Gerald Schlabach wrote that a key test of progress for Catholicism in its dialogue with the historic peace churches on nonviolence and the use of force would be that the church's teaching on nonviolence would become “church wide and parish deep.”Footnote 9 While modern Catholic social teaching has recognized nonviolence since the time of the Second Vatican Council, and Pope Saint John Paul II gave nonviolence strong, formal endorsement in his 1991 encyclical Centesimus Annus, the church's teaching on nonviolence is hardly known in the pews.Footnote 10 If they are familiar at all with Catholic teaching on peace and war, most Catholics would know the just-war tradition, especially through the US bishops’ 1983 pastoral letter, The Challenge of Peace.Footnote 11 But the newer and still relatively slight teaching on nonviolence is hardly known at all. Only by rare exception do Catholic preachers address issues of peace and war.
World Day of Peace Message
In his 2017 World Day of Peace message, Pope Francis began a process of enriching that teaching and, with the help of Pax Christi International, inviting a process of reflection and study on nonviolence and peacemaking across the universal church.Footnote 12 For all its praise of the history and practice of nonviolence, the message nonetheless regards nonviolence as a complement to just war, though it refers to the just-war principles in a circumlocution as “moral norms.” “Peacebuilding through active nonviolence,” the message reads, “is the natural and necessary complement to the Church's continuing efforts to limit the use of force by the application of moral norms.”Footnote 13 This formula, “the natural and necessary complement,” accurately reflects the place of nonviolence in Catholic social teaching since Vatican II. In particular, it corresponds to the stipulation inherent in Gaudium et Spes, §78, that we are obligated to defend human rights—by nonviolence where possible, and by limited force when necessary.Footnote 14
In his message to the April 2016 Roman conference on just peace, which gave rise to this roundtable, Pope Francis himself called the attention of the conferees to what I call Vatican II's Great Proviso, the recognition that in a conflicted world “governments cannot be denied the right to legitimate defense once every means of peaceful settlement has been exhausted.”Footnote 15 So, it appears, the Holy Father, like the council, sees nonviolence and just war as complementary parts of the church's peace teaching. It is that complementarity I want to discuss here, especially as it is now realized in the Responsibility to Protect.
A Composite Teaching
Some regard the church's composite teaching as unstable or even contradictory, but it is so only if one confuses nonviolence with pacifism, that is, unqualified opposition to all war and any use of force. If one sees active nonviolence as a tool for vindicating rights and building peace, as the council did, it may be regarded as part of a continuum of (noncoercive or mildly coercive) remedies against injustice that at some point may give way, on consideration, to more coercive means like sanctions and military intervention. This is precisely the perspective of the US bishops in their 1993 pastoral statement “The Harvest of Justice Is Sown in Peace.”
In that document, the bishops conditioned the use of force against grave injustice on the exhaustion of nonviolent methods. “Our constant commitment,” they wrote, “ought to be, as far as possible, to strive for justice through nonviolent means.” Then they added: “But, when sustained attempts at nonviolent action fail to protect the innocent against fundamental injustice, then legitimate political authorities are permitted as a last resort to employ limited force to rescue the innocent and establish justice.”Footnote 16 The serious application of nonviolent means, therefore, is a condition for considering the use of force.
In his full-throated advocacy of nonviolence in the encyclical Centesimus Annus, Pope Saint John Paul II praised the persistence of the nonviolent activists who in the late 1980s overthrew Communist Party rule in Eastern Europe. “While always refusing to yield to the force of power, [the protestors] succeeded time after time in finding effective ways of bearing witness to the truth.”Footnote 17 The persistence of repeated attempts, then, is essential to the serious application of nonviolent remedies.
The late John Howard Yoder argued that serious exploration of nonviolent alternatives raises the bar for determining the point of last resort for forceful resolution of conflict.Footnote 18 As Yoder argued, the exhaustion of nonviolent alternatives is one of the measures for judging whether just-war thinking is morally credible.Footnote 19 The International Catholic-Mennonite Dialogue regarded just war as a point of divergence between the two communities; nonetheless it observed that “both Catholics and some Mennonites acknowledge that when all recourse to nonviolence has failed, authorities may use force in the defense of the innocent.”Footnote 20 Note well, their imperfect convergence was on the duty of the state to defend human rights.
It is fair to conclude, therefore, that the encouragement of education and formation in nonviolent peacebuilding is not intended to abandon just-war thinking, but to expand the hitherto marginal role of nonviolence in Catholic life and in the thinking of just war theorists in the Catholic tradition.Footnote 21 The latest World Day of Peace message, then, read on its own terms, not only encourages nonviolent activists and peacemakers, but is also a “challenge for political and religious leaders, the heads of international institutions, and business and media executives to adopt [nonviolence] . . . in the exercise of their respective responsibilities.”Footnote 22 The task it sets for the church, including especially Catholic just-war analysts, is to make the principles and practices of active nonviolence as familiar and natural to Catholics, and the public generally, as those of the just war.
Nonviolence–Just War Nexus and R2P
The deepening and expansion of teaching on nonviolence proposed by Pax Christi and endorsed by Pope Francis will serve to enrich Catholic teaching on peace and war. One can see the complementarity of nonviolence and just war already displayed in the articulation and practice of the Responsibility to Protect (R2P), the emerging UN rules for humanitarian intervention, where both nonviolent alternatives and just-war tests are integral to the practice.Footnote 23
While enforcement forms just one pillar of R2P, it is arguably the best-known and most-debated of the three. The other two pillars are prevention and rebuilding.Footnote 24 According to the International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty (ICISS), the blue-ribbon group that proposed the principle adopted by the UN High-level Meeting in 2005, “‘prevention’ is the single most important dimension of the responsibility to protect.”Footnote 25 “Less intrusive and coercive measures,” the commission argued, must be considered and tried before the more overt and aggressive methods of enforcement are employed.Footnote 26
Indeed, while countries that have required international military enforcement, like Libya, stand out in public perception, the countries where preventive measures have succeeded, like Kenya, are at least as numerous.Footnote 27 The primary responsibility for preventing atrocities falls, in the first place, to the sovereign state itself. Among the preventive measures former UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon urged on governments were intercommunal dialogue, programs that promote inclusiveness and counteract exclusivist ideologies, and rapid response to human rights violations.Footnote 28 Activities on the part of international actors, the secretary-general added, include commissioning “special envoys, mediators, peace operations (peacekeepers), and regional (peacekeeping) offices.”Footnote 29 In addition, the secretary-general observed that international actors can assist in building capacity for national electoral commissions and human rights institutions, facilitating security sector reform, and fostering independent media and anti-incitement activities.Footnote 30 All these measures are the global face of institutional nonviolence.
Efforts at prevention, of course, do fail. Nonviolence, even when it is systematically pursued, can fall short in the defense of human rights, presenting political authorities with the question of whether or not to use force in the defense of the vulnerable innocent. This is the point where traditional just-war criteria come into play. The ICISS's “precautionary principles” offer a slightly modified set of just-war standards. They include right intention, last resort, proportional means, and reasonable prospects. The ICISS assumes that if atrocities cannot be prevented nonviolently, then protection of the vulnerable and ending of atrocities constitute just cause for the legitimate use of force.Footnote 31
In Libya, we have seen that limited military enforcement is not necessarily a solution for mass atrocities; and in the Syrian catastrophe we have witnessed the downside of the caution exercised in weighing “the reasonable prospects,” what just war calls the prospect of success.Footnote 32 At least for the moment, we may have reached the existing limits, short of full-scale war, of stopping mass atrocities when they are under way. But the international effort to protect vulnerable populations, as flawed as it is, represents an advance over the sovereign immunity that so long protected perpetrators of mass atrocities on their own people or neighboring ethnic groups.Footnote 33 It also represents a working alliance between nonviolence, at a professional and institutional level, and the use of rule-governed armed force in the maintenance of a peace that upholds the dignity and rights of humanity.
In a way, R2P was made possible by a post–Cold War liberal order that itself is troubled in the Atlantic community that gave it birth.Footnote 34 Nonetheless, R2P represented a revolution in the post-Westphalian normative order, and it has given rise to a complex of institutions, roles, and practices that could well endure beyond the current Western political distemper.Footnote 35 At present, it provides recourse for victims of smaller, less complex humanitarian emergencies. It is quite possible that the R2P institutions and practices created over the last two decades could survive the present global disorder, and will continue to evolve to meet the challenge of a future Syria or Libya.
