Catholic peace traditions
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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.
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[edit] 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 Romana 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.
[edit] Eirene: Greek Meanings of Peace
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.
[edit] 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’s use of the term pax) and external political tranquility, as with its use by the Stoics.[edit] Shalom: Hebrew Meanings
The Hebrew Bible, 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!”
[edit] Peace in the New Testament
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.
[edit] 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 Covenant 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.”[edit] 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 Apocalypse, 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.
[edit] 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, 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.
[edit] The Martyrs
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.
[edit] 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 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.
[edit] The Age of Constantine (c. 300–c. 500)
With the triumph of Constantine as sole Roman emperor in 313 and the beginning of a Christianized Roman Empire, the early 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 Christian church and Roman empire 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.
[edit] Augustine of Hippo
The City of God, Augustine’s masterpiece, was written between 413 and 426 in response to arguments made by Volusianus, 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.[edit] 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 (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.
[edit] The Barbarian Invasions (c. 400–c.800)
[edit] 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 Tours, Salvian of Marseilles, Nicetas of Remesiana, Germanus of Auxerre, Severinus of Noricum, St. Patrick, St. Genevieve of Paris, Columban, and St. Boniface of Crediton.[edit] 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 — 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.
[edit] Carolingian Peacemaking (800–1100)
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.
[edit] The Papacy
Pope Nicholas I (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.
[edit] The Martyrs of Cordoba
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 [1] sees its cause in a “spiritual anxiety” spurred on by one Christian’s losing his comfortable government job. While Clayton J. Drees[2] 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.
[edit] 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 Advent, Lent, and Rogation days. At certain times and places, like the Peace, it also extended its protection to persons and property.[edit] 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 Gaul, 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.[3]
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.
[edit] The Truce of God
The Peace movement reached its peak at Narbonne 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.
[edit] 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 chivalry.
[edit] The New Poverty Movements
Based on the model of the early church, the Gregorian Reform 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.
[edit] Popular Peace Movements
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,[4] and the Bianchi.
[edit] 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 Venerable, 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.
[edit] 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.
[edit] 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 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.
[edit] 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.[edit] The Italian Humanists
[edit] The Northern Humanists
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.
[edit] The Age of Encounter
[edit] Catholic Universalism
At the same time papal traditions built upon the universalist ideas of Dante 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.[edit] The Modern Church (to c.1945)
[edit] Internationalism
[edit] 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.[edit] 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[6], generally considered classic treatments of the subject, have provided a series of illustrations of this point. 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, Sophie Scholl and the White Rose, 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.[edit] Contemporary Catholicism (c.1965 – )
[edit] Europe
The generation between the calling of the Second Vatican Council (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 moralityAmong 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.
[edit] The Global South
[edit] 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 MedellÃn, 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.
[edit] 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 Ela, Archbishop Denis Hurley of Durban, the Kairos Covenant offer cogent examples of praxis.[edit] Asia
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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.
[edit] North America
[edit] Catholic Beginnings
Catholics first arrived in North America 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.
[edit] 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. In May 1933 in New York City, two American Catholics, Dorothy Day and Peter Maurin, founded a new Catholic peace group, the Catholic Worker, 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.
[edit] Vietnam and After
After the war Catholic peacemaking narrowed down to a very few institutions, including the Catholic Worker,[8] 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, the Sanctuary movement, and Witness for Peace.[edit] See also
[edit] References
- ^ Christian Martyrs in Muslim Spain, New York: Cambridge University Press, 1987
- ^ “Sainthood and Suicide. The Motives of the Martyrs of Córdoba, A.D. 850-859,” Journal of Medieval and Renaissance Studies 20, 1, 1990: 59-89
- ^ See Interactive map of Peace and Truce of God. at http://www.peacedocs.com/Site/Maps_%7C_Timelines_%7C_Europe_%7C_Peace_of_God.html
- ^ See interative map at: http://www.peacedocs.com/Site/Maps_%7C_Timelines_%7C_Europe_%7C_1100-1500.html
- ^ See Interative Map of Jesuit Reducciones at: http://www.peacedocs.com/Site/Maps_%7C_Timelines_%7C_South_America_%7C_Jesuit_Reducciones.html
- ^ See Guenther Lewy, The Catholic Church and Nazi Germany (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1965); and Gordan Zahn, German Catholics and Hitler’s Wars: A Study in Social Control (New York: Sheed & Ward, 1962)
- ^ See Interactive Map of World War II camps for conscientious objectors at: http://www.peacedocs.com/Site/Maps_%7C_Timelines_%7C_North_America,_CPS_Camps.html
- ^ See Interactive Map of Catholic Worker houses at: http://www.peacedocs.com/Site/Maps_%7C_Timelines_%7C_Catholic_Worker_USA.html
[edit] 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.
