of prisoners and other corporal punishments were also common police methods, however. Only occasionally during this period, when the borders were threatened, were Roman soldiers actually called on to fight in war (bellare). Our first term, militare, in fact, was used to describe most civilian government service; and many of the Christians whom we find in the military during this period were engaged in such non-violent work. Such early-Chritstian writers as Hippolytus and Tertullian
wrote on the topic. Among the beter-known soldier saints are St. Marinus, St. Marcellus
, and St. Maximilian
, and St. Martin of Tours.
Another factor worth considering is that much of our evidence for Christian soldiering is derived from pagan sources, such as the background story of the Thundering Legion, or from the reincarnation of pagan myths into Christian legend about fighting heroes: Saint George
and Saint Mercurius
are good examples. Third, our evidence for Christians who were actually in the military generally comes from accounts of their martyrdoms for refusing to fight or from their confession to being Christians while in the army.
With the triumph of Constantine
as sole Roman emperor in 313 and the beginning of a Christianized Roman Empire, the Catholic Church faced a new problem. Born out of opposition to the prevailing value structure of the ancient world and nurtured in persecution on the margins of society, the former revolutionaries had now come to the center of power; the church of the martyrs now found itself an accepted and favored religion, soon to become the official religion of the state.
This alliance of the Roman Empire
and the Church now produced changes in both. Constantine’s conversion and his administrative reorganizations of the empire brought into the structures of Christian power a large number of superficial converts. Conversion now often proceeded from above, leaving Roman administrative machinery and institutions largely untouched by Christian ideals.
On the other hand, Christian victory over imperial power resulted in a new intellectual apologetic, especially in the East, aimed not at defending a poor sect against society at large but at explaining its sudden power and new status. As the empire put on the robes of Christianity and the protection of the Christian God as a means of preserving its rule, so too the church began to put on the trappings of empire. The vestments of its clergy, its liturgical rituals, its hierarchical structure, even its church buildings, were borrowed wholesale from those of the Roman imperial administration.
Even the vocabulary of peace used by the church was affected by these changes and took on distinctly Roman accents. In the alliance of emperor and church the external order of the Pax Romana fused with Christian notions of peace to create a new pax ecclesiae. This represented both the final settlement between church and empire, ending the persecutions, and a new order of Christian hierarchy and authority that insured external harmony and internal salvation for society at large. On the highest levels in both practice and writing Christian pax became more and more bound to the ideas of ordo (order) and concordia (harmony) that had characterized Stoic and Roman thought.
Despite these changes, however, the message of peace, though translated for a new age, one also influenced by barbarian notions and practices, continued strongly. Its manifestations were several: in the elite thought of church leaders like Eusebius of Caesarea
, Lactantius
, Ambrose of Milan, and Augustine of Hippo
; and in the popular revolt from Roman society that found a haven in the monastic movement that was born just as the empire had allied itself with the church.
, proconsul of Africa, that Christian nonviolence was responsible for the sack of Rome by the Vandals
in 410. Augustine’s response is both a defense of a certain type of peace, the ordo tranquillitatis (tranquillity of order) imposed by Rome, and a stark contrast between the peace of coercion and exploitation of an earthly state and the peace of justice that lives in the City of God, that is, the imitation of Christ lived by true Christians. This and other of his works have often been interpreted as the fountainheads of the Western theory of the just war
, but their place in the history of peacemaking has been largely ignored. Many questions remain: what was Augustine’s attitude toward the Roman Empire expressed here? Did he favor its wars, even those claimed as “just wars?” Did Augustine associate “peace” with “order?” What did he mean by these terms? This has been hotly debated over the centuries, but in general we can say that his "tranquillity of order" is closer to Christian notions of peace and justice rather than an imposed law and order like the Pax Romana
.
While there is little literary evidence for popular attitudes among Christians in late imperial times, what does exist is associated with the new monastic movement. It is no coincidence that the appearance of the first monks comes within a few years of Constantine’s assumption of power and the alliance of church and empire that he forged. As Christians were brought into the new imperial aristocracy and the old pagan aristocracy converted to the victorious religion, the ways of empire began to dominate much of the thinking and behavior of the higher levels of Christian society: authoritarianism within the church, violent coercion, and the theory of divinely sanctioned wars were only some of the results.
Yet, at the same time, Christian laypeople began to desert this new alliance by the thousands, abandoning the oppression and corruption of urban society and of settled agricultural communities to flee to the purity, and freedom, of the desert, whether the arid one of Egypt or the forested ones of western Europe.
The revolt started among the lower classes of the provinces, at first in Egypt, then spread to Palestine, Syria, Mesopotamia, and finally to Italy and southern Gaul. Anthony the Hermit
(c.251-356), the founder of monasticism, and Pachomius
(c.290-346) were the prototypes. Anthony fled to the desert to create a new society in imitation of the Gospel model; he rejected violence in pursuit of justice and Roman repression in favor of an often outspoken support of the oppressed. Struggle, not flight, was the core of his monastic movement. Anthony’s reputation for holiness soon reached Constantine himself, to whose requests for advice the hermit wrote on the need for just government and society.
The physical impact of the Barbarian Invasions are no longer seen as significant: the entire population of all the invading tribes actually numbered no more than five percent of the population of the conquered provinces; and the barbarians themselves only took over the administrative machinery of the declining empire, in most cases simply replacing one elite with another and doing very little to change the material or spiritual conditions of the peoples they governed. There is a long historical tradition that has collected ample evidence to show that the Roman Empire itself was undergoing profound social, economic, and spiritual changes that were only hastened by the invasions.
The Christian response to the invasions was clear. Rather than being weakened by a wholesale barbarization, the church’s message became even stronger, making an activist missionary approach all the more compelling. While the upper levels of Christian Roman society sought various accommodations to the new barbarians, on a lower level local bishops and monastic leaders were actively forging a new society, bridging the chasm between Gospel ideals of peace and justice, the barbarian ideals of the new ruling classes, and the still largely pagan lives of the masses of country folk. These changes, however slow and uneven, are illustrated in the lives and works of missionaries who confronted the barbarian invaders and attempted to convert them to Christianity; and in a prophetic tradition of speaking out for peace and justice.
, Salvian of Marseilles, Nicetas of Remesiana
, Germanus of Auxerre
, Severinus of Noricum, St. Patrick, St. Genevieve of Paris, Columban, and St. Boniface of Crediton.
The penitentials were a series of manuals designed for priests who heard confessions that specified certain penances for certain categories of sins. Penances ranged from fasting on bread and water for weeks, seasons or years — a harsh punishment in a world where most people lived on the margins of starvation in the best of times — paying compensation to victims in money, goods or property, exile, pilgrimage, and excommunication. Readmission to Christian community was possible only after the completion of the prescribed penance.
These manuals proved to be such a concise and effective method for conceptualizing and standardizing notions of sin and repentance that they spread from Ireland to the Continent in a wide variety of collections that became enshrined in official collections of church law by the twelfth century.
The penitentials are of great value for studying early medieval notions of violence, its seriousness and its consequences in a variety of actions, circumstances, and classes of victims. For us they reveal a growing awareness of Gospel ideals in a barbarized society.
One would expect rules governing the punishments for violent crimes like murder, infanticide, patricide, and rape; yet the texts below also reveal clear-cut disapproval for killing in wartime, even under the lawful command of legitimate authority. On the subject of warfare the punishments recommended in almost every penitential — with the exception of the Roman Penitential of Halitgar
— which metes out a twenty-one week penance, are uniform: forty days of penance for participating in “open battle,” that is, in feudal war. Although it also imposed this penance, the Penitential of Pseudo-Theodore recognized the soldier’s duty to obey just orders and imposed a ten-year penance on the prince who issued the order. While light compared with punishments for murder, or even for many types of sexual crimes and sins, the appearance of this standard forty-day punishment is a clear indication that the medieval conscience still carried with it the Gospel call for nonviolence, however mitigated by circumstances.
The Carolingian period saw the emergence of two elements that were to dramatically alter Catholic concepts of peace and peacemaking for centuries to come. The first was the political emergence of the new Carolingian dynasty in the renewed Roman Empire of the West. The second was the beginning of fresh barbarian invasions from the north and east and the rise of Islam. Internal efforts to legislate the life of the Christian Republic were therefore matched by its external defense against invasions by the Vikings, Magyars, and Saracens. The Carolingian Empire
thus brought a renewed militarization of society that sought to protect Christendom from external threat, while it used the hierarchical bonds of feudal oaths and vassalage to bring the new class of mobile horse warriors, the milities, to some semblance of central authority.
At the same time European intellectual and political elites formulated new theories of the relationship between political and spiritual leadership in a unified Christian society. Their problems and conditions were in many ways similar to those of Christian thinkers under the late Roman Empire when the state was identified with Christian society and its leadership was accepted as a legitimate interpreter of the Gospels. These conditions and ideas were to shape the forms of peacemaking in this period into a new image that emphasized hierarchy, order, and compulsion as legitimate means to Christian perfection. Yet these formulations evoked equally strong responses and new interpretations of the gospel of peace that would reaffirm the life of Jesus and seek to apply it to this new world.
The Carolingian Empire was first hierarchical: all authority flowed down from heaven’s own hierarchies through the emperor, the representative of Christ acting as intermediary between the earth and the heavens. All grace, authority, and order was then diffused through him to all levels of Christian society. Peace was therefore something imposed from above, a state of order, tranquility, and unity within the empire guaranteed by force. Like the Germanic king's peace
, Carolingian peace was a special protection granted to subjects as a privilege, a possession of the powerful dispersed like wealth or favors.
Second, the close identification of the Carolingian Empire with the extent of Western Christianity revived the late Roman associations of Christianitas (Christendom
) with the orbis Romanus or oikoumene (the Roman world). Only membership within this empire guaranteed salvation; all those beyond the frontiers of Christendom, or those within who did not recognize the supremacy of the Christian emperor, were enemies of the Christian faith, the pax of the emperor, and, therefore, of the church. Thus on the most official levels Christian peace necessitated its defense against the attacks of external enemies and their conquest and forced conversion.
Popes and Frankish clergy cooperated to refine a theory of such divine kingship and holy war based on Old Testament models. The brutal subjugation of the east Saxons
(772-804), their forced conversion, and Charlemagne
’s policy of genocide against those who refused to convert or who returned to paganism is an example of the outcome. In official Carolingian thought the peacemaker therefore became the person charged with imposing peace from above. “May there be peace in the realm,” swore the emperor on his coronation day. Charlemagne (king 768-814) himself took the title Imperator Pacificus, who brought glory and prosperity, peace, and life to the realm. The imperial lawman was called the paciarius, the peace man; and the pax of a village or a place became the area of jurisdiction of the paciarius.
Third, Carolingian theory established two, separate, ecclesiastical and secular spheres of authority within Christian society, one to lead the body and one the spirit. From the eighth century on Christian peace would therefore entail two things: one the external protection of social order by force and imperial legislation, the other a distinct internal peace of the heart, based on Gospel ethics but restricted to monks and clerics. The Carolingians insured that each sphere kept to its own business. Monastic life was supported, encouraged, and carefully directed; while late Roman prohibitions against clerical participation in the army were repeated again and again. However, this tradition of religious peacemaking preserved the message of the Gospels with a clear understanding of the meaning of nonviolence that was to reveal itself throughout the Carolingian age in a variety of active forms. Among the thinkers and writers on issues of peace and peacemaking were Alcuin of York, Smaragdus of Saint-Mihiel
, Druthmar of Corbie, Paschasius Radbertus, Hincmar of Rheims, and Rather of Liège. In keeping with their time, these offered various interpretations of peace as an inner tranquillity, legal guidelines to war and the curbing of military violence, or the image of peace as an ideal Christian state.
(858-67) exemplifies peacemaking at the highest levels of Christian society. Famous for his aid to the poor and the pursuit of social justice, Nicholas also vigorously pursued missionary expansion on the borders of Christendom. Yet against the backdrop of Carolingian conquest Nicholas penned what is both a “classic summary of Christian faith and discipline” in dealing with the outside world and a harsh condemnation of war. In his Reply to the Inquiry of the Bulgars, written in 866, Nicholas attempts to answer a series of questions from the newly converted Khan Boris on the proper Christian conduct of a kingdom. In his reply the pope condemns conversion by force, branding war as a diabolical fraud.
While Nicholas concedes that war may be permissible in cases of inescapable necessity, in self-defense, he warns that “in itself it is the devil’s work.” He advises that deserters (c. 22) and those who refuse to obey orders to kill (c. 23) be treated leniently and gives Boris examples of numerous martyrs who fled in the face of violence. The pope further notes that the clergy, “the soldiers of the church,” are to take no part in the affairs of the world that “involves them inevitably in the spilling of blood.” His condemnation was not merely a further re-striction on clerical violence but a reversal of the official Carolingian acceptance of war as a duty in the spread of Christendom.
In response to Boris’ question as to how Christians are to prepare for war, Nicholas answers ironically that one must employ all the Christian works of mercy that make peace, affirm life, and negate the motives for and works of war. In chapter 34 Nicholas offers some para-doxical advice: the Hebrews saved themselves by not observing the Sabbath and by defending themselves by arms. The passage is ambiguous. Is Nicholas offering advice on military preparedness or on the spirit of the Christian who must also go beyond the letter of the law? This ambiguity is carried into chapter 35, as Nicholas tells Boris to reject ritual preparations for battle: songs, sexual jokes, incantations should be abandoned in favor of actions that bring justice. Nicholas then turns the argument and makes these points explicit in his following chapters.
Perhaps the most important, though least known, nonviolent campaign during the early Carolingian period is the ninth-century martyr movement of Cordoba, Spain
. At the outset of the movement most of the Iberian peninsula had been Muslim for about a century. In the mid-ninth century, however, a group of Christian intellectuals in Cordoba, both cleric and lay, initiated a movement of cultural and religious revival.
By 850 the Christian revival within the city spurred a Muslim pogrom that initially met little Christian resistance. In April 850, however, a group of Muslim citizens arrested a Christian cleric named Perfectus
, accused him of openly attacking Mohammed, and executed him. The Muslim persecution unleashed an “unprecedented nonviolent fury.” Christians began to openly proclaim their Christianity and to denounce Islam. Despite continued arrests, the nonviolent protests continued to the end of 851 and throughout 852 as married couples, monks, Moslem converts, and repentant apostates — men and women — openly defied the Islamic authorities.
In late 852 Emir Abd al-Rahman died. His successor, Emir Mohammed I (852-56), faced by an uncontrollable nonviolent revolt in Cordoba and by a very violent rebellion in Toledo
, persuaded church leaders to call a council at Cordoba to seek an end to the confrontation. In December 852 a council honored those fallen but called on Christians to refrain from seeking martyrdom. The Christian community, however, heeded other leadership. During the lull in activity two leaders of the Christian community rallied their followers. Eulogius of Cordova had composed his Memoriale sanctorum (Memorial of the Saints) and Alvarus the first part of the Indiculus luminosus (The Remarkable List), both explanations of the martyrs’ activities not as acts of suicide but as positive assertions of Christianity and witnesses to the truth.
In June 853 five more Christians came forward to proclaim their faith. After backing down from a threat to massacre all Christian men and to sell Christian women to prostitution, Mohammed began a purge of Christians from the government, imposed severe taxes, destroyed church buildings, and pressed for forced conversions to Islam. For nearly two years no new martyrs appeared. In 854, however, Alvarus published the second part of his Indiculus, equating Mohammed with the Antichrist of the Apocalypse. By 855 Christians were again appearing before the magistrates, pressing them to convert to Christianity, and meeting their deaths. The martyrdoms continued throughout the 850s. Finally in 859 Eulogius himself was executed. With him ended the history of the martyrdoms. In 884 Eulogius’ and his protegées’ remains were brought to Oviedo
in Christian northern Spain along with a manuscript of his writings, from which his words and the events in Spain reached a wide audience.
Recent historical interpretation of the martyr movement reflect questions on its nature. Thus Kenneth Baxter Wolf sees its cause in a “spiritual anxiety” spurred on by one Christian’s losing his comfortable government job. While Clayton J. Drees sees their motives in a “pathological death-wish, the product of unexpressed hatred toward society that had turned inward against themselves” and other innate “psychological imbalances.”
In any case, the testimony is clear and unambiguous and is agreed to even by those who criticize the martyrs: Flora and Maria
’s deaths so embarrassed the Muslim authorities that they soon released Eulogius and his companions from prison.
, Lent
, and Rogation days
. At certain times and places, like the Peace, it also extended its protection to persons and property.
, the episcopate took steps to protect their congregations and their holdings against the encroachments of local nobles. The clergy moved into the power vacuum in order to protect their own position, but they also sought to restore peace and justice. This restauracio pacis broke with Carolingian ideas by crossing the line between sacred and secular forms of peace. The bishops also chose spiritual and nonviolent methods to bring about peace, and in this they were actively supported from the start by the laity, the rustici and pauperes (peasants and poor people), who were the traditional victims of feudal exploitation and violence.
The Peace movement was born at Charroux
in eastern Aquitaine c.989 and spread rapidly under both ecclesiastical and secular leadership. By 1041 the Peace had spread throughout France and had reached Flanders and Italy. From c.1018 the Peace was extended to Catalonia
and reached Barcelona
, Girona
, and Urgel. Assemblies were repeated all over western Europe into the 1060s.
Right from the start the new peace movement attracted both men and women, including peasants of the lowest social orders. Under the leadership of the bishops they came together in a series of church councils that legislated for each diocese and were also the scenes of mass demonstrations dedicated to peace and justice. Moved by eloquent sermons on the need for reconciliation
, thousands joined together amid chants of “Peace! Peace! Peace!” and swore on the relics of the saints to work for reconciliation and for peace, equality, and the love of their brothers and sisters.
The Peace assemblies became occasions of high emotion and solidarity between classes, where masses were moved to penitence and conversion, to abandoning arms and to seeking peace and justice. Such ideas of absolution, forgiveness of sins, reconciliation, communion, and the admission of the penitent to communion are, in fact, inherent in the medieval idea of pax, while the influence of the penitential system within the Peace movement always remained strong. The councils legislated on the methods to be used within the diocese to protect the peasants’ labor, property, and legal rights from exploitation. Their participants broke the bonds of medieval hierarchical order by swearing pacts of peace to one another as free equals. The methods used, at least in its first or “sanctified” phase, were almost wholly nonviolent – the spiritual sanctions of excommunication and interdict against knights who refused to obey the call to peace.
These spiritual weapons were quite effective in limiting feudal violence. Wielded by the ecclesiastical hierarchy but made effective only by the nonviolent participation of the Christian people, they forbade the violent from participating in the Christian community: no Eucharist, no forgiveness of sins, no engagements or marriages, no attendance at mass, no Christian burial. Even in the far more institutional and official Truce of God, the tools used by the civil government remained largely nonviolent: financial reparations or banishment on top of excommunication.
in 1054 with a total injunction against violence by Christians against other Christians. “He who kills a Christian spills the blood of Christ,” it announced. With the second half of the eleventh century, however, the Peace was merged with the Truce of God and coopted, “institutionalized” by the lay lords in the interests of political centralization and unification. Peace militias were raised to enforce the decrees of the councils, hostages were taken to insure obedience to the oaths, and the castles and lands of resisting lords were destroyed. Local lords began to levy “peace taxes” to maintain these militias and to dub themselves “peacemakers.”
The institutionalized Peace and the Truce were used to great advantage in many areas. The movements, however, retained many of their original elements: swearing of oaths, truce days, restitution by offenders. Yet these were centered not on popular assemblies but on the prince and enforced through his agents, the paciarii, and in his peace courts. The pattern was the same throughout France, in the Empire, in the English possessions in France, and in Christian Spain.
.
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had attacked the basis of contemporary society in its call for the purification of Christian individuals and institutions. The reform produced a profound and far-reaching challenge to Christians to assume a new personal responsibility for their spiritual well-being and a new critical attitude to Christian leadership.
This attitude united with the emergence of new forms of power in the West — the rise of an urban and capitalist money economy and of the crusader ideal — to produce original forms of prophetic protest and of positive peacemaking. That the new form of peacemaking linked its criticism of the urban money economy with the violence of the feudal classes was natural, first because capitalism was seen as a strange new form of exploitation, and secondly because the power of the feudal classes had always been linked to violence and was based on the economic exploitation of the poor.
With the Peace of God, the poor assumed a position of Christian leadership that was eventually repressed by the aristocratic reaction. The discontent remaining in the wake of the Gregorian Reform, however, became a prime spur to the new call for the imitation of the primitive church among individuals and small groups. Poverty began to be seen as the equivalent of the sufferings of the early martyrs, a suffering willingly accepted in witness to the truth of the Gospels that the humble and the poor of spirit will inherit the earth. The meaning of poverty thus shifted radically from passivity to that of active imitation of the evangelical life of Christ, the Apostles, and the primitive church. It ennobled those who practiced it and changed the thinking of theologians and legislators. It also gave new meaning to the sufferings of the actual poor and of those who cared for them. The new ideal began to equate the pauperes and the laboratores with the highest ideal of the Christian life.
Voluntary poverty thus became a means to an inner, spiritual poverty, the sign of a conversion of the “inner person,” and thus of the worthiness of the new preachers of this poverty. At the same time, nonviolence, the official status of the poor, therefore gained a new dignity as a positive imitation of the Gospel life. Thus from the mid-eleventh century with spread of the Peace of God there appeared all over the West a succession of preachers, prophets, and groups dedicated to the twin ideals of poverty and peace that indicted contemporary violence and offered a new model of living. Movements included those of the Waldensians
, the Humiliati
, St. Francis of Assisi and the Franciscan Order and their Third Order.
The effect of the mendicant friars and their third orders is well illustrated by the peace movement of the mid-thirteenth century known as the Great Alleluia. Several factors contributed to its appearance: disgust with the continued war between Emperor Frederick II
and Pope Gregory IX united with apocalyptic expectations that saw Frederick as the Antichrist
and awaited the new age to dawn. Apparently spontaneously, therefore, thousands of people throughout northern Italy began to search for alternatives to the violence. Urged on by wandering preachers, including the Dominican John of Vicenza, both laypeople and mendicants began to make peace.
This peace movement recalled the days of St. Francis’ wanderings through the Italian countryside. Through sermons, processions, devotions, and other demonstrations the peace spread rapidly through northeastern Italy, into the Romagna
around Bologna
, and into Tuscany
. It culminated at Verona
on August 28, 1233 when, on the Plain of Pasquara, 400,000 people of all classes and areas of northern Italy reportedly assembled to demonstrate for the end of war, for peace, and reconciliation. Like that of the Peace of God, the assembly moved many to abandon violence and embrace their enemies. For a while even the emperor and the pope agreed to make peace. Other popular peace movements included the Flagellants, the peace pilgrimage of Venturino da Bergamo, and the Bianchi
.
, Roger Bacon
, and Ramon Lull.
Direct condemnations of the military came from several sources during the Crusade period. One of the most important is the literary tradition that rose not from the feudal class but from the lower clergy: the emerging intellectual class of the age. These Included several forms, the vision literature of the period, often represented as true accounts of visions of heaven and hell but usually heavily influenced by literary convention and artistic invention; the poetry of protest found especially in the works of the troubadours of Southern France, whose region felt the full brunt of destruction in the Albigensian Crusade; and a form of ethical writing usually in poetic form, that has come to be known as the “political poetry” of the Middle Ages. These authors included Guilhem d'Autpol
(Guillem Daspols), Guilhem de Tudela, and Étienne de Fougères.
Since the dawn of the Middle Ages the peaceful resolution of conflicts has been taken as one of the prime duties and prerogatives of the papacy. The papacy, in fact, can be regarded as the originator of many of the most basic elements of modern diplomacy and international law: the protection and safe conduct of ambassadors, the secrecy of diplomatic negotiations, the insistence that treaties and their terms, once made, are to be strictly adhered to, the condemnation of violations, provisions for the release of prisoners and hostages and their humane treatment while in detention, the protection of exiles, aliens, and racial minorities, and the condemnation of unjust wars all derive from the papal position both as the leader of Christian society and as a force for international unity among secular states. The papacy’s association of peace with justice that motivated its active arbitration in international relations also prompted its interest in another area associated with justice, that of jus or law. In the international sphere this brought the papacy to adopt the ancient Roman theories of the jus gentium, a body of custom and agreements among peoples and sovereign princes, from the tenth century linked with the revival of Roman law in Italy. Closely associated with Roman law and custom was the notion of the just war, which was Christianized by Augustine and handed on to the Middle Ages through Isidore of Seville
.
Later canon lawyers retained Gratian’s and other canon-law distinctions and outlook and continued to stress the duty of obedience in just wars. Their definitions, such as that of Ramon of Peñafort, were nothing more than elaborations of his position, specifying the just causes and the intentions of those who waged the just war. Within this fairly straightforward definition, however, there emerged much room for comment and debate: what constituted proper authority? What was just cause? And what was proper intent? In addition to the motives of the prince com-manding the war, however, canon lawyers and theologians also debated another issue with far more serious consequences for the individual Christian bound to fight in that war. What, they asked, were the consequences for the individual if the prince waging the war lacked proper authority, if he were a heretic or a schismatic? What if the war were being waged by legitimate authority but without just cause: against other Christians and for mere territorial gain? And what if the intent of those waging or com-manding the war were unjust, be it greed for booty or vengeance? What, then, were the duties of the individual Christian and how was he to determine this duty?
While theologians of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries saw much to commend the waging of just wars, they tended to follow the lead of Peter Lombard
and of the older penitential tradition and to see military service itself as sinful. They therefore placed less emphasis than Gratian
and the canonists on authority and obedience and more on the Christian pursuit of perfection guided by the Sermon on the Mount. The injunction to obey God above human law guided their thoughts on war and set the general criteria for obedience to commands or to participation in war to begin with.
Canon lawyers, theologians and ecclesiastical theorists like William of Ockham derived from this material — and from the tradition of St. Paul, Jerome
, Peter Abelard
, and Thomas Aquinas
— a new theory of the rights of individual conscience. Good examples include the work of Raymond of Peñafort
, Robert of Courson, and Roland of Cremona
.
These trends are reflected in the various forms of peacemaking. The first is that of the Italian Renaissance. Francesco Petrarch, Pico della Mirandola, and Girolamo Savonarola
present very different examples of peace. Petrarch’s is that of political order brought about by the prince and based upon Classical Stoic models and the political image of the Roman Empire. Pico takes another aspect of ancient Stoic thought: the peace of the philosopher, the inner calm and tranquillity that leads to union with divinity and the true order of the cosmos. Savonarola, on the other hand, recapitulates much of the Western medieval tradition of peacemaking with a fresh new vision of apocalyptic peace that merges with Florentine civic humanism: in the final days a last world emperor would bring peace and order, the conversion of all non-Christian peoples, and a golden age of peace and justice.
In northern Europe such humanists as John Colet
, Erasmus, and Thomas More
drew their inspiration from several sources. These included the humanism of Renaissance Italy, to be sure. Yet they also came from along tradition of Christian piety and learned humanism that was a major factor in the intellectual life of the Middle Ages. In England the “political poets” of the late Middle Ages and the long tradition of social sermons, prophetic visions, and penitentials helped set the stage for the blend of humanism, peacemaking, and social protest that we see in the London Reformers, including John Colet
, Thomas More
and Juan Luis Vives
.
On the Continent similar strains of late medieval humanism and piety are evident in the background and education of Desiderius Erasmus
and many of his circle, most especially in the influence of Thomas à Kempis
, the Brethren of the Common Life
, and the Devotio Moderna
, a combination of the simple imitation of Christ and the apostles typical of many medieval reform movements and a new awareness of the importance of education for the formation of Christian personal and social values. By the end of the fifteenth century this emphasis on education combined with the new invention of print to produce a movement for reform that, while it borrowed some inspiration from Italian humanism, really set out on its own original course in parallel to the Italians.
Latin America during the Spanish and Portuguese conquest witnessed the efforts by European peacemakers to bring justice out of exploitation, peace from wars of conquest, and a society based upon the Gospels from one that sought to use the worst of the feudal and new capitalist systems to enrich the few at the expense of the vast majority of the peoples of the Western Hemisphere. Important figures include Pedro de Córdoba
and Antonio de Montesinos on Hispaniola, Bartolomé de Las Casas
in Hispaniola, Cuba, and Central America, Juan Fernandez de Angulo in Colombia, Peter of Ghent (Pedro de Gant), Juan de Zumárraga
, Toribio de Benavente (Motolinía) and other Mexican Franciscans; José de Anchieta
and Antonio Vieira
in Brazil; the Jesuits and their Reducciones in Paraguay and Argentina.. The efforts of the missionaries resulted in many reforms at the Spanish Court including the promulgation of the New Laws
in November 1542.
and Pierre Dubois
, while the new internationist thought of Francisco de Vitoria
, Emeric Crucé
, Abbot Charles de Saint Pierre and others helped shape a new consciousness of the multipolarity of the new worlds discovered by the Europeans. The tradition of social criticism combined with high moral purposes of reform and renovation of Christian life so central to Renaissance humanists like Erasmus and Thomas More survived the growing autocracy in both church and state and the spread of intolerance brought about by the Reformations and Religious Wars. In the generations after Erasmus this humanism flourished most strongly in the French intellectual tradition that leads almost directly to the Enlightenment and Revolution. Classical learning, an emphasis upon moral virtue, civil life and proper education of the gentleman and lady, the role of the courtier and the nobility of both sword and robe, and the moral impulse of reform were the hallmarks of a movement that infused French culture for centuries. François Rabelais
, Michel de Montaigne
, and Blaise Pascal
offer variations on this tradition.
The internationalist tradition lived on through the Age of Enlightenment and the Industrial Revolution, where it merged with more secular forms of international peacemaking. The nineteenth century was the great age of the peace conference and peace society, made up most often of aristocratic men reaching out to their peers across national boundaries in full expectation that an age of enlightenment was about to dawn. This would end irrational conflict through gentlemanly agreements and carefully constructed treaties and balances of power. While national policies were guided by a grim laissez-faire economic expansion, fierce colonial exploitation and competition, and a cult of the nation unrivaled in earlier ages, a new optimism spread among the very social circles responsible for these trends. Leading proponents of the new internationalism included Victor Hugo
, Henri-Marie La Fontaine, Salvador de Madariaga y Rojo, Aristide Briand
, and Maria Montessori
.
Yet individual Catholic resistance to Nazism
and fascism
carried on the gospel tradition of peacemaking. Jacques Semelin
in France; Cardinal van Roey in Belgium; Franz Jaegerstatter, Clement August von Galen, Erich Klausener
, Theo Hespers, Bernhard Lichtenberg
, Max Josef Metzger
in Germany; Lauro De Bosis
, the National Alliance
, and the Ventotene
group in Italy offer good examples.
(Oct. 11, 1962–Dec. 8, 1965) and the Velvet Revolution
in Eastern Europe in 1989 marked a new era in the Catholic peace tradition. Pope John XXIII (1958–63) set off a revolution in Roman Catholic thought and life that, like most revolutions, harkened back to an earlier period for its models and inspiration and thus brought the church into a new age. Through his policy of aggiornamento the pope opened the church to the modern world and most of its progressive movements. He also turned the church away from a legalistic interpretation of ecclesial structure and from an intransigence to the modern world toward the fresh air of greater collegiality within the hierarchy and a broader voice for the laity who make up the church. In his encyclicals John seems to have stressed the Christian humanist tradition and its reliance on biblical and patristic sources, especially in his thought on war and peace. In so doing the pope began to replace the legal categories of just war with an ethical and historical approach that derives its chief inspiration from the gospels and that ultimately questions the very notion of war in the modern world. Vatican II, Mater et Magistra
, and Pacem in Terris
all placed Catholicism on a new footing as a peace church; while John's successors Paul VI and John Paul II furthered this agenda while maintaining traditional church teachings in many areas of individual and social morality
Among individuals and groups the most notable trends in Catholic practice have been the rise of conscientious objection in Europe, the work of individuals such as Lanzo Del Vasto, Danilo Dolci
, the Irish Peace People (Mairead Corrigan
, Betty Williams, Ciaran McKeown
), Polish Solidarity, and Eastern European Velvet Revolutions, among whom Catholic took on key leadership roles.
Oppression, poverty, and injustice cried out as never before for new solutions: yet the last three decades have not been easy ones to have foreseen: violent revolution often gave rise to even more violent repression, while first isolated individuals and then – with the help of a reform-minded church hierarchy – entire social movements and then nations began to experiment with and finally to learn the lessons of true nonviolent struggle. This culminated in successes for peacemaking that rivaled, and often exceeded anything in Europe. Church councils at Medellín
, Sucre
, Bogotá
, and Puebla
laid the groundwork for a new activism and a still-controversial liberation theology
, while the examples of Catholic clergy and laity including Helder Camara
, Oscar Romero
,and the Madres de la Plaza de Mayo helped define new forms of Catholic peacemaking.
, Archbishop Denis Hurley of Durban, the Kairos Covenant offer cogent examples of praxis.
. It remained attached to the cities and the Westernized elite
s. By the twentieth century therefore Catholicism encountered the growing hostility of Asian societies in the midst of liberation
, often in the form of Marxist revolutions against Western, capitalist, and imperialist pasts. As Marxism spread the Westernized nations of the region responded by embracing the “National Security” doctrine. Furthermore, in Asia Christian
s represent only five percent of the population and only ten percent of the worldwide Christian total.
By the 1960s, however, all the factors of the Asian Catholic scene — marginality
, the increasing poverty
of the continent, the pressing need for social change caught between Marxist revolution and national-security reaction, and the church’s tradition of criticism – combined to make necessary a new pastoral mission. The church, already on the fringes in most of Asia, began to adopt the message of Vatican II and to accept its proper place with the poor and oppressed — the truly marginal in Asian society. The Filipino “People Power” movement, the Indian theology
of Aloysius Pieris
, and Kim Chi-Ha
in South Korea were important milestones in the development of peacemaking there.
Catholics of the immigrant generations remained urban, impoverished, and subject to the worst forms of prejudice and discrimination. Peace in the Catholic tradition always retained a strongly “personalistic” strain that merged well with the immigrants’ suspicion of institutions; Catholic moral teaching retained the medieval exaltation of conscience above human law that many Protestant mainline churches had abandoned in favor of the state’s authority; Catholic social thought by the early twentieth century was beginning to be clearly critical of many aspects of capitalist industrial economy and society. The Catholic Church’s universality bound Catholics to their coreligionists all over the world; while the church’s claims to being above society, and certainly to being distinct from the mainstream of American culture, provided it both institutionally and individually with a reservoir from which later dissent could flow.
was a notable exception. Ben Salmon was a conscientious objector during the war and outspoken critic of Just War
theology. The Catholic Church denounced him and the The New York Times described him as a "spy suspect." The US military (in which he was never inducted) charged him with desertion and spreading propaganda, then sentenced him to death (this was later revised to 25 years hard labor).
In May 1933 in New York City, two American Catholics, Dorothy Day
and Peter Maurin
, founded a new Catholic peace group, the Catholic Worker Movement
, that would embody their ideals of pacifism, commitment to the poor and to fundamental change in American society. By 1941, just before Pearl Harbor, 97% of all Catholics polled opposed U.S. entry into World War II, far greater than the percentage of any Protestant denomination. In theory and until the attack on Pearl Harbor, then, opposition to war, including pacifism, had a respectable and widespread appeal among American Catholics. This opposition took several forms, including the internationalist approach of CAIP (Catholic Association for International Peace
). The Catholic hierarchy was almost universally opposed to the Burke-Wadsworth Act conscription bill of 1940. With the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, Catholic opposition to the war and the draft collapsed. Catholics, like most Americans, became fervent supporters of the war, both out of patriotic duty and from a sense of the justness of the struggle.
Out of a total of 21 million Catholics only 223 claimed IV-E CO status, conscientious objection to military service; 135 were eventually classified, a grand leap from the four Catholics out of the 3,989 COs to World War I [352], but a minuscule percentage of the total 11,887 conscientious objectors to World War II. Most Catholic objectors chose I-A-O status, noncombatant military service, generally as unarmed medics on the front lines. Unlike the exclusion of Catholics, Jews, and mainline Protestant churches from CO status in World War I, Burke-Wadsworth did provide for Catholic objection, but the prejudice and scepticism of draft boards and of many potential Catholic supporters about the pacifist tradition in their own church made applications difficult. It is not surprising then that in addition to these 135 Catholic conscientious objectors, 61 Catholics refused induction and were imprisoned, again a small proportion of the 6,068 jailed during the war for noncooperation.
, and individuals, including Dorothy Day
, Robert Ludlow, Ammon Hennacy
, and Thomas Merton
. By the late 1950s, however, these small beginnings began to bear fruit in a more widespread religious peace movement that then blossomed during the Vietnam War. The impetus of the war and the reform impuse of Vatican II created a new Catholic peace movement that included the Catholic Worker, the Catholic Peace Fellowship, Daniel Berrigan
, Philip Berrigan
, Elizabeth McAlister and the Catonsville Nine
. After the war, acitivities were carried on by such individuals as Joseph Fahey and Eileen Egan
who were instrumental in the creation of Pax Christi
and continuing Catholic peace efforts into the 20th century. Other Catholic peacemakers have included Cesar Chavez
, John Dear
, the Sanctuary movement
, and Witness for Peace
.
Peace
Peace is a state of harmony characterized by the lack of violent conflict. Commonly understood as the absence of hostility, peace also suggests the existence of healthy or newly healed interpersonal or international relationships, prosperity in matters of social or economic welfare, the...
in the Catholic Church from its biblical and classical origins into the 21st century. This Catholic tradition, because of its long history and breadth of geographical and cultural diversity, encompasses many strains and influences of both religious and secular peacemaking
Peacemaking
Peacemaking is a form of conflict resolution which focuses on establishing equal power relationships that will be robust enough to forestall future conflict, and establishing some means of agreeing on ethical decisions within a community that has previously had conflict. In order to do so there...
and many aspects of the traditions of Christian pacifism
Christian pacifism
Christian pacifism is the theological and ethical position that any form of violence is incompatible with the Christian faith. Christian pacifists state that Jesus himself was a pacifist who taught and practiced pacifism, and that his followers must do likewise.There have been various notable...
, just war
Just War
Just war theory is a doctrine of military ethics of Roman philosophical and Catholic origin, studied by moral theologians, ethicists and international policy makers, which holds that a conflict ought to meet philosophical, religious or political criteria.-Origins:The concept of justification for...
and nonviolence
Nonviolence
Nonviolence has two meanings. It can refer, first, to a general philosophy of abstention from violence because of moral or religious principle It can refer to the behaviour of people using nonviolent action Nonviolence has two (closely related) meanings. (1) It can refer, first, to a general...
.
We cannot discuss the history of peacemaking in the Catholic tradition without first defining what the word “peace” means today for us and what it has meant in the past. Peace means a great many things, depending on the context and, very often, the user. The sections below, however, are intended to provide the raw materials for deriving a modern, workable definition of the term that will unify the materials in the following sections, We will therefore discuss modern dictionary definitions, the Greek word for peace, eirene, Roman pax, and Roman ideas of virtue and dominance. We then conclude with the meanings of peace as shalom
Shalom
Shalom is a Hebrew word meaning peace, completeness, and welfare and can be used idiomatically to mean both hello and goodbye...
found in the Hebrew Bible
Hebrew Bible
The Hebrew Bible is a term used by biblical scholars outside of Judaism to refer to the Tanakh , a canonical collection of Jewish texts, and the common textual antecedent of the several canonical editions of the Christian Old Testament...
. In the next sections we will then trace the development of Catholic traditions of peacemaking from a historical, rather than a thematic, perspective.
Some Dictionary Definitions
The most obvious place to begin this examination of meanings is with the standard English dictionaries. While not often consciously used, these contain all the denotations and connotations of the word that we are likely to find. These vary from the external meanings of peace as “freedom from” or “absence of” war or strife, to the common meanings of tranquility or relaxation. The second group of meanings is internal and individual: freedom from emotional upset, a positive feeling of ease, lack of worry, a “peace of mind.” A third grouping of meanings is the social or political, the harmony of those working together, a sense of community and cooperation within a community or society, or a state of cooperation between states, as expressed in a “peace” treaty. Often, however, societal peace is defined as “law and order“ or a quiet imposed from the top down with no reference to the efforts of the members of a society. Peace as order has had a long life stretching back from the American West where a sheriff and his weapon were “peacemakers“ to its roots in the Western political tradition of the Pax RomanaPax Romana
Pax Romana was the long period of relative peace and minimal expansion by military force experienced by the Roman Empire in the 1st and 2nd centuries AD. Since it was established by Caesar Augustus it is sometimes called Pax Augusta...
and St. Augustine’s “tranquility of order.”
Finally, there remain the religious meanings of peace, as in the New Catholic Encyclopedia
New Catholic Encyclopedia
The New Catholic Encyclopedia is a multi-volume reference work on Roman Catholic history and belief edited by the faculty of The Catholic University of America and originally published by McGraw-Hill in 1967...
, where peace also has internal and external meanings but where these meanings are tied to positive virtues, such as love, and to the personal and social works of justice.
Notice how our English definitions of peace make so little mention of peace as a dynamic force for good or for change, as a nurturing and creative force or state. Peace as justice is mentioned only in a religious context. The term “pacifism,” which came into existence only in the late nineteenth century — among the elite opponents of religious peacemaking — is defined as opposition to war or nonresistance
Nonresistance
Nonresistance is generally defined as "the practice or principle of not resisting authority, even when it is unjustly exercised". At its core is discouragement of, even opposition to, physical resistance to an enemy...
, that is, as passivity.
Eirene: Greek Meanings of Peace
New Testament
The New Testament is the second major division of the Christian biblical canon, the first such division being the much longer Old Testament....
Greek meanings for peace, contained in the word eirene, evolved over the course of Greco-Roman civilization from such agricultural meanings as prosperity, fertility, and security of home contained in Hesiod
Hesiod
Hesiod was a Greek oral poet generally thought by scholars to have been active between 750 and 650 BC, around the same time as Homer. His is the first European poetry in which the poet regards himself as a topic, an individual with a distinctive role to play. Ancient authors credited him and...
’s Works and Days, to more internal meanings of peace formulated by the Stoics, such as Epictetus
Epictetus
Epictetus was a Greek sage and Stoic philosopher. He was born a slave at Hierapolis, Phrygia , and lived in Rome until banishment when he went to Nicopolis in northwestern Greece where he lived the rest of his life. His teachings were noted down and published by his pupil Arrian in his Discourses...
. In his Meditations, or To Himself, the Roman Emperor Marcus Aurelius uses the Greek language to express the loftiest and most complex ideas of Hellenistic culture. Among these are peace as a state of unperturbed tranquility. Like the Roman Empire itself, the Stoic remains unassailed by external enemies, be these violent, or simply stupid, people. In the face of these assaults the true Stoic avoids any external sign of hatred or ill will that might offend the gods.
The reader may notice the similarity between such ideas and the first definitions of both external and internal peace found in Webster’s and the OED. On another level, however, the Stoics preached a highly ethical way of life that matched inner tranquility with a belief that all humans shared a common nature. They taught that humans ought to live for, and in accord with, truth and justice linked to the common good.
Pax: Roman Meanings
Our English word “peace” derives from the French paix and ultimately from its root, the Latin pax. This comes from a whole family of terms with the root pak, meaning “to determine,” “to conjugate,” or “to retain.” From this stems the Latin words pacisci, “to agree,” or pactum, a form of agreement. Thus for the earliest Latins peace meant to live in a state of agreement, where discord was absent, and where reconciliation, tranquility, leisure, repose, and security flourish. On a natural level, peace meant the absence of war. Pactum could also mean the treaty or agreement that establishes this order and tranquility, usually — as Rome’s political history shows — with neighbors or enemies that Rome has subdued by force and on whom it now imposed conditions.Roman peace could mean an absence of war, imposed political domination, inner calm (as in Cicero
Cicero
Marcus Tullius Cicero , was a Roman philosopher, statesman, lawyer, political theorist, and Roman constitutionalist. He came from a wealthy municipal family of the equestrian order, and is widely considered one of Rome's greatest orators and prose stylists.He introduced the Romans to the chief...
’s use of the term pax) and external political tranquility, as with its use by the Stoics.
Shalom: Hebrew Meanings
The Hebrew BibleHebrew Bible
The Hebrew Bible is a term used by biblical scholars outside of Judaism to refer to the Tanakh , a canonical collection of Jewish texts, and the common textual antecedent of the several canonical editions of the Christian Old Testament...
, or the Christian Old Testament, is generally viewed as a book of wars. The Hebrew word for war, milhamah, in fact, is used more than three hundred times in the Hebrew Bible; and the history of Israel has generally been viewed as one of holy war to conquer and then to retain the Holy Land.
Yet even the political history of Israel, when seen in the overall context of the Hebrew Bible, is one of a movement away from war and toward new, peaceful definitions for the state of Israel. These abandon armies and eventually come to identify the state as a union of people who do God’s will under the Covenant
Covenant (biblical)
A biblical covenant is an agreement found in the Bible between God and His people in which God makes specific promises and demands. It is the customary word used to translate the Hebrew word berith. It it is used in the Tanakh 286 times . All Abrahamic religions consider the Biblical covenant...
. They live in expectation of a new kingdom and a new messiah. This process, and this consciousness of eventual political and spiritual liberation, is summed up in the Hebrew word for peace, shalom.
It is difficult to give any one and precise meaning to shalom or to translate it consistently into English. The word has twenty-five meanings in the Hebrew Bible, beginning with the sense of security, absence of war, calm and prosperity for an agricultural society also found in ancient meanings of pax or eirene. Like Greco-Roman ideas of peace, shalom could also mean good health, wholeness, harmony, or success for an individual or a community, an alliance between parties or nations, even success in war. These were all the meanings also implied in the greeting “shalom!”
Peace in the New Testament
New Testament
The New Testament is the second major division of the Christian biblical canon, the first such division being the much longer Old Testament....
is first and foremost the “gospel of peace.” In the New Testament God is described as the God of peace and love itself. Christ is the peaceful king, the way to peace, and peace itself. Jesus’ message is the summation of peace found in the Hebrew shalom. Yet here all the meanings of peace inherited from the Jewish tradition and translated into the Greek of the New Testament are deepened and expanded. Christ brings reconciliation of humanity to God and of humans to one another, healing, nourishment, and renewal to the world, liberation to the poor and oppressed. He fulfills the promise of the messianic kingdom and the peace that the prophets preached, and he brings wholeness and fulfillment, the deepest meanings of peace. Jesus' Sermon on the Mount
Sermon on the Mount
The Sermon on the Mount is a collection of sayings and teachings of Jesus, which emphasizes his moral teaching found in the Gospel of Matthew...
(Mt. 5:1-16) and his Sermon on the Plain
Sermon on the Plain
In Christianity, the Sermon on the Plain refers to a set of teachings by Jesus in the Gospel of Luke, in 6:17-49.This sermon may be compared to the longer Sermon on the Mount in the Gospel of Matthew....
(Lk. 6:20-45) combine with Jesus' call to "love your enemies" (Mt. 5:38-48) encapsulate his teachings on peacemaking.
Eirene is the word that the New Testament generally uses for peace, one of the twenty words used by the Septuagint, which is the Greek version of the Hebrew Bible used in the largely Greek-speaking Jewish communities throughout the Greco-Roman world. It is chiefly through the Septuagint’s use of Greek that the Greek word eirene became infused with all the religious imagery and richness of the word shalom in the Hebrew Bible that had evolved over the history of the Jewish people. Eirene therefore contains not only the earliest meanings of shalom, such as the opposite of war, security, order, harmony, and a greeting or farewell, but it also takes on all the meanings of healing, forgiveness, reconciliation, and wholeness that Jesus taught was the new meaning of the kingdom.
Subsequently, the use of the Greek Bible as the basis for St. Jerome’s Vulgate
Vulgate
The Vulgate is a late 4th-century Latin translation of the Bible. It was largely the work of St. Jerome, who was commissioned by Pope Damasus I in 382 to make a revision of the old Latin translations...
translation into Latin then brought all the new meanings of eirene to the Latin word pax and transformed it from a term for an imposed order of the sword, the Pax Romana, into the chief image of peace for Western Christianity.
New Testament Meanings of Eirene
The various meanings of eirene in the New Testament can be divided into four groups: first, in texts used to describe the flourishing condition of the church and its salvation; second, peace among all the members of a community brought about through the conversion of individuals and linked through the Holy Spirit; third, the kingdom of God itself and the inner disposition of those who keep the CovenantCovenant (religion)
In Abrahamic religions, a covenant is a formal alliance or agreement made by God with that religious community or with humanity in general. This sort of covenant is an important concept in Judaism and Christianity, derived in the first instance from the biblical covenant tradition.An example of a...
in love and grace; and fourth, reconciliation with God that is both the gift of God and the fruit of that gift, what theologians call justification
Justification (theology)
Rising out of the Protestant Reformation, Justification is the chief article of faith describing God's act of declaring or making a sinner righteous through Christ's atoning sacrifice....
. By reconciling humanity with God Christ brings unity, the healing of division, the end of the Old Covenant
Old Covenant
The Old Covenant was the name of the agreement which effected the union of Iceland and Norway. It is also known as Gissurarsáttmáli, named after Gissur Þorvaldsson, the Icelandic chieftain who worked to promote it. The name "Old Covenant", however, is probably due to historical confusion...
and the creation of a new humanity, in short, “peace.”
Apocalyptic Peace
Since the time of the Jewish prophets, the kingdom of God and the peace that would reign in it was seen as an ultimate goal of history, the ultimate human bond. Yet both the Prophets and the New Testament clearly taught that the kingdom’s birth would not be easy, that its coming would be accompanied by great struggle and the suffering of those who seek justice. Nevertheless, this very struggle was to be one of nonviolence: nowhere in the ApocalypseApocalypse
An Apocalypse is a disclosure of something hidden from the majority of mankind in an era dominated by falsehood and misconception, i.e. the veil to be lifted. The Apocalypse of John is the Book of Revelation, the last book of the New Testament...
, or Book of Revelation, do followers of Jesus inflict suffering. Instead, their very suffering helps issue in the new kingdom; and it is the heavenly, spiritual, army that actually defeats God’s enemies.
The author of the Apocalypse has also left the peacemaker a vivid image of peace: Jerusalem as the vision of peace and of peace itself as the renewal of creation. This is appropriate, for the goal of the peacemaker is the new city created in heaven, one that consigns the Romes of human power to oblivion and that transforms the earthly Jerusalem, the paradigm of human institutions, into the new kingdom. Its final descent is also a revelation, for it comes to us not through our own efforts, or even in spite of our own frustrations, but as a completely free gift of God to those who seek the kingdom, who are open to grace, and who attempt to live it in this life.
The Early Church (c. 100–c. 300)
From the time of St. Paul Christians seem to have recognized that if they were to create a new kingdom in the world and to “overcome evil with good” in the context of Roman political power they would have to wage a struggle both to retain their own steadfastness and to replace the empire that already existed. While the early church’s understanding of peace was not based on a specifically political opposition to an unjust state, in the ancient world no clear-cut division existed between what was political and what was religious or social.From the start the church established itself as a foe of pagan society. Christians identified themselves as a new and separate political people, a new world empire or oikumene, as Basil the Great called it (Homilies on the Psalms 48.1, 59.3; Letter 66.2). In imitation of Christ, the Christian movement sought to liberate the victim of oppression and marginalization. Yet their struggle was not to destroy the old world but to convert it.
This process of conversion worked on two levels. The first was that of intellectual persuasion carried on by the educated, Hellenized Christians who moved within the moral and intellectual tradition of the ancient world and could rebut it on its own terms. These were the Apologists, the Greek word for “vindicator” or one who explains. Among them were Ignatius of Antioch
Ignatius of Antioch
Ignatius of Antioch was among the Apostolic Fathers, was the third Bishop of Antioch, and was a student of John the Apostle. En route to his martyrdom in Rome, Ignatius wrote a series of letters which have been preserved as an example of very early Christian theology...
, Justin Martyr
Justin Martyr
Justin Martyr, also known as just Saint Justin , was an early Christian apologist. Most of his works are lost, but two apologies and a dialogue survive. He is considered a saint by the Roman Catholic Church and the Eastern Orthodox Church....
, Tatian
Tatian
Tatian the Assyrian was an Assyrian early Christian writer and theologian of the 2nd century.Tatian's most influential work is the Diatessaron, a Biblical paraphrase, or "harmony", of the four gospels that became the standard text of the four gospels in the Syriac-speaking churches until the...
, Athenagoras
Athenagoras of Athens
Athenagoras was a Father of the Church, a Proto-orthodox Christian apologist who lived during the second half of the 2nd century of whom little is known for certain, besides that he was Athenian , a philosopher, and a convert to Christianity. In his writings he styles himself as "Athenagoras, the...
, Minucius Felix, Clement of Alexandria
Clement of Alexandria
Titus Flavius Clemens , known as Clement of Alexandria , was a Christian theologian and the head of the noted Catechetical School of Alexandria. Clement is best remembered as the teacher of Origen...
, Tertullian
Tertullian
Quintus Septimius Florens Tertullianus, anglicised as Tertullian , was a prolific early Christian author from Carthage in the Roman province of Africa. He is the first Christian author to produce an extensive corpus of Latin Christian literature. He also was a notable early Christian apologist and...
, Origen of Alexandria, Cyprian of Carthage, and Arnobius
Arnobius
Arnobius of Sicca was an Early Christian apologist, during the reign of Diocletian . According to Jerome's Chronicle, Arnobius, before his conversion, was a distinguished Numidian rhetorician at Sicca Veneria , a major Christian center in Proconsular Africa, and owed his conversion to a...
. On another, ethical and broad-based level, Christians sought to live the injunction to love their enemies while resisting their evil, even if this involved persecution and death: these were the martyrs
Christian martyrs
A Christian martyr is one who is killed for following Christianity, through stoning, crucifixion, burning at the stake or other forms of torture and capital punishment. The word "martyr" comes from the Greek word μάρτυς, mártys, which means "witness."...
, the Greek word for “witness.” While the Apologists have left behind a large collection of written texts, some of which we shall examine below, the testimony of the martyrs derives from eyewitness accounts or later written tradi-tions. Together they demonstrate that peacemaking is a process that involves all types of people, all forms of witness, and that draws on all the talents and sacrifices that are unique to individuals, as they are.
Another theme worth examining here is the distinction between peacemaking
Peacemaking
Peacemaking is a form of conflict resolution which focuses on establishing equal power relationships that will be robust enough to forestall future conflict, and establishing some means of agreeing on ethical decisions within a community that has previously had conflict. In order to do so there...
and nonviolence
Nonviolence
Nonviolence has two meanings. It can refer, first, to a general philosophy of abstention from violence because of moral or religious principle It can refer to the behaviour of people using nonviolent action Nonviolence has two (closely related) meanings. (1) It can refer, first, to a general...
. While the two are generally associated — since by its very nature peacemaking must be nonviolent — nonviolence itself is only one aspect of peacemaking. In a Catholic sense peace is the pursuit and creation of justice and this tradition makes the connection between Christian nonviolence and the love and pursuit of justice that characterize the peacemaker. The Apologists also specifically responded to and emphasized Christian abhorrence to violence or a refusal to participate in military life. This narrow focus, in the context of debate over specific issues, should not mislead the modern reader into believing that the overall outlook of these writers was equally narrow or purely negative.
The Martyrs
Maccabees
The Maccabees were a Jewish rebel army who took control of Judea, which had been a client state of the Seleucid Empire. They founded the Hasmonean dynasty, which ruled from 164 BCE to 63 BCE, reasserting the Jewish religion, expanding the boundaries of the Land of Israel and reducing the influence...
, heroes who were willing to give up their lives for the sake of God’s kingdom.
The sufferings of the martyrs were therefore not an act of suicide or some masochistic form of passive weakness that found its fulfillment in torture and death at the hands of the Romans. Their nonviolence was a political and public act of commitment carried out in the public arena, designed to show the enemy the nature of God’s reign: what is worth living for is also worth dying for. In so doing they sought to win the enemy over to the truth. This passionate commitment to the truth was quite the opposite of the Cynic's removal from public life or the Stoic
STOIC
STOIC was a variant of Forth.It started out at the MIT and Harvard Biomedical Engineering Centre in Boston, and was written in the mid 1970s by Jonathan Sachs...
’s notion that error can be overcome by a withdrawal into a state of unperturbed tranquility. Like the Stoics, however, the martyrs did share an essential religious insight, an appreciation of a central paradox in life: that one cannot fully love life without its opposite — a willingness to let go of it — which also implies an ability to let go of a precious possession, the fear of death.
The early Christians actively opposed the Roman world system; and their opposition brought suffering and death to them, not that they sought either as an end. Ultimately, however, like Gandhi, Martin Luther King, or Jean Donovan
Jean Donovan
Jean Donovan was an American lay missionary who was murdered with three nuns in El Salvador by a military death squad while volunteering to do charity work during the civil war there.-Life:...
and the women martyrs of El Salvador
El Salvador
El Salvador or simply Salvador is the smallest and the most densely populated country in Central America. The country's capital city and largest city is San Salvador; Santa Ana and San Miguel are also important cultural and commercial centers in the country and in all of Central America...
, they were willing to undergo it if there were no other choice in remaining true to their beliefs. What distinguished this willingness, however, was that the martyrs did not simply meet their deaths passively but chose their own time and place to make a fight of it, to publicly confront the system before the very people they hoped to convert. Their struggle turned the Colosseum
Colosseum
The Colosseum, or the Coliseum, originally the Flavian Amphitheatre , is an elliptical amphitheatre in the centre of the city of Rome, Italy, the largest ever built in the Roman Empire...
and countless other public arenas where the Romans had celebrated the bloody survival of the fittest into something quite distasteful to the ancient world: the place where gentleness won the final round over the sword.
Christians in the Roman Army
The question of Christian service in the Roman army in whatever numbers has been hotly debated over time. Evidence of Christians serving as Roman soldiers is undeniable; yet the dates, extent, and significance of such service is still open to interpretation. Catholic historians have tended to emphasize continuing Christian loyalty to the state, reading back into history the alliance between Catholicism and government that characterized European politics up to the period of Vatican II. Such historians assert that Christians were not opposed to fighting per se but only to the idolatry and sexual immorality that camp life involved.Many factors enter into this consideration, however. One is that under the Roman Empire from the second to the fourth century military service (militare) was generally peaceful police work: traffic and customs control, fireman duty, the apprehension of common criminals and bandits, quelling street brawls, and performing the roles of engineering, clearance, and other works of building for which the Roman army was well known. Torture of prisoners and other corporal punishments were also common police methods, however. Only occasionally during this period, when the borders were threatened, were Roman soldiers actually called on to fight in war (bellare). Our first term, militare, in fact, was used to describe most civilian government service; and many of the Christians whom we find in the military during this period were engaged in such non-violent work. Such early-Chritstian writers as Hippolytus and Tertullian
Tertullian
Quintus Septimius Florens Tertullianus, anglicised as Tertullian , was a prolific early Christian author from Carthage in the Roman province of Africa. He is the first Christian author to produce an extensive corpus of Latin Christian literature. He also was a notable early Christian apologist and...
wrote on the topic. Among the beter-known soldier saints are St. Marinus, St. Marcellus
Marcellus of Tangier
Saint Marcellus of Tangier or Saint Marcellus the Centurion is venerated as a Martyr Saint by the Roman Catholic Church and the Eastern Orthodox Church...
, and St. Maximilian
St. Maximilian
Saint Maximilian of Tebessa is a Christian saint whose feast day is observed on 12 March. He is a martyr of the Christian Church from the third century CE, born in AD 274. Because his father Fabius Victor was a soldier in the Roman army, Maximilian was obliged to join at the age of 21...
, and St. Martin of Tours.
Another factor worth considering is that much of our evidence for Christian soldiering is derived from pagan sources, such as the background story of the Thundering Legion, or from the reincarnation of pagan myths into Christian legend about fighting heroes: Saint George
Saint George
Saint George was, according to tradition, a Roman soldier from Syria Palaestina and a priest in the Guard of Diocletian, who is venerated as a Christian martyr. In hagiography Saint George is one of the most venerated saints in the Catholic , Anglican, Eastern Orthodox, and the Oriental Orthodox...
and Saint Mercurius
Saint Mercurius
Great-martyr Mercurius was a Christian saint and martyr. Born Philopater in the city of Eskentos in Cappadocia, Eastern Asia Minor, his original name means "lover of the Father"...
are good examples. Third, our evidence for Christians who were actually in the military generally comes from accounts of their martyrdoms for refusing to fight or from their confession to being Christians while in the army.
The Age of Constantine (c. 300–c. 500)
Constantine I
Constantine the Great , also known as Constantine I or Saint Constantine, was Roman Emperor from 306 to 337. Well known for being the first Roman emperor to convert to Christianity, Constantine and co-Emperor Licinius issued the Edict of Milan in 313, which proclaimed religious tolerance of all...
as sole Roman emperor in 313 and the beginning of a Christianized Roman Empire, the Catholic Church faced a new problem. Born out of opposition to the prevailing value structure of the ancient world and nurtured in persecution on the margins of society, the former revolutionaries had now come to the center of power; the church of the martyrs now found itself an accepted and favored religion, soon to become the official religion of the state.
This alliance of the Roman Empire
Roman Empire
The Roman Empire was the post-Republican period of the ancient Roman civilization, characterised by an autocratic form of government and large territorial holdings in Europe and around the Mediterranean....
and the Church now produced changes in both. Constantine’s conversion and his administrative reorganizations of the empire brought into the structures of Christian power a large number of superficial converts. Conversion now often proceeded from above, leaving Roman administrative machinery and institutions largely untouched by Christian ideals.
On the other hand, Christian victory over imperial power resulted in a new intellectual apologetic, especially in the East, aimed not at defending a poor sect against society at large but at explaining its sudden power and new status. As the empire put on the robes of Christianity and the protection of the Christian God as a means of preserving its rule, so too the church began to put on the trappings of empire. The vestments of its clergy, its liturgical rituals, its hierarchical structure, even its church buildings, were borrowed wholesale from those of the Roman imperial administration.
Even the vocabulary of peace used by the church was affected by these changes and took on distinctly Roman accents. In the alliance of emperor and church the external order of the Pax Romana fused with Christian notions of peace to create a new pax ecclesiae. This represented both the final settlement between church and empire, ending the persecutions, and a new order of Christian hierarchy and authority that insured external harmony and internal salvation for society at large. On the highest levels in both practice and writing Christian pax became more and more bound to the ideas of ordo (order) and concordia (harmony) that had characterized Stoic and Roman thought.
Despite these changes, however, the message of peace, though translated for a new age, one also influenced by barbarian notions and practices, continued strongly. Its manifestations were several: in the elite thought of church leaders like Eusebius of Caesarea
Eusebius of Caesarea
Eusebius of Caesarea also called Eusebius Pamphili, was a Roman historian, exegete and Christian polemicist. He became the Bishop of Caesarea in Palestine about the year 314. Together with Pamphilus, he was a scholar of the Biblical canon...
, Lactantius
Lactantius
Lucius Caecilius Firmianus Lactantius was an early Christian author who became an advisor to the first Christian Roman emperor, Constantine I, guiding his religious policy as it developed, and tutor to his son.-Biography:...
, Ambrose of Milan, and Augustine of Hippo
Augustine of Hippo
Augustine of Hippo , also known as Augustine, St. Augustine, St. Austin, St. Augoustinos, Blessed Augustine, or St. Augustine the Blessed, was Bishop of Hippo Regius . He was a Latin-speaking philosopher and theologian who lived in the Roman Africa Province...
; and in the popular revolt from Roman society that found a haven in the monastic movement that was born just as the empire had allied itself with the church.
Augustine of Hippo
The City of God, Augustine’s masterpiece, was written between 413 and 426 in response to arguments made by VolusianusVolusianus
Volusianus , also known as Volusian, was a Roman Emperor from 251 to 253.He was son to Gaius Vibius Trebonianus Gallus by his wife Afinia Gemina Baebiana. He is known to have had a sister, Vibia Galla....
, proconsul of Africa, that Christian nonviolence was responsible for the sack of Rome by the Vandals
Vandals
The Vandals were an East Germanic tribe that entered the late Roman Empire during the 5th century. The Vandals under king Genseric entered Africa in 429 and by 439 established a kingdom which included the Roman Africa province, besides the islands of Sicily, Corsica, Sardinia and the Balearics....
in 410. Augustine’s response is both a defense of a certain type of peace, the ordo tranquillitatis (tranquillity of order) imposed by Rome, and a stark contrast between the peace of coercion and exploitation of an earthly state and the peace of justice that lives in the City of God, that is, the imitation of Christ lived by true Christians. This and other of his works have often been interpreted as the fountainheads of the Western theory of the just war
Just War
Just war theory is a doctrine of military ethics of Roman philosophical and Catholic origin, studied by moral theologians, ethicists and international policy makers, which holds that a conflict ought to meet philosophical, religious or political criteria.-Origins:The concept of justification for...
, but their place in the history of peacemaking has been largely ignored. Many questions remain: what was Augustine’s attitude toward the Roman Empire expressed here? Did he favor its wars, even those claimed as “just wars?” Did Augustine associate “peace” with “order?” What did he mean by these terms? This has been hotly debated over the centuries, but in general we can say that his "tranquillity of order" is closer to Christian notions of peace and justice rather than an imposed law and order like the Pax Romana
Pax Romana
Pax Romana was the long period of relative peace and minimal expansion by military force experienced by the Roman Empire in the 1st and 2nd centuries AD. Since it was established by Caesar Augustus it is sometimes called Pax Augusta...
.
The Monastic Revolt
Yet, at the same time, Christian laypeople began to desert this new alliance by the thousands, abandoning the oppression and corruption of urban society and of settled agricultural communities to flee to the purity, and freedom, of the desert, whether the arid one of Egypt or the forested ones of western Europe.
The revolt started among the lower classes of the provinces, at first in Egypt, then spread to Palestine, Syria, Mesopotamia, and finally to Italy and southern Gaul. Anthony the Hermit
Anthony the Hermit
Anthony the Hermit , also known as Antony of Lérins, is a Christian saint. Anthony was born in Italy in the late 5th century, and raised from the age of eight by his relative St. Severinus...
(c.251-356), the founder of monasticism, and Pachomius
Pachomius
Saint Pakhom , also known as Pachome and Pakhomius , is generally recognized as the founder of Christian cenobitic monasticism. In the Coptic churches his feast day is celebrated on May 9...
(c.290-346) were the prototypes. Anthony fled to the desert to create a new society in imitation of the Gospel model; he rejected violence in pursuit of justice and Roman repression in favor of an often outspoken support of the oppressed. Struggle, not flight, was the core of his monastic movement. Anthony’s reputation for holiness soon reached Constantine himself, to whose requests for advice the hermit wrote on the need for just government and society.
The Barbarian Invasions (c. 400–c.800)
The Christian response to the invasions was clear. Rather than being weakened by a wholesale barbarization, the church’s message became even stronger, making an activist missionary approach all the more compelling. While the upper levels of Christian Roman society sought various accommodations to the new barbarians, on a lower level local bishops and monastic leaders were actively forging a new society, bridging the chasm between Gospel ideals of peace and justice, the barbarian ideals of the new ruling classes, and the still largely pagan lives of the masses of country folk. These changes, however slow and uneven, are illustrated in the lives and works of missionaries who confronted the barbarian invaders and attempted to convert them to Christianity; and in a prophetic tradition of speaking out for peace and justice.
Missionaries and Saints
The Christian peacemakers of this period were not the dominant cultural or political force of their time, but were either marginalized minorities — as in the case of the Roman Empire or — as in the case of the missionaries who evangelized the barbarians — were actually reaching out not from an oppressive and collapsing world to an anarchic one that offered the seeds of a new society. Among the more important figures of active peacemaking or of intellectual life worth further study were Martin of ToursMartin of Tours
Martin of Tours was a Bishop of Tours whose shrine became a famous stopping-point for pilgrims on the road to Santiago de Compostela. Around his name much legendary material accrued, and he has become one of the most familiar and recognizable Christian saints...
, Salvian of Marseilles, Nicetas of Remesiana
Nicetas of Remesiana
Saint Nicetas was Bishop of Remesiana, present-day Bela Palanka in the Pirot District of modern Serbia, but which was then in the Roman province of Dacia Mediterranea.-Biography:...
, Germanus of Auxerre
Germanus of Auxerre
Germanus of Auxerre was a bishop of Auxerre in Gaul. He is a saint in both the Roman Catholic and Orthodox churches, commemorated on July 31. He visited Britain in around 429 and the records of this visit provide valuable information on the state of post-Roman British society...
, Severinus of Noricum, St. Patrick, St. Genevieve of Paris, Columban, and St. Boniface of Crediton.
The Penitentials
From the sixth century on Irish abbot-bishops began developing a system of written laws for the regulation of the external and internal lives of their congregations. These “penitentials” borrowed inspiration and specific regulations from the early church councils, monastic rules, and the letters of popes and bishops. Many of the regulations at first paralleled those aimed at insuring the special status of the clergy, including its nonviolence, but were gradually extended to the lay population.The penitentials were a series of manuals designed for priests who heard confessions that specified certain penances for certain categories of sins. Penances ranged from fasting on bread and water for weeks, seasons or years — a harsh punishment in a world where most people lived on the margins of starvation in the best of times — paying compensation to victims in money, goods or property, exile, pilgrimage, and excommunication. Readmission to Christian community was possible only after the completion of the prescribed penance.
These manuals proved to be such a concise and effective method for conceptualizing and standardizing notions of sin and repentance that they spread from Ireland to the Continent in a wide variety of collections that became enshrined in official collections of church law by the twelfth century.
The penitentials are of great value for studying early medieval notions of violence, its seriousness and its consequences in a variety of actions, circumstances, and classes of victims. For us they reveal a growing awareness of Gospel ideals in a barbarized society.
One would expect rules governing the punishments for violent crimes like murder, infanticide, patricide, and rape; yet the texts below also reveal clear-cut disapproval for killing in wartime, even under the lawful command of legitimate authority. On the subject of warfare the punishments recommended in almost every penitential — with the exception of the Roman Penitential of Halitgar
Halitgar
Halitgar was a ninth-century bishop of Cambrai . He is known also as an apostle to the Danes, and the writer of a widely-known penitential.-Life:...
— which metes out a twenty-one week penance, are uniform: forty days of penance for participating in “open battle,” that is, in feudal war. Although it also imposed this penance, the Penitential of Pseudo-Theodore recognized the soldier’s duty to obey just orders and imposed a ten-year penance on the prince who issued the order. While light compared with punishments for murder, or even for many types of sexual crimes and sins, the appearance of this standard forty-day punishment is a clear indication that the medieval conscience still carried with it the Gospel call for nonviolence, however mitigated by circumstances.
Carolingian Peacemaking (800–1100)
Carolingian Empire
Carolingian Empire is a historiographical term which has been used to refer to the realm of the Franks under the Carolingian dynasty in the Early Middle Ages. This dynasty is seen as the founders of France and Germany, and its beginning date is based on the crowning of Charlemagne, or Charles the...
thus brought a renewed militarization of society that sought to protect Christendom from external threat, while it used the hierarchical bonds of feudal oaths and vassalage to bring the new class of mobile horse warriors, the milities, to some semblance of central authority.
At the same time European intellectual and political elites formulated new theories of the relationship between political and spiritual leadership in a unified Christian society. Their problems and conditions were in many ways similar to those of Christian thinkers under the late Roman Empire when the state was identified with Christian society and its leadership was accepted as a legitimate interpreter of the Gospels. These conditions and ideas were to shape the forms of peacemaking in this period into a new image that emphasized hierarchy, order, and compulsion as legitimate means to Christian perfection. Yet these formulations evoked equally strong responses and new interpretations of the gospel of peace that would reaffirm the life of Jesus and seek to apply it to this new world.
The Carolingian Empire was first hierarchical: all authority flowed down from heaven’s own hierarchies through the emperor, the representative of Christ acting as intermediary between the earth and the heavens. All grace, authority, and order was then diffused through him to all levels of Christian society. Peace was therefore something imposed from above, a state of order, tranquility, and unity within the empire guaranteed by force. Like the Germanic king's peace
King's peace
King's peace may refer to:*a term in Anglo-Saxon law*the Queen's peace in contemporary English law*Peace of Antalcidas, between Ancient Greek city-states and Persia*The King's Peace, a fantasy novel by Jo Walton...
, Carolingian peace was a special protection granted to subjects as a privilege, a possession of the powerful dispersed like wealth or favors.
Second, the close identification of the Carolingian Empire with the extent of Western Christianity revived the late Roman associations of Christianitas (Christendom
Christendom
Christendom, or the Christian world, has several meanings. In a cultural sense it refers to the worldwide community of Christians, adherents of Christianity...
) with the orbis Romanus or oikoumene (the Roman world). Only membership within this empire guaranteed salvation; all those beyond the frontiers of Christendom, or those within who did not recognize the supremacy of the Christian emperor, were enemies of the Christian faith, the pax of the emperor, and, therefore, of the church. Thus on the most official levels Christian peace necessitated its defense against the attacks of external enemies and their conquest and forced conversion.
Popes and Frankish clergy cooperated to refine a theory of such divine kingship and holy war based on Old Testament models. The brutal subjugation of the east Saxons
Saxons
The Saxons were a confederation of Germanic tribes originating on the North German plain. The Saxons earliest known area of settlement is Northern Albingia, an area approximately that of modern Holstein...
(772-804), their forced conversion, and Charlemagne
Charlemagne
Charlemagne was King of the Franks from 768 and Emperor of the Romans from 800 to his death in 814. He expanded the Frankish kingdom into an empire that incorporated much of Western and Central Europe. During his reign, he conquered Italy and was crowned by Pope Leo III on 25 December 800...
’s policy of genocide against those who refused to convert or who returned to paganism is an example of the outcome. In official Carolingian thought the peacemaker therefore became the person charged with imposing peace from above. “May there be peace in the realm,” swore the emperor on his coronation day. Charlemagne (king 768-814) himself took the title Imperator Pacificus, who brought glory and prosperity, peace, and life to the realm. The imperial lawman was called the paciarius, the peace man; and the pax of a village or a place became the area of jurisdiction of the paciarius.
Third, Carolingian theory established two, separate, ecclesiastical and secular spheres of authority within Christian society, one to lead the body and one the spirit. From the eighth century on Christian peace would therefore entail two things: one the external protection of social order by force and imperial legislation, the other a distinct internal peace of the heart, based on Gospel ethics but restricted to monks and clerics. The Carolingians insured that each sphere kept to its own business. Monastic life was supported, encouraged, and carefully directed; while late Roman prohibitions against clerical participation in the army were repeated again and again. However, this tradition of religious peacemaking preserved the message of the Gospels with a clear understanding of the meaning of nonviolence that was to reveal itself throughout the Carolingian age in a variety of active forms. Among the thinkers and writers on issues of peace and peacemaking were Alcuin of York, Smaragdus of Saint-Mihiel
Smaragdus of Saint-Mihiel
Smaragdus of Saint-Mihiel was a Benedictine monk of St Mihiel Abbey, near Verdun. He was a significant writer of homilies, and on the Rule of St Benedict.-Life:...
, Druthmar of Corbie, Paschasius Radbertus, Hincmar of Rheims, and Rather of Liège. In keeping with their time, these offered various interpretations of peace as an inner tranquillity, legal guidelines to war and the curbing of military violence, or the image of peace as an ideal Christian state.
The Papacy
Pope Nicholas IPope Nicholas I
Pope Nicholas I, , or Saint Nicholas the Great, reigned from April 24, 858 until his death. He is remembered as a consolidator of papal authority and power, exerting decisive influence upon the historical development of the papacy and its position among the Christian nations of Western Europe.He...
(858-67) exemplifies peacemaking at the highest levels of Christian society. Famous for his aid to the poor and the pursuit of social justice, Nicholas also vigorously pursued missionary expansion on the borders of Christendom. Yet against the backdrop of Carolingian conquest Nicholas penned what is both a “classic summary of Christian faith and discipline” in dealing with the outside world and a harsh condemnation of war. In his Reply to the Inquiry of the Bulgars, written in 866, Nicholas attempts to answer a series of questions from the newly converted Khan Boris on the proper Christian conduct of a kingdom. In his reply the pope condemns conversion by force, branding war as a diabolical fraud.
While Nicholas concedes that war may be permissible in cases of inescapable necessity, in self-defense, he warns that “in itself it is the devil’s work.” He advises that deserters (c. 22) and those who refuse to obey orders to kill (c. 23) be treated leniently and gives Boris examples of numerous martyrs who fled in the face of violence. The pope further notes that the clergy, “the soldiers of the church,” are to take no part in the affairs of the world that “involves them inevitably in the spilling of blood.” His condemnation was not merely a further re-striction on clerical violence but a reversal of the official Carolingian acceptance of war as a duty in the spread of Christendom.
In response to Boris’ question as to how Christians are to prepare for war, Nicholas answers ironically that one must employ all the Christian works of mercy that make peace, affirm life, and negate the motives for and works of war. In chapter 34 Nicholas offers some para-doxical advice: the Hebrews saved themselves by not observing the Sabbath and by defending themselves by arms. The passage is ambiguous. Is Nicholas offering advice on military preparedness or on the spirit of the Christian who must also go beyond the letter of the law? This ambiguity is carried into chapter 35, as Nicholas tells Boris to reject ritual preparations for battle: songs, sexual jokes, incantations should be abandoned in favor of actions that bring justice. Nicholas then turns the argument and makes these points explicit in his following chapters.
The Martyrs of Cordoba
Córdoba, Spain
-History:The first trace of human presence in the area are remains of a Neanderthal Man, dating to c. 32,000 BC. In the 8th century BC, during the ancient Tartessos period, a pre-urban settlement existed. The population gradually learned copper and silver metallurgy...
. At the outset of the movement most of the Iberian peninsula had been Muslim for about a century. In the mid-ninth century, however, a group of Christian intellectuals in Cordoba, both cleric and lay, initiated a movement of cultural and religious revival.
By 850 the Christian revival within the city spurred a Muslim pogrom that initially met little Christian resistance. In April 850, however, a group of Muslim citizens arrested a Christian cleric named Perfectus
Perfectus
Saint Perfectus was one of the Martyrs of Córdoba whose martyrdom was recorded by Saint Eulogius in the Memoriale sanctorum....
, accused him of openly attacking Mohammed, and executed him. The Muslim persecution unleashed an “unprecedented nonviolent fury.” Christians began to openly proclaim their Christianity and to denounce Islam. Despite continued arrests, the nonviolent protests continued to the end of 851 and throughout 852 as married couples, monks, Moslem converts, and repentant apostates — men and women — openly defied the Islamic authorities.
In late 852 Emir Abd al-Rahman died. His successor, Emir Mohammed I (852-56), faced by an uncontrollable nonviolent revolt in Cordoba and by a very violent rebellion in Toledo
Toledo, Spain
Toledo's Alcázar became renowned in the 19th and 20th centuries as a military academy. At the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War in 1936 its garrison was famously besieged by Republican forces.-Economy:...
, persuaded church leaders to call a council at Cordoba to seek an end to the confrontation. In December 852 a council honored those fallen but called on Christians to refrain from seeking martyrdom. The Christian community, however, heeded other leadership. During the lull in activity two leaders of the Christian community rallied their followers. Eulogius of Cordova had composed his Memoriale sanctorum (Memorial of the Saints) and Alvarus the first part of the Indiculus luminosus (The Remarkable List), both explanations of the martyrs’ activities not as acts of suicide but as positive assertions of Christianity and witnesses to the truth.
In June 853 five more Christians came forward to proclaim their faith. After backing down from a threat to massacre all Christian men and to sell Christian women to prostitution, Mohammed began a purge of Christians from the government, imposed severe taxes, destroyed church buildings, and pressed for forced conversions to Islam. For nearly two years no new martyrs appeared. In 854, however, Alvarus published the second part of his Indiculus, equating Mohammed with the Antichrist of the Apocalypse. By 855 Christians were again appearing before the magistrates, pressing them to convert to Christianity, and meeting their deaths. The martyrdoms continued throughout the 850s. Finally in 859 Eulogius himself was executed. With him ended the history of the martyrdoms. In 884 Eulogius’ and his protegées’ remains were brought to Oviedo
Oviedo
Oviedo is the capital city of the Principality of Asturias in northern Spain. It is also the name of the municipality that contains the city....
in Christian northern Spain along with a manuscript of his writings, from which his words and the events in Spain reached a wide audience.
Recent historical interpretation of the martyr movement reflect questions on its nature. Thus Kenneth Baxter Wolf sees its cause in a “spiritual anxiety” spurred on by one Christian’s losing his comfortable government job. While Clayton J. Drees sees their motives in a “pathological death-wish, the product of unexpressed hatred toward society that had turned inward against themselves” and other innate “psychological imbalances.”
In any case, the testimony is clear and unambiguous and is agreed to even by those who criticize the martyrs: Flora and Maria
Flora and Maria
Flora and Maria were the first two of nine female Christian Martyrs of Córdoba. After denouncing Islam to an Islamic judge they were imprisoned. Though threatened "with being thrown upon the streets as prostitutes", they were eventually beheaded. Their example inspired other Christians to become...
’s deaths so embarrassed the Muslim authorities that they soon released Eulogius and his companions from prison.
The Peace and Truce of God
The most important outcome of Carolingian forms of peacemaking are the movements of the Peace of God and the Truce of God. The first was the protection from military violence won by special groups in medieval society. These included the clergy and their possessions; the poor; women; peasants along with their tools, animals, mills, vineyards, and labor; and later pilgrims and merchants: in short, the vast majority of the medieval population who neither bore arms, nor were entitled to bear them. The Truce of God, while often confused and later merged with the Peace, protected certain times of the week and year from the violence of the feudal class: no private or public wars were to be waged from Wednesday evening until Monday morning, during certain saints’ days, during AdventAdvent
Advent is a season observed in many Western Christian churches, a time of expectant waiting and preparation for the celebration of the Nativity of Jesus at Christmas. It is the beginning of the Western liturgical year and commences on Advent Sunday, called Levavi...
, Lent
Lent
In the Christian tradition, Lent is the period of the liturgical year from Ash Wednesday to Easter. The traditional purpose of Lent is the preparation of the believer – through prayer, repentance, almsgiving and self-denial – for the annual commemoration during Holy Week of the Death and...
, and Rogation days
Rogation days
Rogation days are, in the calendar of the Western Church, four days traditionally set apart for solemn processions to invoke God's mercy. They are April 25, the Major Rogation, coinciding with St...
. At certain times and places, like the Peace, it also extended its protection to persons and property.
The Peace of God
The Peace of God originated in the episcopal and popular assemblies of the Frankish and Carolingian periods. It also had its roots in the ideas of peace as justice preserved and nurtured for centuries in Carolingian monasteries. As Carolingian authority began to decay, especially on the outskirts of power, as in southern GaulGaul
Gaul was a region of Western Europe during the Iron Age and Roman era, encompassing present day France, Luxembourg and Belgium, most of Switzerland, the western part of Northern Italy, as well as the parts of the Netherlands and Germany on the left bank of the Rhine. The Gauls were the speakers of...
, the episcopate took steps to protect their congregations and their holdings against the encroachments of local nobles. The clergy moved into the power vacuum in order to protect their own position, but they also sought to restore peace and justice. This restauracio pacis broke with Carolingian ideas by crossing the line between sacred and secular forms of peace. The bishops also chose spiritual and nonviolent methods to bring about peace, and in this they were actively supported from the start by the laity, the rustici and pauperes (peasants and poor people), who were the traditional victims of feudal exploitation and violence.
The Peace movement was born at Charroux
Charroux, Vienne
Charroux is a commune in the Vienne department in the Poitou-Charentes region in western France.The remains of the Benedictine Charroux Abbey, founded in the 8th century, are preserved in the town.-Demographics:-References:*...
in eastern Aquitaine c.989 and spread rapidly under both ecclesiastical and secular leadership. By 1041 the Peace had spread throughout France and had reached Flanders and Italy. From c.1018 the Peace was extended to Catalonia
Catalonia
Catalonia is an autonomous community in northeastern Spain, with the official status of a "nationality" of Spain. Catalonia comprises four provinces: Barcelona, Girona, Lleida, and Tarragona. Its capital and largest city is Barcelona. Catalonia covers an area of 32,114 km² and has an...
and reached Barcelona
Barcelona
Barcelona is the second largest city in Spain after Madrid, and the capital of Catalonia, with a population of 1,621,537 within its administrative limits on a land area of...
, Girona
Girona
Girona is a city in the northeast of Catalonia, Spain at the confluence of the rivers Ter, Onyar, Galligants and Güell, with an official population of 96,236 in January 2009. It is the capital of the province of the same name and of the comarca of the Gironès...
, and Urgel. Assemblies were repeated all over western Europe into the 1060s.
Right from the start the new peace movement attracted both men and women, including peasants of the lowest social orders. Under the leadership of the bishops they came together in a series of church councils that legislated for each diocese and were also the scenes of mass demonstrations dedicated to peace and justice. Moved by eloquent sermons on the need for reconciliation
Reconciliation (theology)
Reconciliation, a theological term, is an element of salvation that refers to the results of atonement. Reconciliation as a theological concept describes the end of the estrangement, caused by sin, between God and humanity. John Calvin describes reconciliation as the peace between humanity and...
, thousands joined together amid chants of “Peace! Peace! Peace!” and swore on the relics of the saints to work for reconciliation and for peace, equality, and the love of their brothers and sisters.
The Peace assemblies became occasions of high emotion and solidarity between classes, where masses were moved to penitence and conversion, to abandoning arms and to seeking peace and justice. Such ideas of absolution, forgiveness of sins, reconciliation, communion, and the admission of the penitent to communion are, in fact, inherent in the medieval idea of pax, while the influence of the penitential system within the Peace movement always remained strong. The councils legislated on the methods to be used within the diocese to protect the peasants’ labor, property, and legal rights from exploitation. Their participants broke the bonds of medieval hierarchical order by swearing pacts of peace to one another as free equals. The methods used, at least in its first or “sanctified” phase, were almost wholly nonviolent – the spiritual sanctions of excommunication and interdict against knights who refused to obey the call to peace.
These spiritual weapons were quite effective in limiting feudal violence. Wielded by the ecclesiastical hierarchy but made effective only by the nonviolent participation of the Christian people, they forbade the violent from participating in the Christian community: no Eucharist, no forgiveness of sins, no engagements or marriages, no attendance at mass, no Christian burial. Even in the far more institutional and official Truce of God, the tools used by the civil government remained largely nonviolent: financial reparations or banishment on top of excommunication.
The Truce of God
The Peace movement reached its peak at NarbonneNarbonne
Narbonne is a commune in southern France in the Languedoc-Roussillon region. It lies from Paris in the Aude department, of which it is a sub-prefecture. Once a prosperous port, it is now located about from the shores of the Mediterranean Sea...
in 1054 with a total injunction against violence by Christians against other Christians. “He who kills a Christian spills the blood of Christ,” it announced. With the second half of the eleventh century, however, the Peace was merged with the Truce of God and coopted, “institutionalized” by the lay lords in the interests of political centralization and unification. Peace militias were raised to enforce the decrees of the councils, hostages were taken to insure obedience to the oaths, and the castles and lands of resisting lords were destroyed. Local lords began to levy “peace taxes” to maintain these militias and to dub themselves “peacemakers.”
The institutionalized Peace and the Truce were used to great advantage in many areas. The movements, however, retained many of their original elements: swearing of oaths, truce days, restitution by offenders. Yet these were centered not on popular assemblies but on the prince and enforced through his agents, the paciarii, and in his peace courts. The pattern was the same throughout France, in the Empire, in the English possessions in France, and in Christian Spain.
The Era of the Crusades (c.1100–1400)
The Peace movement of the eleventh century spurred an aristocratic and conservative reaction that worked on three levels. On the first level, of theory, conservative intellectuals formulated a new concept of hierarchy – the three orders of society – that would once more return the world to the rigid order of Carolingian society and mute the voices of the popular Peace movement. On the second level, that of political power, the newly emerging states and principalities of the period used the mass appeal and the structural innovations of the Peace of God as a tool for their own consolidation of power. Their efforts are reflected both in the institutionalized Peace and in the Truce of God. On the third level religious thinkers and secular writers attempted to incorporate the controls of the Peace and Truce of God into the existing warrior ethic by “Christianizing” it into the Crusades and the cult of chivalryChivalry
Chivalry is a term related to the medieval institution of knighthood which has an aristocratic military origin of individual training and service to others. Chivalry was also the term used to refer to a group of mounted men-at-arms as well as to martial valour...
.
The New Poverty Movements
Based on the model of the early church, the Gregorian ReformGregorian Reform
The Gregorian Reforms were a series of reforms initiated by Pope Gregory VII and the circle he formed in the papal curia, circa 1050–80, which dealt with the moral integrity and independence of the clergy...
had attacked the basis of contemporary society in its call for the purification of Christian individuals and institutions. The reform produced a profound and far-reaching challenge to Christians to assume a new personal responsibility for their spiritual well-being and a new critical attitude to Christian leadership.
This attitude united with the emergence of new forms of power in the West — the rise of an urban and capitalist money economy and of the crusader ideal — to produce original forms of prophetic protest and of positive peacemaking. That the new form of peacemaking linked its criticism of the urban money economy with the violence of the feudal classes was natural, first because capitalism was seen as a strange new form of exploitation, and secondly because the power of the feudal classes had always been linked to violence and was based on the economic exploitation of the poor.
With the Peace of God, the poor assumed a position of Christian leadership that was eventually repressed by the aristocratic reaction. The discontent remaining in the wake of the Gregorian Reform, however, became a prime spur to the new call for the imitation of the primitive church among individuals and small groups. Poverty began to be seen as the equivalent of the sufferings of the early martyrs, a suffering willingly accepted in witness to the truth of the Gospels that the humble and the poor of spirit will inherit the earth. The meaning of poverty thus shifted radically from passivity to that of active imitation of the evangelical life of Christ, the Apostles, and the primitive church. It ennobled those who practiced it and changed the thinking of theologians and legislators. It also gave new meaning to the sufferings of the actual poor and of those who cared for them. The new ideal began to equate the pauperes and the laboratores with the highest ideal of the Christian life.
Voluntary poverty thus became a means to an inner, spiritual poverty, the sign of a conversion of the “inner person,” and thus of the worthiness of the new preachers of this poverty. At the same time, nonviolence, the official status of the poor, therefore gained a new dignity as a positive imitation of the Gospel life. Thus from the mid-eleventh century with spread of the Peace of God there appeared all over the West a succession of preachers, prophets, and groups dedicated to the twin ideals of poverty and peace that indicted contemporary violence and offered a new model of living. Movements included those of the Waldensians
Waldensians
Waldensians, Waldenses or Vaudois are names for a Christian movement of the later Middle Ages, descendants of which still exist in various regions, primarily in North-Western Italy. There is considerable uncertainty about the earlier history of the Waldenses because of a lack of extant source...
, the Humiliati
Humiliati
The Humiliati were an Italian religious order of men formed probably in the 12th century. It was suppressed by a Papal bull in 1571 though an associated order of women continued into the 20th century.-Origin:Its origin is obscure...
, St. Francis of Assisi and the Franciscan Order and their Third Order.
Popular Peace Movements
Frederick II, Holy Roman Emperor
Frederick II , was one of the most powerful Holy Roman Emperors of the Middle Ages and head of the House of Hohenstaufen. His political and cultural ambitions, based in Sicily and stretching through Italy to Germany, and even to Jerusalem, were enormous...
and Pope Gregory IX united with apocalyptic expectations that saw Frederick as the Antichrist
Antichrist
The term or title antichrist, in Christian theology, refers to a leader who fulfills Biblical prophecies concerning an adversary of Christ, while resembling him in a deceptive manner...
and awaited the new age to dawn. Apparently spontaneously, therefore, thousands of people throughout northern Italy began to search for alternatives to the violence. Urged on by wandering preachers, including the Dominican John of Vicenza, both laypeople and mendicants began to make peace.
This peace movement recalled the days of St. Francis’ wanderings through the Italian countryside. Through sermons, processions, devotions, and other demonstrations the peace spread rapidly through northeastern Italy, into the Romagna
Romagna
Romagna is an Italian historical region that approximately corresponds to the south-eastern portion of present-day Emilia-Romagna. Traditionally, it is limited by the Apennines to the south-west, the Adriatic to the east, and the rivers Reno and Sillaro to the north and west...
around Bologna
Bologna
Bologna is the capital city of Emilia-Romagna, in the Po Valley of Northern Italy. The city lies between the Po River and the Apennine Mountains, more specifically, between the Reno River and the Savena River. Bologna is a lively and cosmopolitan Italian college city, with spectacular history,...
, and into Tuscany
Tuscany
Tuscany is a region in Italy. It has an area of about 23,000 square kilometres and a population of about 3.75 million inhabitants. The regional capital is Florence ....
. It culminated at Verona
Verona
Verona ; German Bern, Dietrichsbern or Welschbern) is a city in the Veneto, northern Italy, with approx. 265,000 inhabitants and one of the seven chef-lieus of the region. It is the second largest city municipality in the region and the third of North-Eastern Italy. The metropolitan area of Verona...
on August 28, 1233 when, on the Plain of Pasquara, 400,000 people of all classes and areas of northern Italy reportedly assembled to demonstrate for the end of war, for peace, and reconciliation. Like that of the Peace of God, the assembly moved many to abandon violence and embrace their enemies. For a while even the emperor and the pope agreed to make peace. Other popular peace movements included the Flagellants, the peace pilgrimage of Venturino da Bergamo, and the Bianchi
Bianchi
Bianchi, a plural of bianco , is a frequent proper name; notable people with that surname include:*Andrea Bianchi, an Italian film director*Bianca Bianchi , stage name of Bertha Schwarz, German/Austrian opera soprano...
.
Alternatives to the Crusades
Just as the apostolic poverty movements confronted the violence of the feudal order within Europe, so too Christian missionary work attempted to counter the violence of the Crusades overseas by imitating the life of Christ and the Apostles in preaching the Gospels to all nations. Nonviolent conversion was consciously presented as a viable alternative to the violence of the crusaders. At the same time that popular movements for peace and justice attracted thousands to demonstrate their commitment to a true Christian society, Europe also produced a great variety of writers who offered alternative visions to the Crusades, either in the image of the just society reached through the Apocalypse or in direct condemnations of crusading warfare and the military. Examples include Peter the VenerablePeter the Venerable
Peter the Venerable , also known as Peter of Montboissier, abbot of the Benedictine abbey of Cluny, born to Blessed Raingarde in Auvergne, France. He has been honored as a saint but has never been formally canonized.-Life:Peter was "Dedicated to God" at birth and given to the monastery at...
, Roger Bacon
Roger Bacon
Roger Bacon, O.F.M. , also known as Doctor Mirabilis , was an English philosopher and Franciscan friar who placed considerable emphasis on the study of nature through empirical methods...
, and Ramon Lull.
Direct condemnations of the military came from several sources during the Crusade period. One of the most important is the literary tradition that rose not from the feudal class but from the lower clergy: the emerging intellectual class of the age. These Included several forms, the vision literature of the period, often represented as true accounts of visions of heaven and hell but usually heavily influenced by literary convention and artistic invention; the poetry of protest found especially in the works of the troubadours of Southern France, whose region felt the full brunt of destruction in the Albigensian Crusade; and a form of ethical writing usually in poetic form, that has come to be known as the “political poetry” of the Middle Ages. These authors included Guilhem d'Autpol
Guilhem d'Autpol
Guilhem d'Autpol or Daspol was a troubadour from Hautpoul in the Languedoc. He wrote four works that survive, three dwelling on intensely religious themes. There exists some evidence internal in his songs that he was a jongleur early on.Esperansa de totz ferms esperans is a religious alba...
(Guillem Daspols), Guilhem de Tudela, and Étienne de Fougères.
Papal Diplomacy and Arbitration
The institutional church, and especially the papacy, long sought to use its authority to promote peace and justice, and like all human institutions, has met with mixed results. From Antiquity to the end of the Crusade era, there were several areas in which the papacy consistently set standards and definitions of Catholic peacemaking. The first was primarily in the area of international diplomacy; the second was the realm of canon law and of theology, in attempts to define the limits of war and violence; and the third, among the Scholastics who investigated the boundaries of individual conscience.Since the dawn of the Middle Ages the peaceful resolution of conflicts has been taken as one of the prime duties and prerogatives of the papacy. The papacy, in fact, can be regarded as the originator of many of the most basic elements of modern diplomacy and international law: the protection and safe conduct of ambassadors, the secrecy of diplomatic negotiations, the insistence that treaties and their terms, once made, are to be strictly adhered to, the condemnation of violations, provisions for the release of prisoners and hostages and their humane treatment while in detention, the protection of exiles, aliens, and racial minorities, and the condemnation of unjust wars all derive from the papal position both as the leader of Christian society and as a force for international unity among secular states. The papacy’s association of peace with justice that motivated its active arbitration in international relations also prompted its interest in another area associated with justice, that of jus or law. In the international sphere this brought the papacy to adopt the ancient Roman theories of the jus gentium, a body of custom and agreements among peoples and sovereign princes, from the tenth century linked with the revival of Roman law in Italy. Closely associated with Roman law and custom was the notion of the just war, which was Christianized by Augustine and handed on to the Middle Ages through Isidore of Seville
Isidore of Seville
Saint Isidore of Seville served as Archbishop of Seville for more than three decades and is considered, as the historian Montalembert put it in an oft-quoted phrase, "le dernier savant du monde ancien"...
.
The Rights of Conscience
While theologians of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries saw much to commend the waging of just wars, they tended to follow the lead of Peter Lombard
Peter Lombard
Peter Lombard was a scholastic theologian and bishop and author of Four Books of Sentences, which became the standard textbook of theology, for which he is also known as Magister Sententiarum-Biography:Peter Lombard was born in Lumellogno , in...
and of the older penitential tradition and to see military service itself as sinful. They therefore placed less emphasis than Gratian
Gratian
Gratian was Roman Emperor from 375 to 383.The eldest son of Valentinian I, during his youth Gratian accompanied his father on several campaigns along the Rhine and Danube frontiers. Upon the death of Valentinian in 375, Gratian's brother Valentinian II was declared emperor by his father's soldiers...
and the canonists on authority and obedience and more on the Christian pursuit of perfection guided by the Sermon on the Mount. The injunction to obey God above human law guided their thoughts on war and set the general criteria for obedience to commands or to participation in war to begin with.
Canon lawyers, theologians and ecclesiastical theorists like William of Ockham derived from this material — and from the tradition of St. Paul, Jerome
Jerome
Saint Jerome was a Roman Christian priest, confessor, theologian and historian, and who became a Doctor of the Church. He was the son of Eusebius, of the city of Stridon, which was on the border of Dalmatia and Pannonia...
, Peter Abelard
Peter Abelard
Peter Abelard was a medieval French scholastic philosopher, theologian and preeminent logician. The story of his affair with and love for Héloïse has become legendary...
, and Thomas Aquinas
Thomas Aquinas
Thomas Aquinas, O.P. , also Thomas of Aquin or Aquino, was an Italian Dominican priest of the Catholic Church, and an immensely influential philosopher and theologian in the tradition of scholasticism, known as Doctor Angelicus, Doctor Communis, or Doctor Universalis...
— a new theory of the rights of individual conscience. Good examples include the work of Raymond of Peñafort
Raymond of Peñafort
Saint Raymond of Penyafort, O.P. is a Dominican friar who compiled the Decretals of Gregory IX, a collection of canon laws that remained part of church law until the Code of Canon Law was promulgated in 1917...
, Robert of Courson, and Roland of Cremona
Roland of Cremona
Roland of Cremona was a Dominican theologian and an early scholastic philosopher. He was the first Dominican regentat Paris, France...
.
The Renaissance and Reformation (c.1400 – c.1800)
Many strains of the Christian peace tradition survived into the Renaissance, while some flourished in new and unexpected ways. The revival of classical thought that took hold of the Italian humanists also provided them with venerable models of peace based upon Stoic and imperial Roman modes of thought. At the same time, the long evolving traditions of medieval prophesy and protest combined with the new learning and the printing press, especially in the north of Europe, to produce a form of peacemaking that suddenly emerged to challenge the new nation-state and its war policies.The Italian Humanists
Girolamo Savonarola
Girolamo Savonarola was an Italian Dominican friar, Scholastic, and an influential contributor to the politics of Florence from 1494 until his execution in 1498. He was known for his book burning, destruction of what he considered immoral art, and what he thought the Renaissance—which began in his...
present very different examples of peace. Petrarch’s is that of political order brought about by the prince and based upon Classical Stoic models and the political image of the Roman Empire. Pico takes another aspect of ancient Stoic thought: the peace of the philosopher, the inner calm and tranquillity that leads to union with divinity and the true order of the cosmos. Savonarola, on the other hand, recapitulates much of the Western medieval tradition of peacemaking with a fresh new vision of apocalyptic peace that merges with Florentine civic humanism: in the final days a last world emperor would bring peace and order, the conversion of all non-Christian peoples, and a golden age of peace and justice.
The Northern Humanists
John Colet
John Colet was an English churchman and educational pioneer.Colet was an English scholar, Renaissance humanist, theologian, and Dean of St. Paul’s Cathedral, London. Colet wanted people to see the scripture as their guide through life. Furthermore, he wanted to restore theology and rejuvenate...
, Erasmus, and Thomas More
Thomas More
Sir Thomas More , also known by Catholics as Saint Thomas More, was an English lawyer, social philosopher, author, statesman and noted Renaissance humanist. He was an important councillor to Henry VIII of England and, for three years toward the end of his life, Lord Chancellor...
drew their inspiration from several sources. These included the humanism of Renaissance Italy, to be sure. Yet they also came from along tradition of Christian piety and learned humanism that was a major factor in the intellectual life of the Middle Ages. In England the “political poets” of the late Middle Ages and the long tradition of social sermons, prophetic visions, and penitentials helped set the stage for the blend of humanism, peacemaking, and social protest that we see in the London Reformers, including John Colet
John Colet
John Colet was an English churchman and educational pioneer.Colet was an English scholar, Renaissance humanist, theologian, and Dean of St. Paul’s Cathedral, London. Colet wanted people to see the scripture as their guide through life. Furthermore, he wanted to restore theology and rejuvenate...
, Thomas More
Thomas More
Sir Thomas More , also known by Catholics as Saint Thomas More, was an English lawyer, social philosopher, author, statesman and noted Renaissance humanist. He was an important councillor to Henry VIII of England and, for three years toward the end of his life, Lord Chancellor...
and Juan Luis Vives
Juan Luís Vives
Juan Luis Vives , also Joan Lluís Vives i March , was a Valencian Spanish scholar and humanist.-Biography:Vives was born in Valencia...
.
On the Continent similar strains of late medieval humanism and piety are evident in the background and education of Desiderius Erasmus
Desiderius Erasmus
Desiderius Erasmus Roterodamus , known as Erasmus of Rotterdam, was a Dutch Renaissance humanist, Catholic priest, and a theologian....
and many of his circle, most especially in the influence of Thomas à Kempis
Thomas à Kempis
Thomas à Kempis was a late Medieval Catholic monk and the probable author of The Imitation of Christ, which is one of the best known Christian books on devotion. His name means, "Thomas of Kempen", his home town and in German he is known as Thomas von Kempen...
, the Brethren of the Common Life
Brethren of the Common Life
The Brethren of the Common Life was a Roman Catholic pietist religious community founded in the 14th century by Gerard Groote, formerly a successful and worldly educator who had had a religious experience and preached a life of simple devotion to Jesus Christ...
, and the Devotio Moderna
Devotio Moderna
Devotio Moderna, or Modern Devotion, was a 14th century new religious movement, with Gerard Groote as a key founder. Other well known members included Thomas à Kempis who was the likely author of the book The Imitation of Christ which proved to be highly influential for centuries.Groote's initial...
, a combination of the simple imitation of Christ and the apostles typical of many medieval reform movements and a new awareness of the importance of education for the formation of Christian personal and social values. By the end of the fifteenth century this emphasis on education combined with the new invention of print to produce a movement for reform that, while it borrowed some inspiration from Italian humanism, really set out on its own original course in parallel to the Italians.
The Age of Encounter
Pedro de Cordoba
Pedro de Cordoba , was an American actor.Pedro de Cordoba, who appeared in his first film, a 1915 version of Carmen, was actually a classically trained theatre actor who confessed he did not enjoy appearing in silent films nearly as much as he liked working on stage...
and Antonio de Montesinos on Hispaniola, Bartolomé de Las Casas
Bartolomé de Las Casas
Bartolomé de las Casas O.P. was a 16th-century Spanish historian, social reformer and Dominican friar. He became the first resident Bishop of Chiapas, and the first officially appointed "Protector of the Indians"...
in Hispaniola, Cuba, and Central America, Juan Fernandez de Angulo in Colombia, Peter of Ghent (Pedro de Gant), Juan de Zumárraga
Juan de Zumárraga
Juan de Zumárraga was a Spanish Basque Franciscan prelate and first bishop of Mexico.-Origins and arrival in New Spain:...
, Toribio de Benavente (Motolinía) and other Mexican Franciscans; José de Anchieta
José de Anchieta
José de Anchieta was a Canarian Jesuit missionary to Brazil in the second half of the 16th century. A highly influential figure in Brazil's history in the 1st century after its discovery on April 22, 1500 by a Portuguese fleet commanded by Pedro Álvares Cabral, Anchieta was one of the founders of...
and Antonio Vieira
António Vieira
Father António Vieira was a Portuguese Jesuit and writer, the "prince" of Catholic pulpit-orators of his time.-Life:Vieira was born in Lisbon to Cristóvão Vieira Ravasco, the son of a mulatto woman, and Maria de Azevedo. Accompanying his parents to Brazil in 1614, he received his education at the...
in Brazil; the Jesuits and their Reducciones in Paraguay and Argentina.. The efforts of the missionaries resulted in many reforms at the Spanish Court including the promulgation of the New Laws
New Laws
The New Laws, in Spanish Leyes Nuevas, issued November 20, 1542 by King Charles V of Spain regarding the Spanish colonization of the Americas, are also known as the "New Laws of the Indies for the Good Treatment and Preservation of the Indians", and were created to prevent the exploitation of the...
in November 1542.
Catholic Universalism
At the same time papal traditions built upon the universalist ideas of DanteDANTE
Delivery of Advanced Network Technology to Europe is a not-for-profit organisation that plans, builds and operates the international networks that interconnect the various national research and education networks in Europe and surrounding regions...
and Pierre Dubois
Pierre Dubois
Pierre Dubois , French publicist in the reign of Philip the Fair, was the author of a series of political pamphlets embodying original and daring views....
, while the new internationist thought of Francisco de Vitoria
Francisco de Vitoria
Francisco de Vitoria, OP was a Spanish Renaissance Roman Catholic philosopher, theologian and jurist, founder of the tradition in philosophy known as the School of Salamanca, noted especially for his contributions to the theory of just war and international law...
, Emeric Crucé
Émeric Crucé
Émeric Crucé was a French political writer, known for the Nouveau Cynée , a pioneer work on international relations.-Life:Little specific is known about him...
, Abbot Charles de Saint Pierre and others helped shape a new consciousness of the multipolarity of the new worlds discovered by the Europeans. The tradition of social criticism combined with high moral purposes of reform and renovation of Christian life so central to Renaissance humanists like Erasmus and Thomas More survived the growing autocracy in both church and state and the spread of intolerance brought about by the Reformations and Religious Wars. In the generations after Erasmus this humanism flourished most strongly in the French intellectual tradition that leads almost directly to the Enlightenment and Revolution. Classical learning, an emphasis upon moral virtue, civil life and proper education of the gentleman and lady, the role of the courtier and the nobility of both sword and robe, and the moral impulse of reform were the hallmarks of a movement that infused French culture for centuries. François Rabelais
François Rabelais
François Rabelais was a major French Renaissance writer, doctor, Renaissance humanist, monk and Greek scholar. He has historically been regarded as a writer of fantasy, satire, the grotesque, bawdy jokes and songs...
, Michel de Montaigne
Michel de Montaigne
Lord Michel Eyquem de Montaigne , February 28, 1533 – September 13, 1592, was one of the most influential writers of the French Renaissance, known for popularising the essay as a literary genre and is popularly thought of as the father of Modern Skepticism...
, and Blaise Pascal
Blaise Pascal
Blaise Pascal , was a French mathematician, physicist, inventor, writer and Catholic philosopher. He was a child prodigy who was educated by his father, a tax collector in Rouen...
offer variations on this tradition.
Internationalism
Victor Hugo
Victor-Marie Hugo was a Frenchpoet, playwright, novelist, essayist, visual artist, statesman, human rights activist and exponent of the Romantic movement in France....
, Henri-Marie La Fontaine, Salvador de Madariaga y Rojo, Aristide Briand
Aristide Briand
Aristide Briand was a French statesman who served eleven terms as Prime Minister of France during the French Third Republic and received the 1926 Nobel Peace Prize.- Early life :...
, and Maria Montessori
Maria Montessori
Maria Montessori was an Italian physician and educator, a noted humanitarian and devout Catholic best known for the philosophy of education which bears her name...
.
The Papacy
Papal peacemaking in the twentieth century is one of a long process beginning with withdrawal from and suspicion toward the modern secular world, and an alliance with powers that seemed to promise a return to an outmoded order, and ending with an “opening” to the forces of modernity. These include an embrace of economic and social democracy and a trust in the free conscience and will of individual believers and other people of good will. It was a progress that came too late to prevent the holocausts of the century; yet that has been deeply informed and profoundly shaped by the crisis that these brought to modern Christian life. Leo XIII, Benedict XV, Pius XI and Pius XII all offer testimony of this gradual process.Fascism and Nazism
The rise of the dictators came as a shock to the institutional church. The assumption of obedience and the prior claim of the state to the consciences of its Christian citizens continued to determine the thought of the Catholic bishops of Germany throughout the Nazi regime and into World War II. Two studies, generally considered classic treatments of the subject, have provided a series of illustrations of this point.Yet individual Catholic resistance to Nazism
Nazism
Nazism, the common short form name of National Socialism was the ideology and practice of the Nazi Party and of Nazi Germany...
and fascism
Fascism
Fascism is a radical authoritarian nationalist political ideology. Fascists seek to rejuvenate their nation based on commitment to the national community as an organic entity, in which individuals are bound together in national identity by suprapersonal connections of ancestry, culture, and blood...
carried on the gospel tradition of peacemaking. Jacques Semelin
Jacques Sémelin
Jacques Sémelin is a French historian, psychologist and political scientist. He is a director of research in the CNRS, affiliated to the Institut d'Études Politiques de Paris...
in France; Cardinal van Roey in Belgium; Franz Jaegerstatter, Clement August von Galen, Erich Klausener
Erich Klausener
Erich Klausener was a German Catholic politician who was murdered in the Night of the Long Knives as the Nazis purged their opponents.- Biography :...
, Theo Hespers, Bernhard Lichtenberg
Bernhard Lichtenberg
Blessed Bernhard Lichtenberg was a German Roman Catholic priest and theologian, awarded the title righteous among the Nations....
, Max Josef Metzger
Max Josef Metzger
Max Josef Metzger was born in Schopfheim in Baden, Germany.Metzger became a Roman Catholic priest and worked as a military chaplain for the forces of Imperial Germany during World War I. During that war he began to see peace work as an urgent task...
in Germany; Lauro De Bosis
Lauro De Bosis
Lauro Adolfo De Bosis was an Italian poet and aviator.In 1928 he won a silver medal in the art competitions of the Olympic Games for his "Icarus". When he turned anti-fascist, he was shot down by Benito Mussolini's airplanes over the Tyrrhenian Sea...
, the National Alliance
National Alliance (Italy)
National Alliance was a conservative political party in Italy.Gianfranco Fini was the leader of the party since its foundation in 1995, however he stepped down in 2008 after being elected to the nominally non-partisan post of President of the Italian Chamber of Deputies and was succeeded by...
, and the Ventotene
Ventotene
Ventotene, in Roman times known as Pandataria or Pandateria from the Greek Pandoteira, is one of the Pontine Islands in the Tyrrhenian Sea, off the coast of Gaeta right at the border between Lazio and Campania, Italy...
group in Italy offer good examples.
Contemporary Catholicism (c.1965 – )
Europe
The generation between the calling of the Second Vatican CouncilSecond Vatican Council
The Second Vatican Council addressed relations between the Roman Catholic Church and the modern world. It was the twenty-first Ecumenical Council of the Catholic Church and the second to be held at St. Peter's Basilica in the Vatican. It opened under Pope John XXIII on 11 October 1962 and closed...
(Oct. 11, 1962–Dec. 8, 1965) and the Velvet Revolution
Velvet Revolution
The Velvet Revolution or Gentle Revolution was a non-violent revolution in Czechoslovakia that took place from November 17 – December 29, 1989...
in Eastern Europe in 1989 marked a new era in the Catholic peace tradition. Pope John XXIII (1958–63) set off a revolution in Roman Catholic thought and life that, like most revolutions, harkened back to an earlier period for its models and inspiration and thus brought the church into a new age. Through his policy of aggiornamento the pope opened the church to the modern world and most of its progressive movements. He also turned the church away from a legalistic interpretation of ecclesial structure and from an intransigence to the modern world toward the fresh air of greater collegiality within the hierarchy and a broader voice for the laity who make up the church. In his encyclicals John seems to have stressed the Christian humanist tradition and its reliance on biblical and patristic sources, especially in his thought on war and peace. In so doing the pope began to replace the legal categories of just war with an ethical and historical approach that derives its chief inspiration from the gospels and that ultimately questions the very notion of war in the modern world. Vatican II, Mater et Magistra
Mater et Magistra
"Mater et Magistra" is the encyclical written by Pope John XXIII on the topic of "Christianity and Social Progress". It was promulgated on May 15, 1961. The title means "mother and teacher", referring to the role of the church. It describes a necessity to work towards authentic community in order...
, and Pacem in Terris
Pacem in Terris
Pacem in Terris was a papal encyclical issued by Pope John XXIII on 11 April 1963. It was the last encyclical drafted by John XXIII, who died from cancer two months after its completion ....
all placed Catholicism on a new footing as a peace church; while John's successors Paul VI and John Paul II furthered this agenda while maintaining traditional church teachings in many areas of individual and social morality
Among individuals and groups the most notable trends in Catholic practice have been the rise of conscientious objection in Europe, the work of individuals such as Lanzo Del Vasto, Danilo Dolci
Danilo Dolci
Danilo Dolci was an Italian social activist, sociologist, popular educator and poet. He is best known for his opposition to poverty, social exclusion and the Mafia on Sicily, and is considered to be one of the protagonists of the non-violence movement in Italy...
, the Irish Peace People (Mairead Corrigan
Mairead Corrigan
Mairead Maguire , also known as Mairead Corrigan Maguire and formerly as Mairéad Corrigan, is a Northern Irish peace activist. She co-founded, with Betty Williams and Ciaran McKeown, the Community of Peace People, an organisation dedicated to encouraging a peaceful resolution of the Troubles in...
, Betty Williams, Ciaran McKeown
Ciaran McKeown
Ciaran McKeown is a former peace activist in Northern Ireland.Born in Derry to a Roman Catholic family, McKeown served as a Dominican novice for eight months in his youth. He then attended Queen's University Belfast, where he studied philosophy, becoming the first Catholic to be elected president...
), Polish Solidarity, and Eastern European Velvet Revolutions, among whom Catholic took on key leadership roles.
The Global South
Latin America
By 1960 and Vatican II several trends had come together in a uniquely new situation for Catholic peacemakers. These combined a new spirit of renewal and reform within the Catholic Church, while the impact of Marxism made itself felt profoundly throughout Latin America as a result of the successful Cuban revolution, and all over the post-colonial Third World as a new generation sought modes of existence that steered a careful course between what many perceived as the extremes of both Western and Soviet camps in the Cold War.Oppression, poverty, and injustice cried out as never before for new solutions: yet the last three decades have not been easy ones to have foreseen: violent revolution often gave rise to even more violent repression, while first isolated individuals and then – with the help of a reform-minded church hierarchy – entire social movements and then nations began to experiment with and finally to learn the lessons of true nonviolent struggle. This culminated in successes for peacemaking that rivaled, and often exceeded anything in Europe. Church councils at Medellín
Medellín
Medellín , officially the Municipio de Medellín or Municipality of Medellín, is the second largest city in Colombia. It is in the Aburrá Valley, one of the more northerly of the Andes in South America. It has a population of 2.3 million...
, Sucre
Sucre
Sucre, also known historically as Charcas, La Plata and Chuquisaca is the constitutional capital of Bolivia and the capital of the department of Chuquisaca. Located in the south-central part of the country, Sucre lies at an elevation of 2750m...
, Bogotá
Bogotá
Bogotá, Distrito Capital , from 1991 to 2000 called Santa Fé de Bogotá, is the capital, and largest city, of Colombia. It is also designated by the national constitution as the capital of the department of Cundinamarca, even though the city of Bogotá now comprises an independent Capital district...
, and Puebla
Puebla
Puebla officially Estado Libre y Soberano de Puebla is one of the 31 states which, with the Federal District, comprise the 32 Federal Entities of Mexico. It is divided in 217 municipalities and its capital city is Puebla....
laid the groundwork for a new activism and a still-controversial liberation theology
Liberation theology
Liberation theology is a Christian movement in political theology which interprets the teachings of Jesus Christ in terms of a liberation from unjust economic, political, or social conditions...
, while the examples of Catholic clergy and laity including Helder Camara
Hélder Câmara
Dom Hélder Pessoa Câmara was Roman Catholic Archbishop of Olinda and Recife.He was known as the 'Bishop of Corum' and took a clear position with the urban poor....
, Oscar Romero
Óscar Romero
Óscar Arnulfo Romero y Galdámez was a bishop of the Catholic Church in El Salvador. He became the fourth Archbishop of San Salvador, succeeding Luis Chávez. He was assassinated on 24 March 1980....
,and the Madres de la Plaza de Mayo helped define new forms of Catholic peacemaking.
Africa
In Africa issues of cultural identity, the dignity of the vast majority of the people, and the role of violence and nonviolence in the struggle for liberation emerged from a legacy of colonialism and deep racism have left their marks on all forms of life and thought. Growing from this is a theology that owes much to both the liberation theology of Latin America and to the civil-rights movement of the United States. In African theology this has sought to find meaning in the biblical book of Exodus: the liberation of the people of Israel from their bondage under the Pharaohs. Liberation takes on not only theological and ecclesiological meaning in the freeing of the African from Eurocentric forms of liturgy and theology; but also in the political realm. Jean Marc ElaJean Marc Ela
Jean-Marc Ela was a sociologist, Diocesan Priest, Professor and author of many books on theology, philosophy, and social sciences in Africa. His most famous work, African Cry has been called the "soundest illustration" of the spirit of liberation theology in sub-Saharan Africa...
, Archbishop Denis Hurley of Durban, the Kairos Covenant offer cogent examples of praxis.
Asia
In Asia Catholicism emerged as one of the most vital test cases of the post-Constantinian church. The arrival of the church on the continent and in its eastern island rim accompanied European expansion and colonialismColonialism
Colonialism is the establishment, maintenance, acquisition and expansion of colonies in one territory by people from another territory. It is a process whereby the metropole claims sovereignty over the colony and the social structure, government, and economics of the colony are changed by...
. It remained attached to the cities and the Westernized elite
Elite
Elite refers to an exceptional or privileged group that wields considerable power within its sphere of influence...
s. By the twentieth century therefore Catholicism encountered the growing hostility of Asian societies in the midst of liberation
Liberty
Liberty is a moral and political principle, or Right, that identifies the condition in which human beings are able to govern themselves, to behave according to their own free will, and take responsibility for their actions...
, often in the form of Marxist revolutions against Western, capitalist, and imperialist pasts. As Marxism spread the Westernized nations of the region responded by embracing the “National Security” doctrine. Furthermore, in Asia Christian
Christianity in Asia
Christianity in Asia has its roots in the very inception of Christianity, which originated from the teachings of Jesus Christ. Christianity in Asia then spread through the missionary work of his apostles. Christianity first expanded in the Levant, taking roots in the major cities such as Jerusalem...
s represent only five percent of the population and only ten percent of the worldwide Christian total.
By the 1960s, however, all the factors of the Asian Catholic scene — marginality
Marginalism
Marginalism refers to the use of marginal concepts in economic theory. Marginalism is associated with arguments concerning changes in the quantity used of a good or service, as opposed to some notion of the over-all significance of that class of good or service, or of some total quantity...
, the increasing poverty
Poverty
Poverty is the lack of a certain amount of material possessions or money. Absolute poverty or destitution is inability to afford basic human needs, which commonly includes clean and fresh water, nutrition, health care, education, clothing and shelter. About 1.7 billion people are estimated to live...
of the continent, the pressing need for social change caught between Marxist revolution and national-security reaction, and the church’s tradition of criticism – combined to make necessary a new pastoral mission. The church, already on the fringes in most of Asia, began to adopt the message of Vatican II and to accept its proper place with the poor and oppressed — the truly marginal in Asian society. The Filipino “People Power” movement, the Indian theology
Theology
Theology is the systematic and rational study of religion and its influences and of the nature of religious truths, or the learned profession acquired by completing specialized training in religious studies, usually at a university or school of divinity or seminary.-Definition:Augustine of Hippo...
of Aloysius Pieris
Ecumenical Institute for Study and Dialogue
The Ecumenical Institute for Study and Dialogue , formerly called Study Center for Religion and Society, is an institute located in Colombo, Sri Lanka that is devoted to the study and interpretation of religious and social movements of people in Sri Lanka, in order to assist the Church in...
, and Kim Chi-Ha
Kim Chi-Ha
Kim Ji-ha is a Korean poet and playwright. He was a dissident under the Park regime. After accusing the regime of extracting false confessions with the use of torture, he was tried and sentenced to death, which was commuted to a life sentence and eventual release following a public outcry...
in South Korea were important milestones in the development of peacemaking there.
Catholic Beginnings
Catholics first arrived in what is now the United States as a persecuted minority. Through the colonial and early republican periods their growth was slow; and they were subject to suspicion and outright prejudice. The Catholic Church’s solution was to draw in on itself, to protect itself from hostility and to continue nurturing its own traditions and institutions in a society that it often viewed with suspicion and alienation. With the great waves of immigration of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries came millions of Catholics, predominantly from the impoverished classes of southern and eastern Europe and Ireland, who greatly increased Catholicism’s presence in the United States but who also deepened its association with foreign cultures, alien political systems, and suspect allegiances.Catholics of the immigrant generations remained urban, impoverished, and subject to the worst forms of prejudice and discrimination. Peace in the Catholic tradition always retained a strongly “personalistic” strain that merged well with the immigrants’ suspicion of institutions; Catholic moral teaching retained the medieval exaltation of conscience above human law that many Protestant mainline churches had abandoned in favor of the state’s authority; Catholic social thought by the early twentieth century was beginning to be clearly critical of many aspects of capitalist industrial economy and society. The Catholic Church’s universality bound Catholics to their coreligionists all over the world; while the church’s claims to being above society, and certainly to being distinct from the mainstream of American culture, provided it both institutionally and individually with a reservoir from which later dissent could flow.
The World Wars
With the twentieth century and World War I, American Catholics began to emerge from their isolation. The immigrant church, in fact, began to go out of its way to assert its Americanness and ultra-loyalty. There was little Catholic protest against World War I, although Ben SalmonBen Salmon
Ben Joseph Salmon was an American Christian pacifist, Roman Catholic, conscientious objector and outspoken critic of Just War theology....
was a notable exception. Ben Salmon was a conscientious objector during the war and outspoken critic of Just War
Just War
Just war theory is a doctrine of military ethics of Roman philosophical and Catholic origin, studied by moral theologians, ethicists and international policy makers, which holds that a conflict ought to meet philosophical, religious or political criteria.-Origins:The concept of justification for...
theology. The Catholic Church denounced him and the The New York Times described him as a "spy suspect." The US military (in which he was never inducted) charged him with desertion and spreading propaganda, then sentenced him to death (this was later revised to 25 years hard labor).
Dorothy Day
Dorothy Day was an American journalist, social activist and devout Catholic convert; she advocated the Catholic economic theory of Distributism. She was also considered to be an anarchist, and did not hesitate to use the term...
and Peter Maurin
Peter Maurin
Peter Maurin was a Roman Catholic social activist who founded the Catholic Worker Movement in 1933 with Dorothy Day.Maurin expressed his ideas through short pieces of verse that became known as - Biography :...
, founded a new Catholic peace group, the Catholic Worker Movement
Catholic Worker Movement
The Catholic Worker Movement is a collection of autonomous communities of Catholics and their associates founded by Dorothy Day and Peter Maurin in 1933. Its aim is to "live in accordance with the justice and charity of Jesus Christ." One of its guiding principles is hospitality towards those on...
, that would embody their ideals of pacifism, commitment to the poor and to fundamental change in American society. By 1941, just before Pearl Harbor, 97% of all Catholics polled opposed U.S. entry into World War II, far greater than the percentage of any Protestant denomination. In theory and until the attack on Pearl Harbor, then, opposition to war, including pacifism, had a respectable and widespread appeal among American Catholics. This opposition took several forms, including the internationalist approach of CAIP (Catholic Association for International Peace
Catholic Association for International Peace
The Catholic Association for International Peace was founded in 1927 by John A. Ryan. It based its opposition to war on the traditional just war doctrine.-Opposition to the Vietnam War :...
). The Catholic hierarchy was almost universally opposed to the Burke-Wadsworth Act conscription bill of 1940. With the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, Catholic opposition to the war and the draft collapsed. Catholics, like most Americans, became fervent supporters of the war, both out of patriotic duty and from a sense of the justness of the struggle.
Out of a total of 21 million Catholics only 223 claimed IV-E CO status, conscientious objection to military service; 135 were eventually classified, a grand leap from the four Catholics out of the 3,989 COs to World War I [352], but a minuscule percentage of the total 11,887 conscientious objectors to World War II. Most Catholic objectors chose I-A-O status, noncombatant military service, generally as unarmed medics on the front lines. Unlike the exclusion of Catholics, Jews, and mainline Protestant churches from CO status in World War I, Burke-Wadsworth did provide for Catholic objection, but the prejudice and scepticism of draft boards and of many potential Catholic supporters about the pacifist tradition in their own church made applications difficult. It is not surprising then that in addition to these 135 Catholic conscientious objectors, 61 Catholics refused induction and were imprisoned, again a small proportion of the 6,068 jailed during the war for noncooperation.
Vietnam and After
After the war Catholic peacemaking narrowed down to a very few institutions, including the Catholic Worker MovementCatholic Worker Movement
The Catholic Worker Movement is a collection of autonomous communities of Catholics and their associates founded by Dorothy Day and Peter Maurin in 1933. Its aim is to "live in accordance with the justice and charity of Jesus Christ." One of its guiding principles is hospitality towards those on...
, and individuals, including Dorothy Day
Dorothy Day
Dorothy Day was an American journalist, social activist and devout Catholic convert; she advocated the Catholic economic theory of Distributism. She was also considered to be an anarchist, and did not hesitate to use the term...
, Robert Ludlow, Ammon Hennacy
Ammon Hennacy
Ammon Ashford Hennacy was an Irish American pacifist, Christian anarchist, social activist, member of the Catholic Worker Movement and a Wobbly...
, and Thomas Merton
Thomas Merton
Thomas Merton, O.C.S.O. was a 20th century Anglo-American Catholic writer and mystic. A Trappist monk of the Abbey of Gethsemani, Kentucky, he was a poet, social activist, and student of comparative religion...
. By the late 1950s, however, these small beginnings began to bear fruit in a more widespread religious peace movement that then blossomed during the Vietnam War. The impetus of the war and the reform impuse of Vatican II created a new Catholic peace movement that included the Catholic Worker, the Catholic Peace Fellowship, Daniel Berrigan
Daniel Berrigan
Daniel Berrigan, SJ is an American Catholic priest, peace activist, and poet. Daniel and his brother Philip were for a time on the FBI Ten Most Wanted Fugitives list for their involvement in antiwar protests during the Vietnam war....
, Philip Berrigan
Philip Berrigan
Philip Francis Berrigan was an internationally renowned American peace activist, Christian anarchist and former Roman Catholic priest...
, Elizabeth McAlister and the Catonsville Nine
Catonsville Nine
The Catonsville Nine were nine Catholic activists who burned draft files to protest the Vietnam War. On May 17, 1968 they went to the draft board in Catonsville, Maryland, took 378 draft files, brought them to the parking lot in wire baskets, dumped them out, poured homemade napalm over them, and...
. After the war, acitivities were carried on by such individuals as Joseph Fahey and Eileen Egan
Eileen Egan
Eileen Egan was a journalist, Roman Catholic pacifist and activist, and co-founder of the Catholic peace group, American PAX Association and its successor Pax Christi-USA, the American branch of International Pax Christi...
who were instrumental in the creation of Pax Christi
Pax Christi
-History:Pax Christi was established in France in 1945 as a reconciliation work between the French and the Germans after the Second World War. In 2007, it existed in more than 60 countries...
and continuing Catholic peace efforts into the 20th century. Other Catholic peacemakers have included Cesar Chavez
César Chávez
César Estrada Chávez was an American farm worker, labor leader, and civil rights activist who, with Dolores Huerta, co-founded the National Farm Workers Association, which later became the United Farm Workers ....
, John Dear
John Dear
John Dear is an American Catholic priest, Christian pacifist, author and lecturer. He has been arrested over 75 times in acts of nonviolent civil disobedience against war, injustice and nuclear weapons.-Studies:...
, the Sanctuary movement
Sanctuary movement
The Sanctuary Movement was a religious and political campaign that began in the early 1980s to provide safe-haven for Central American refugees fleeing civil conflict...
, and Witness for Peace
Witness for Peace
Witness for Peace is an United States-based activist organization founded in 1983 that opposed the Reagan administration's support of the Nicaraguan Contras, alleging widespread atrocities by these counterrevolutionary groups. Witness for Peace brought U.S. citizens to Nicaragua to see the effects...
.
Further reading
- Bainton, Roland H. Christian Attitudes toward War and Peace. New York: Abingdon, 1960.
- Egan, Eileen. Peace Be with You: Justified Warfare or the Way of Nonviolence. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 1999.
- Fahey, Joseph J. War and the Christian Conscience: Where Do You Stand? Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 2005.
- Merton, Thomas. The Nonviolent Alternative. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1980.
- Musto, Ronald G. The Catholic Peace Tradition. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 1986; reprint New York: Peace Books, 2002.
- Musto, Ronald G. Catholic Peacemakers: A Documentary History. 2 vols. 1: From the Bible to the Crusades. New York: Garland, 1993; 2: From the Renaissance to the Twentieth Century. New York: Garland, 1996.
- Musto, Ronald G. Liberation Theologies: A Research Guide. New York: Garland, 1991.
- Musto, Ronald G. The Peace Tradition in the Catholic Church: An Annotated Bibliography. New York: Garland, 1987.
- Musto, Ronald G. Peacedocs website: http://www.peacedocs.com .
- O’Brien, David J. and Thomas A. Shannon, eds. Renewing the Earth: Catholic Documents on Peace, Justice and Liberation. Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1977.
- Zahn, Gordon. War, Conscience and Dissent. New York: Hawthorne, 1967.