A reader writes:

I have recently come accross a rather strage idealism that seems to be taking hold of more and more Catholics online. It’s something I’ve not heard of until now: ‘The Gospel of Non-Violence’.

I didn’t hear the proper name of it for a while, but the basic ideas I read people talking about seemed fine: “we shouldn’t promote violence as a way of resolving issues, forgiveness for your enemies, etc.” Then, to borrow a phrase from Austin Powers: “it got weird.” As I read the people who espouse it, I found that they teach that not only is agressive war evil, but even DEFENSIVE war, OF ANY KIND WHATSOEVER, is morally evil. Answering a direct question I posed, they even write that you shouldn’t defend your own life or the lives of your family with violence from unjust lethal attack, as that violates the spirit of the Sermon on The Mount. The more I saw, the more it seemed like this entire movement could only have come from Ghandi and a bunch on Quakers coming together at a commune, smoking a huge bowl of Colombian Gold, and writing up an ideology.

As I read more, I found that one of the main founders of this ideology is some Jesuit priest named Fr. John Dear. His entire work, it seems, envolves speaking tours and getting arrested for trespassing at military bases. They also seem to toss out the entire Scripture, New and Old Testament, and the only thing they kept was Matthew, chapter 5. Get this! This Fr. John Dear even claimed that Jesus’ driving the moneychangers from the temple with the improvised whip was nonviolence and an act of non-cooperation. (they love that phrase ‘non’, lemme tell you.)

What is wrong with these people??? What’s some good way of countering so many of their absurd statements in a way that they can understand?

Thanks for your help in advance.

Pacifism has a long and venerable history in the Church. The earliest Christians refused to take up arms and many of them went–with their families–to the lions saying things remarkably similar to the sorts of things said by modern pacifists–even as their interlocutors said things remarkably similar to the complaints in this email. So history does, indeed, repeat itself.

The Catechism (that would be the same one that also instructs us on Just War doctrine) has this to say about peacemakers and pacifism:

Peace

2302 By recalling the commandment, “You shall not kill,”94 our Lord asked for peace of heart and denounced murderous anger and hatred as immoral.

Anger is a desire for revenge. “To desire vengeance in order to do evil to someone who should be punished is illicit,” but it is praiseworthy to impose restitution “to correct vices and maintain justice.”95 If anger reaches the point of a deliberate desire to kill or seriously wound a neighbor, it is gravely against charity; it is a mortal sin. The Lord says, “Everyone who is angry with his brother shall be liable to judgment.”96

2303 Deliberate hatred is contrary to charity. Hatred of the neighbor is a sin when one deliberately wishes him evil. Hatred of the neighbor is a grave sin when one deliberately desires him grave harm. “But I say to you, Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, so that you may be sons of your Father who is in heaven.”97

2304 Respect for and development of human life require peace. Peace is not merely the absence of war, and it is not limited to maintaining a balance of powers between adversaries. Peace cannot be attained on earth without safeguarding the goods of persons, free communication among men, respect for the dignity of persons and peoples, and the assiduous practice of fraternity. Peace is “the tranquillity of order.”98 Peace is the work of justice and the effect of charity.99

2305 Earthly peace is the image and fruit of the peace of Christ, the messianic “Prince of Peace.”100 By the blood of his Cross, “in his own person he killed the hostility,”101 he reconciled men with God and made his Church the sacrament of the unity of the human race and of its union with God. “He is our peace.”102 He has declared: “Blessed are the peacemakers.”103

2306 Those who renounce violence and bloodshed and, in order to safeguard human rights, make use of those means of defense available to the weakest, bear witness to evangelical charity, provided they do so without harming the rights and obligations of other men and societies. They bear legitimate witness to the gravity of the physical and moral risks of recourse to violence, with all its destruction and death.104

This instruction *precedes* the instruction on just war, since war is, in the Church’s understanding, a last ditch effort, not “common sense” and not the method all sensible people agree is the natural state of the human race (as, for instance, warmongers and End to Evil strategists like Victor Davis Hanson and his fellow pagan Machiavellians insist.) Sin is, for Catholics, normal, but not “natural”. Never natural. Sin destroys nature. So a philosophy predicates on the assumption that sin is natural is contrary to both nature and grace.

Now the Church *allows* for war when all alternatives to peace have been exhausted. But her natural sympathy is with peace as the norm, since we are created to live in peace. So she is not nearly as swift to advocate arms as our culture is (as we saw in the ongoing debacle of the Iraq war). She does not condemn war as intrinsically wrong. But she has always left open a place at the table for people who genuinely believe that it is always wrong to take up arms. In this, she basically lives out the counsels of St. Paul in Romans 14, recognizing that some people believe it morally incumbent upon them *not* to fight, just as other believe it morally incumbent upon them *to* fight. Our task is to not pass judgement and assume too quickly that those who disagree are either bellicose Mars worshippers or cowardly ninnies. Our tradition has both Joan of Arc and Franz Jägerstätter, who refused to fight, not merely because he was anti-Nazi, but because he was a convinced pacifist.

The only place the Church draws the line with pacifist (as she does with Just War types) is when they try to insist that anybody who disagrees with them is “not really Catholic”. If anything, the onus is on Just War types to remember that, since we are in the majority, it particularly falls to us not to speak with contempt of pacifists since, as Holy Church reminds us, they “bear witness to evangelical charity, provided they do so without harming the rights and obligations of other men and societies. They bear legitimate witness to the gravity of the physical and moral risks of recourse to violence, with all its destruction and death.”