{"id":72378,"date":"2016-04-25T12:00:23","date_gmt":"2016-04-25T11:00:23","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/?p=72378"},"modified":"2016-04-20T14:43:15","modified_gmt":"2016-04-20T13:43:15","slug":"did-the-vatican-just-throw-out-its-just-war-doctrine","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/2016\/04\/did-the-vatican-just-throw-out-its-just-war-doctrine\/","title":{"rendered":"Did the Vatican Just Throw Out Its Just War Doctrine?"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"papa_francesco-600x330<\/a><\/p>\n

19 Apr 2016 – <\/em>Last week, the Vatican hosted a conference on the theme of \u201cNonviolence and Just Peace: Contributing to the Catholic Understanding of and Commitment to Nonviolence,\u201d organized by the Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace along with the global Catholic peace network Pax Christi International. In their concluding appeal to Pope Francis, the 80 conference participants recommended that he reject Just War Doctrine as a viable or productive Catholic tradition. They also recommended that he write a new encyclical laying out the Catholic Church\u2019s commitment to nonviolence in all of its manifestations\u2014including nonviolent action as a means of engaging in conflict, nonviolent conflict resolution as a way of resolving conflict, and nonviolence as the principle doctrine of the Catholic Church.<\/p>\n

\"just<\/a><\/p>\n

If such an encyclical follows, this is a big deal. The just war tradition\u2014which contains numerous doctrines morally justifying violence and war, as well as defining appropriate conduct during war\u2014has served for the past 1500 years as the primary normative basis politicians have evoked (correctly or incorrectly) to validate their waging of war. Because the Catholic Church developed the doctrine between the 4th and 13th centuries, the just war canon has had a monopolistic influence on the way people in the West think about war and violence\u2014whether they know it or not. Consequently, many people now take for granted concepts like the right to self-defense, the importance of weighing the goals of war against its potential human costs, the need to exhaust other options before going to war, and the necessity of only fighting wars you think you can win. Whether you\u2019re the President of the United States in D.C., a police officer on the beat in Denver, or a student in a self-defense class in L.A., these moral concepts have probably had a deep impact on your thinking and your experience when it comes to the proper uses of violence.<\/p>\n

Conference participants acknowledged the main sticking point for many skeptics of nonviolence\u2014that promoting (or using) nonviolence can be difficult in the face of armed aggression. Marie Dennis, co-president of Pax Christi International and a participant at the conference, claimed that the group fully considered this challenge. Yet she argued that the international community hasn\u2019t yet devoted resources to developing or discovering nonviolent alternatives to armed aggression because of our reflexive turn to violence as the only possible response. In her words, \u201cas long as we keep saying we can do it with military force, we will not invest the creative energy, the deep thinking, the financial and human resources in creating or identifying the alternatives that actually could make a difference.\u201d<\/a><\/p>\n

\"<\/a>

The de-facto definition of Just War, (based on the writings of St. Thomas Aquinas)<\/p><\/div>\n

So\u2014why is the Catholic Church reconsidering now? Reporter Terrence Lynne argues<\/a> that there are five primary reasons for this\u2014among them the fact that contemporary weapons of war render obsolete any positive impacts that war might have; and what he calls \u201cthe compelling, thrilling saga of nonviolent action over the 60 years since Gandhi.\u201d Indeed, among the arguments Pope Francis used<\/a> to encourage the conference participants was the dramatic rise in the effectiveness of nonviolent resistance over the past century\u2014a trend we hear a lot around the halls of the Korbel School<\/a>. In fact, one of the participants in this landmark conference was my colleague Maria J. Stephan<\/a>, whose work on civil resistance in a variety of struggles<\/a> around the world helped to provide a strong empirical basis<\/a> for this conference.<\/p>\n

How\u2019s that for engaged scholarship?<\/p>\n

_______________________________________<\/p>\n

Erica Chenoweth<\/em><\/a> is Professor & Associate Dean for Research | Josef Korbel School of International Studies, University of Denver. <\/em>Originally published<\/em><\/a> at Political Violence at a Glance, republishing permitted<\/em>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

19 Apr 2016 – The just war tradition\u2014which contains numerous doctrines morally justifying violence and war, as well as defining appropriate conduct during war\u2014has served for the past 1500 years as the primary normative basis to validate waging of war. Last week, eighty conference participants recommended that Pope Francis I reject Just War Doctrine as a viable or productive Catholic tradition.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[183],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-72378","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-religion-2"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/72378","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=72378"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/72378\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=72378"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=72378"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=72378"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}