Catholicism and the concrete pursuit of peace how and where to draw the line — is a concrete thorn in the Church, evidence of the real effort.
For years, Catholic theology—and perhaps the Church itself—has faced an unresolvable dilemma when it comes to peace. The more decisive and radical the stance against war, the less effective and fruitful the advocacy for peace becomes. Despite the efforts of biblical arguments, theological reasons, and historical reconstructions of the development of Catholic tradition and magisterium in favor of peace, peace is precisely what is missing from our world today.
Some theologians assert that citizens have the right to oppose war and all its enormous expenses. However, they argue that citizens are not obligated to identify ways to end ongoing wars or to establish international relations based on peace. This responsibility and duty would fall to elected representatives in parliamentary assemblies and the governments of our democratic societies. This maximalist option of Catholic pacifism seems to express the unresolved dilemma in which theology—and, in many respects, the Church itself—remains embroiled.
This stance carries a paradoxical consequence: making peace a “non-negotiable value,” which removes it from political mediation. This renders the duty placed on political representatives impossible. To borrow Bonhoeffer’s words, peace in the world is always a “penultimate reality”—contingent and conditional. Only God’s peace is absolute – and yet, even though it has already come in history through the actions of Jesus, it has yet to come. According to Bonhoeffer, penultimate realities are the arena of faith’s worldly work to prepare for the bursting in of the ultimate reality of the Kingdom of God.
When Christian faith engages in this work of preparing for what is to come but not yet present, it must bear a profound ambivalence. The actions of this work within penultimate realities are simultaneously transparent and messy. They are transparent in their obedience to God’s concrete commandment, which is always situational and contingent; and messy in their search for mediations and compromises that allow for genuine fidelity to the situation in its contingency. This fidelity to the situation generates a concrete ethical stance that can never be non-negotiable or indisputable. Otherwise, it would work against the situation in which God asks for obedience to his concrete commandment, which is never an absolute universal principle. Such a principle would be nothing more than an abstraction.
In the pursuit of peace, if faith does not take on such “dirty work” and at the same time bars it to politics, it becomes a cause of conflict itself. With this stance of Catholic pacifism, we are faced with a progressive reworking of the “culture wars” typical of conservative Catholic traditionalism. These new “culture wars” shift not only the agency (from conservative Catholics to progressive ones) but also the battlefield, moving it from personal morality to social ethics. There is a risk of entangling the Catholic Church in internal “culture wars” for decades, precisely at the moment when the election of Pope Leo XIV was meant to represent a way out of them. The Church will likely overcome the personal morality aspect of the “culture wars,” but not the one concerning social ethics and international relations, as evidenced by the clash between the pope and the American president.
If the Catholic Church finds itself in a permanent state of cultural war, how can it champion peace on the global stage? Neither theology nor the Magisterium seems capable of finding a way out of this situation for the time being. A situation that undermines the Church’s ability to engage effectively in diplomatic efforts for world peace, that is, in the context of penultimate realities.
Paradoxically, this situation weakens the Church more internally than externally. Until the Catholic “culture wars” reach a resolution, the Holy See cannot rely on all Catholics to act as an agency in the world’s concrete situations in favor of the peace it seeks to achieve through diplomatic work.
The ongoing state of cultural warfare within the Catholic Church speaks to its decade-long inability to create alternative frameworks for mediating the conflicts pervading the social fabric of our world. However, it also indicates that the Church is truly in the world and cannot be immune to the world’s way of being. Thinking that it is possible to overcome social conflict of the world within the Church without addressing how it manifests in the world would be an illusion and a fatal mistake for the world and the Church.
So far, the Church has operated under the logic that Catholics are “believers and citizens.” However, it is precisely this logic that has prevented an end to the “culture wars” and the peaceful resolution of the world’s social conflict within the Church. We must move away from this logic and begin operating according to a logic that views Catholics as “believing citizens”—where belonging to the polis and the community of faith are inseparable.
This requires addressing the world’s social conflicts within the Church through a worldly practice of faith. It means recognizing the validity of politics as a tool of mediation and compromise within the Christian community. However, it also means understanding the underlying causes of social conflict in the world, which are becoming increasingly deep and violent and are moving further away from any possibility of compromise or mediation.
This global condition, which is also the condition of the Catholic Church, has profoundly transformed politics: rather than being a space for the peaceful resolution of social conflict, politics has become a mirror that fuels violence and fragments society into irreconcilable groups.
Catholic theology—and, consequently, the Church itself—will only be able to find a solution to the peace dilemma it has been embroiled in for decades if it develops the worldly and political insight to understand the causes of the radicalization of social conflict worldwide. Furthermore, it must be capable of transforming faith into a new worldly agency that can effectively negotiate a peace that puts an end to Catholic “culture wars.”
Only then will the Catholic Church have the necessary tools to present itself effectively as a diplomatic agency for peace in an upcoming world order, which is possible to realize in its contingency and in the multifaceted array of disparate situations where peace is lacking.
