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[Expositions 13.2 (2019) 137–151] Expositions (online) ISSN: 1747–5376 

     

What It Will Take: Learning from Pope Francis’s Peacebuilding Pedagogy 

 

GERALD W. SCHLABACH 

University of St. Thomas 

 

 

Context 

It is not too soon for those advocating for a shift from a “just war” to a just peace framework 

within Catholic social teaching and practice to anticipate the challenge of “reception”—the need, 

that is, for a wide consensus of Catholics across the Church to embrace Church teaching in order 

to authenticate it. Pope Francis and his advisers in the Vatican’s Dicastery for Promoting Integral 

Human Development clearly are listening to the call for such a shift. But for the vast and 

complex faith community that is the global Roman Catholic Church to shift indeed, the Church is 

going to need more than signals from the magisterium—even if those signals take the strongest 

possible form, an encyclical on gospel nonviolence such as advocates are calling for. While 

affirming their efforts, Francis also has a message to those advocates. So, if they hope to 

succeed, they—we—must do our share of listening too. 

In his 2017 World Day of Peace (WDP) message,1 Francis offers the strongest papal mandate 

yet for Catholics to make active nonviolence normative in their response to injustice and 

violence in the world, but he does more than that. Yes, in at least three ways, he joins his voice to 

the argument that Catholic peace activists and thinkers have been making for decades: (1) He 

draws upon and promotes a growing body of biblical exegesis that rescues the Sermon on the 

Mount from easily dismissible idealism; (2) he recounts some of the many under-told histories of 

nonviolent campaigns and points toward the sociopolitical dynamics that account for their 

remarkable success; (3) he appeals to a consensus (which has come to include stringent just war 

thinkers) that recognizes that even putatively “just” wars inevitably contribute to vicious cycles 

of further violence, which call for creative transforming initiatives to escape.  

But while Catholic proponents of active nonviolence have already been doing all of these 

things themselves, Francis also challenges them with additional points of agenda: (4) He sends a 

clear signal that any Church-wide reception of gospel nonviolence will require more than 



Learning from Pope Francis’s Peacebuilding Pedagogy 138 

 

critique of the just war theory, but must positively fill the space that just war theory has 

historically intended to fill. To do this, (5) they must anticipate the tasks of actually governing, 

through a “politics for peace.” Unless nonviolent activists are prepared—both psychologically 

and strategically—to help govern on “the day after” a tyrant falls or a regime changes, the 

politics of nonviolent change will remain unfinished, and reception will falter.  

 

Anticipating the Need for “Reception” 

In his 2017 World Day of Peace (WDP) message, Francis unmistakably demonstrates that he has 

listened to the appeal for clearer teaching on gospel nonviolence issued at a historic conference 

co-sponsored by Pax Christi International and the Pontifical Council on Justice and Peace (now 

folded into the new dicastery) in Rome the previous April.2 Three years later, the dicastery 

hosted a follow-up meeting,3 and with some regularity Francis continues to highlight not only the 

preferability but the power of nonviolence.4 All of this only begins to address the challenge of 

Church-wide reception, however.  

To notice why, let us imagine that the Holy Father indeed responds further to the April 2016 

“Appeal to the Catholic Church to Re-Commit to the Centrality of Gospel Nonviolence” not only 

by issuing an encyclical but by moving Church teaching away from a “just war” to a just peace 

framework. What then? What will prevent such an encyclical from going the way of Humanae 

vitae—Pope Paul VI’s 1968 encyclical on contraception, which broad swaths of the Catholic 

world have not “received” except with controversy or even cynicism? Fortunately, Pope 

Francis’s WDP message itself charts a path toward Church-wide reception. But advisers who 

assist the Holy Father in drafting any future encyclical, as well as activists who seek to amplify 

papal signals, will need to attend closely to the markers he charted there. 

Anyone who reads Catholic Church documents learns to recognize a certain kind of savvy 

rhetorical strategy. The Vatican’s carefully finessed language may sometimes be frustrating in its 

nuance but it can also serve to balance considerations and forge consensus in a complex global 

community. Pope Francis thus exercises an appropriate Vatican savvy as he alludes to the 

possible use of “just war” criteria in his 2017 WDP message, yet leaves the theory unnamed—for 

now, neither rejected outright nor defended.  



139  Schlabach 

 

   

What Pope Francis names instead is the space that the Vatican and Catholic moral theology 

have historically hoped the “just war” theory would fill. Section 6 of the WDP message begins 

this way: 

 

Peacebuilding through active nonviolence is the natural and necessary 

complement to the Church’s continuing efforts to limit the use of force by the 

application of moral norms; she does so by her participation in the work of 

international institutions and through the competent contribution made by so 

many Christians to the drafting of legislation at all levels.  

 

Now because “just war” theory has long provided the framework for those efforts of the Church 

to “limit the use of force by the application of moral norms” (and indeed has helped build the 

architecture for international law along the way), this sentence might seem to validate its 

continued use. And yet the papal restraint that left “just war” theory here unnamed also recalls 

the unease that once prompted Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger—later Pope Benedict XVI—to wonder 

out loud whether “today we should be asking ourselves if it is still licit to admit the very 

existence of a ‘just war.’”5 After all, Francis is not done here. 

 

Francis Joins the Arguments of Peace Activists 

While the space for Church engagement in international diplomacy and public policy work 

stands in a mutually supportive relationship with active nonviolence according to section 6 of 

Francis’s 2017 WDP message, what the Pope does next is breathtaking. He insists that “Jesus 

himself offers a ‘manual’ for this [integrated] strategy of peacemaking in the Sermon on the 

Mount.” Such a claim points to the need to bring fresh and insightful exegesis together with 

historical evidence and social scientific analysis in a hermeneutic circle both informed by the 

biblical text and further illuminating it. 

 

Biblical Exegesis to Rescue the Sermon on the Mount 

Two things were at work in Francis’s calling the Sermon on the Mount a “manual” for strategic 

peacemaking. First, his use of the word “manual” is a most intriguing word choice. “Manualism” 

had been the neo-scholastic mode of Catholic moral deliberation ascendant from the Seventeenth 



Learning from Pope Francis’s Peacebuilding Pedagogy 140 

 

Century until the Second Vatican Council. Drawing on St. Thomas Aquinas’s carefully reasoned 

reflection on the natural law, the Manualist mode sought to rival Enlightenment rationalism. 

Whatever its virtues, it tended therefore to de-emphasize biblical sources and thus offered a 

comfortable home for “just war” casuistry. To now, instead, call the Sermon on the Mount 

(Matthew 5–7) the Church’s manual for peacemaking hardly seems to have been an accident. 

In any case, a second signal is unmistakable: after reflecting briefly on the Beatitudes as a 

template for the virtues that any authentic peacemaker will embody, Pope Francis describes the 

Sermon on the Mount and the Beatitudes as “also a program and a challenge for political and 

religious leaders, the heads of international institutions, and business and media executives” to 

apply amid “the exercise of their respective responsibilities.” The manual that the Sermon on the 

Mount provides, in other words, is not just for the personal lives of particularly saintly 

Christians. It applies to the public realm.6 It elicits, as the WDP title has already announced, a 

“style of politics for peace.” 

Here, though, is where we must especially anticipate the challenge of reception. Active 

nonviolence is not simply protest and certainly not passivity, as Pope Francis himself notes.7 Yet 

the unformed, uninformed assumption of many is going to be that practicing the Sermon on the 

Mount in public affairs is a lofty but idealistic notion and no more. To rescue the Sermon from 

an idealism that eventually leads to its dismissal as politically irrelevant,8 more than assertion or 

biblical proof-texting is necessary.  

Just as the phrase “to be or not to be” has circulated in popular culture among many people 

who know it comes from Shakespeare but have never seen Hamlet, Jesus’s injunctions to “turn 

the other cheek” or “go the second mile” have taken on a life of their own. Many people—

certainly in the culture at large but even among devout Catholics—may vaguely associate such 

phrases with Jesus but have never studied the Sermon on the Mount carefully. Serious biblical 

exegesis, however, recognizes these teachings as paradigmatic models for a sophisticated 

practice of active nonviolence that counters injustice with the creativity needed to transform 

social processes. Following the exegesis of the Sermon on the Mount by New Testament scholar 

Walter Wink9 and Christian ethicist Glen Stassen,10 another key to reception, therefore, will be to 

explain the social dynamics of active nonviolence by which courageously “turning the other 



141  Schlabach 

 

   

cheek” or otherwise loving enemies can expose injustice and turn the tide of bystander 

complacency into support.  

 

Telling the Under-Told Stories 

Pope Francis certainly knows the power of active nonviolence. In section 3 of his 2017 WDP 

message, he characterizes Jesus’s message as a “radically positive approach,” not just a negative 

refusal of violence. He then goes on to pair Jesus’s teaching about love of enemies with his 

stopping the unjust accusers who were about to stone a woman caught in adultery—thus 

underscoring that nonviolent peacemaking is inseparable from work for justice. He also reiterates 

his predecessor Pope Benedict’s characterization of enemy love as “the nucleus of the ‘Christian 

revolution’” and the “magna carta of Christian nonviolence.”11  

Here then is where Francis collates biblical exegesis with historical examples. In section 4 he 

outlines examples of how the “decisive and consistent practice of nonviolence has produced 

effective results” in campaigns by the Hindu Mahatma Gandhi, the Muslim Khan Abdul Ghaffar 

Khan, and the Christian Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. To be sure, Gandhi and King are iconic, 

sometimes to the point that hagiographic veneration disempowers their legacies. Fortunately, 

Francis continued with further examples of otherwise ordinary people wielding the power of 

active nonviolence:  

 

Women in particular are often leaders of nonviolence, as for example, was 

Leymah Gbowee and the thousands of Liberian women, who organized pray-ins 

and nonviolent protest that resulted in high-level peace talks to end the second 

civil war in Liberia.  

Nor can we forget the eventful decade that ended with the fall of Communist 

regimes in Europe. The Christian communities made their own contribution by 

their insistent prayer and courageous action. 

 

Even while citing “the ministry and teaching of Saint [Pope] John Paul II” in these events, 

Francis follows the lead that his predecessor himself took when he wrote his 1991 encyclical 

Centesiumus annus. John Paul had given credit not so much to his own geopolitical leadership 

but—as Francis now quotes him—to “the non-violent commitment of people [at the grassroots] 



Learning from Pope Francis’s Peacebuilding Pedagogy 142 

 

who, while always refusing to yield to the force of power, succeeded time after time in finding 

effective ways of bearing witness to the truth […] using only the weapons of truth and justice.”12  

 

Escaping Vicious Cycles through Transforming Initiative 

Amplifying Pope Francis’s message by tirelessly recounting these and many more such histories 

is obviously one key way to invite a wide reception of gospel nonviolence. But for a truly wide 

reception by which jaded opinion-leaders, or parishioners anxious about their nation’s security, 

take a second look at Pope Francis’s WDP message now—and hopefully an encyclical later—we 

must turn historical anecdote into global narrative by integrating biblical exegesis with social 

analysis. Again, though, the Holy Father charts a path in his WDP message, though this time 

perhaps more by papal intuition rather than explicitly. 

At various points throughout the document Pope Francis argues for active nonviolence by 

citing cycles of violence and the need to escape them. The “horrifying world war [being] fought 

piecemeal” in the Twenty-First Century has resulted from violence upon violence, he notes. The 

Pope certainly does not deny that war may sometimes respond to injustice. Yet, he asks, “Where 

does this lead? Does violence achieve any goal of lasting value?” No, it leads “to retaliation and 

a cycle of deadly conflict” rather than any “cure for our broken world” (§2). That is why “the 

force of arms is deceptive” (§4). Gospel nonviolence is the truly revolutionary alternative, 

therefore, because “responding to evil with good” rather than “succumbing to evil” by 

responding in kind means “thereby breaking the chain of injustice” (§3).  

Pursuing this line of reasoning should widen reception of the magisterium’s growing body of 

teaching on gospel nonviolence because the diagnosis of vicious cycles is something that 

practitioners of “just war” theory have already agreed upon. No one these days expects any war 

to end all wars, after all. Even anxious security-minded parishioners who are not well-versed in 

the theory, but expect the Church to allow wars in their name one way or another, will be more 

likely to give gospel nonviolence a hearing if the argument is not about whether the causes that 

are dear to their heart are ever just. Politicians often whip up support for dubious causes, of 

course, and one tact for peacebuilders is to deconstruct their jingoistic claims. But those who 

argue that war can never be just are unwise to imply that deeply-held causes are never just. 

Instead we will be wise to frame our arguments within a diagnosis of vicious cycles: in war, even 



143  Schlabach 

 

   

winners lose. Wars that are supposedly just still plant the seeds of new resentments, and thus new 

rounds of mutually reinforcing injustice.  

Building on a wider consensus and acknowledging the legitimate concerns of those whom one 

is seeking to persuade are not simply smart rhetorical strategies; they were part of Jesus’s own 

pedagogy in the Sermon on the Mount itself. As the late Christian ethicist Glen Stassen, a 

leading advocate of “just peacemaking” theory, demonstrated, Jesus’s teachings in most of 

Matthew 5–7 come as a series of fourteen triads that reveal Jesus’s very approach to moral 

reasoning. Jesus’s consistent pattern was to first name the people’s “traditional righteousness” or 

morality, then demonstrate its inability to escape some vicious cycle, then offer a “transforming 

initiative.”13 His focus was not on dismantling traditional righteousness per se; a standard 

teaching such as “eye for an eye” was commendable so far as it went—in this case by limiting 

immediate violence. But traditional righteousness did not go far enough, as he made clear by 

diagnosing its inherent flaw in the vicious cycles that it failed to end. Instead, Jesus’s focus was 

thus on “transforming initiatives” such as those paradigmatic acts of active nonviolence that 

resist evil but not in kind. Still, that did not mean he fully disparaged the transitional contribution 

of traditional righteousness nor the willingness of those schooled in it to begin diagnosing its 

limited ability to escape vicious cycles.14  

  

Francis’s Challenge to Catholic Peace Activists 

The space that the Church has long hoped “just war” theory would fill does need filling. 

Educating more and more Catholics about the demonstrable power of active nonviolence and 

training them in its practice will certainly be a major part of the work toward reception. Yet one 

reason that the “just war” theory has long seemed necessary is that it offers a form of discourse, a 

lingua franca across worldviews and ethical frameworks. Even those who doubt the justice of 

any war have sometimes needed to use it as a second language in order to counter calls for 

specific wars. Thus have they too engaged in those “continuing efforts to limit the use of force 

by the application of moral norms” that Francis identified in his WDP message, as they 

participate in “the work of international institutions” or contribute “to the drafting of legislation 

at all levels.”15 Ultimately, though, the need that requires filling is not merely for a common 

language. It is the need to govern.  



Learning from Pope Francis’s Peacebuilding Pedagogy 144 

 

For what if we actually win? As I have observed or participated in various social movements 

over four decades—reformist and revolutionary, violent and nonviolent, Christian and secular—

neglect for this question has often been the great lacuna that has tripped them up. Working from 

the margins and struggling against hopelessness, they often have reason to be cynical about 

established institutions. An oppositional or “prophetic” stance may then become so much a part 

of their identity that it serves as the only psychological home in which they feel comfortable, and 

the “compromises” they might have to make in order to actually run things all feel like selling 

out. Absorbed in the urgent tasks of resisting unjust powers-that-be, activists may feel as though 

the task of specifying how they would actually exercise power in order to enact the changes they 

are calling is a luxury. But it never is.  

However compelling may be the record of nonviolent campaigns in resisting injustice and 

bringing down tyrants, after all, and however superior their record of preparing for and enabling 

democratic governance in comparison to that of violent insurrection,16 the record of nonviolent 

governance is spottier. Thanks to the development of Gandhian nonviolence in the Twentieth 

Century, peace activists rightly point to far more victories overthrowing tyranny than either 

standard history books admit or popular imagination recognizes. But having won independence 

Gandhi’s own India became one of the first nation-states in what was then called the Third 

World to develop nuclear weaponry. Why? To “overthrow tyranny” is merely a double negative. 

While a double negative may equal a positive in pure mathematics, in social affairs a nonviolent 

revolution overthrowing Marcos in the Philippines or even the Soviet Empire in 1989 does not 

yet offer a positive model of nonviolent governance. We cannot expect to replace the just war 

tradition in the Roman Catholic Church unless and until we unreservedly embrace the challenge 

of governing on “the day after.”  

Having been formed as a Mennonite in one of the so-called historic peace churches (HPCs), 

then entered into full communion with the Catholic Church in 2004 and been a leader in 

Mennonite-Catholic ecumenical dialogue, I sometimes hear my fellow Catholic pacifists 

expressing a kind of peace-church envy. But “beware what you ask for—you might get it.” The 

experience of HPCs is instructive, particularly as they have moved from more sectarian and 

apolitical social postures to an engaged social ethic embracing active nonviolence in contrast to 

what they formerly called “biblical nonresistance.”17 The centuries-long pattern of Church 



145  Schlabach 

 

   

alliances with princes, kings, and nation-states that peace-church thinkers term 

“Constantinianism” is suspect if not anathema to many of them. Historically and even today—

perhaps especially among peace-and-justice activists—HPC members who work within the state 

have sometimes been suspect. Yet the more that social-justice advocacy succeeds, the more it 

invites a counter-invitation to participate first in policymaking and then in governance. And in 

every human community I know, governing requires some kind of enforcement, coercion, 

policing, even if it is nonlethal policing. One option for avoiding the dilemma has been 

principled Christian anarchism, which seems to offer a way to impact the larger society 

perpetually from the margins, through perpetual prophetic critique and small-scale local 

alternative patterns of life. But this only defers rather than avoids the challenge. For, logically, 

one must either abandon all hope that anyone else will actually listen or else must anticipate the 

question, “So will you help us do what you’ve been calling us to do?” 

Not all Christian pacifists have avoided this challenge. For about five years in the early 2000s 

I served on an advisory committee on peace issues for the international program of Mennonite 

Central Committee (MCC), the relief, development, and peacebuilding collaborative arm of 

various Mennonite churches. During that time the committee commissioned a three-year special 

project. Prompting it in part was the insecurity many felt following the events of September 11, 

2001. But the more important prompts were questions that MCC workers and partners around the 

world had been facing for years in conflict zones and failed states where “order” and 

“institutionality” and “security” were not necessarily code words for oppressive regimes. Rather, 

they named dreams of functioning civil society or even shalom. The goal, then, was to articulate 

within the framework of Mennonite thought and pacifist ethics a positive theology of order and 

governance that might even take back that word “security” from militarists.18  

Admittedly, what was most controversial about the project among Mennonites was its 

willingness to consider (even if not yet endorse) a concept I had independently begun to interject 

into ecumenical conversations between Mennonites and Catholics—that of “just policing.”19 

Initially as a resource for the historic international dialogue between Mennonite World 

Conference and the Pontifical Council for Promoting Church Unity from 1998–2003, I had 

sought to narrow the gap between just war and pacifist traditions by arguing that  

 



Learning from Pope Francis’s Peacebuilding Pedagogy 146 

 

If the best intentions of the just war theorists were operational, they could only 

allow for just policing, not warfare at all. If Christian pacifists can in any way 

support, participate, or at least not object to operations with recourse to limited 

but potentially lethal force, that will only be true for just policing. Just policing—

and just just policing.20 

 

My goal on the Mennonite side was not to convince them to abandon their historic pacifism, but 

to press them and other pacifists to fill a major gap in their theory and practice: either define the 

very limited circumstances in which violence might be justified in demilitarized policing, or 

better yet, recover and design strategic models for nonlethal and nonviolent policing. 

None of this need be so controversial among Catholics, however—even among Catholic 

pacifists. However much we ought to repent of all the dubious ways in which Catholics from 

prelate to pew have misaligned their allegiances to emperors, princes, and nation-states down 

through the centuries, we need not have the same allergy toward governance that some HPCs 

have had. As Pope Francis has affirmed on various occasions, “Politics, though often denigrated, 

remains a lofty vocation and one of the highest forms of charity, inasmuch as it seeks the 

common good.”21 

Historically, just war thinking and “Constantinianism” have been the downside to a Catholic 

upside—the embrace of governance and protection of the vulnerable as responses to the 

legitimate concern for security that seeks to allow everyone “under their own vines and under 

their own fig trees, and no one shall make them afraid” (Micah 4:4). Catholic peace activists will 

only complete the transformation of Catholic peace theology if we embrace rather than dismiss 

that challenge. Yes, of course, we must highlight the histories of those double-negative social 

movements that have demonstrated the power of active nonviolence to resist oppression and 

overthrow tyranny. Continuing to develop pilot projects of the sort that Christian Peacemakers, 

Nonviolent Peaceforce, Peace Brigades International, Operation Dove, and other organizations 

are doing for the protection of vulnerable populations, in hopes that they will eventually be 

scaled up by governments as institutions for civilian-based defense and nonviolent humanitarian 

intervention, will be another especially crucial part. But we must do still more. Whether our hope 

is to provide alternatives to every form of violence, or render the exceptional use of lethal 



147  Schlabach 

 

   

violence truly exceptional by limiting it to just policing according to the rule of law, we must 

develop active nonviolence as a positive strategy not just for resisting nonviolently but for 

governing with less and less recourse to violence. 

 

Conclusion 

Pope Francis sees a “natural and necessary complement” between “peacebuilding through active 

nonviolence” and this continuing engagement. Many Catholic peacebuilders see “just war” 

theory as a distraction if not an obstacle to both. If we follow Jesus’s lead, though, we will not 

need to wait until all Catholic theologians, bishops, or other opinion-leaders are convinced to 

abandon their “traditional righteousness” and agree that there is no “just war.” Church-wide 

reception of gospel nonviolence and just peace can take root simply by moving on, as Jesus’s 

did, to those second and third points—the diagnosis of vicious cycles as proper complement to 

the social power and moral imperative of transforming initiatives.  

Catholic peacebuilders can be grateful that the Vatican is listening, but we should also learn 

from Pope Francis’s pedagogically savvy rhetorical strategy. If we expect the Pope to take down 

the “just war” theory at one fell swoop in an eventual encyclical, we may be inviting 

disappointment. Everything in Church history and the development of doctrine suggests that the 

magisterium is loath to say that great Christian authorities of the past were outright wrong. 

Rather, popes and Church councils look for other clever ways to just move on. My prediction is 

that the “just war” theory will be damned with faint praise or die a death of a thousand cuts. Our 

best and quite realistic hope is the “just war” will continue going the way of capital punishment, 

which Pope John Paul II did not quite reject in theory but did reject for modern societies.22 

Reception has obviously not been unanimous—how could anything be unanimous in the world’s 

largest religious body?—but it has been significant enough to move the public-policy needle in 

many countries.  

Pope Francis’s 2017 World Day of Peace message, and section 6 in particular, is exactly what 

that process is going to look like. The job of Catholic peacebuilders is to amplify the signals—

but first to be sure they are attending to all of those signals. 

 
 
 



Learning from Pope Francis’s Peacebuilding Pedagogy 148 

 

Notes 
 

1. Pope Francis, “Nonviolence: A Style of Politics for Peace,” The Holy See, January 1, 

2017, 

https://w2.vatican.va/content/francesco/en/messages/peace/documents/papa-

francesco_20161208_messaggio-l-giornata-mondiale-pace-2017.html. 

2. “An Appeal to the Catholic Church to Re-Commit to the Centrality of Gospel 

Nonviolence,” Catholic Nonviolence Initiative, 2016, 

https://nonviolencejustpeace.net/final-statement-an-appeal-to-the-catholic-church-to-re-

commit-to-the-centrality-of-gospel-nonviolence/. 

3. “‘Path of Nonviolence’ Workshop Concludes in Vatican,” Vatican News April 6 2019, 

https://www.vaticannews.va/en/vatican-city/news/2019–04/nonviolence-dicastery-

integral-human-development.html; Joshua J. McElwee, “Vatican’s Second Conference on 

Nonviolence Renews Hope for Encyclical,” National Catholic Reporter May 3–16 2019; 

Pax Christi International, “Faith Leaders, Peace Practitioners Deepen Church’s 

Commitment to Nonviolence and Peace,” April 6, 2019,  

https://www.paxchristi.net/news/vatican-city-faith-leaders-peace-practitioners-deepen-

churchs-commitment-nonviolence-and-peace. 

4. Most recently in the news at the time of this writing, Francis told a meeting of 

theologians that they “should also look to non-violence as a horizon” and make it one of 

the “constitutive elements” of theology (Gerard O’Connell, “Pope Francis to Theologians 

in Naples: One Cannot Do Theology Without Freedom,” America June 21, 2019,  

https://www.americamagazine.org/faith/2019/06/21/pope-francis-theologians-naples-one-

cannot-do-theology-without-freedom). 

5. “Cardinal Ratzinger on the Abridged Version of Catechism Compendium Expected Out 

in 2 Years,” ZENIT News Agency May 2, 2003, 

https://zenit.org/articles/cardinal-ratzinger-on-the-abridged-version-of-catechism/. 

6. To be sure, this insistence on the public applicability of nonviolence is not an innovation 

by Francis. While the Second Vatican Council had made a breakthrough recognition of 

the legitimacy of nonviolence by affirming the right to conscientious objection in 

Gaudium et spes §78, the refusal of violence even for purposes of self-defense here was 



149  Schlabach 

 

   

essentially a matter of commendable personal holiness, and initially no more. By 1991, 

however, as Pope John Paul II reflected in his encyclical Centesimus annus on the events 

of 1989 in which nonviolent movements had brought down the Soviet Empire, active 

nonviolence had won definitive recognition as applicable in public affairs. Drew 

Christiansen, S.J., has traced this trajectory in numerous writings, e.g., “After September 

11: Catholic Social Teaching on Peace and War,” Origins May 30, 2002: 33, 35–40; 

“Whither the ‘Just War’?” America March 24, 2003: 7–11; “The Ethics of Peacemaking: 

The Genesis of Called Together to Be Peacemakers, Report of the International 

Mennonite-Catholic Dialogue (2004),” Journal of Ecumenical Studies 45.3 (Summer 

2010): 385–416; “Nonviolence, the Responsibility to Protect and Peacebuilding,” 

Origins September 29, 2011: 265–70.  

7. Pope Francis, “Nonviolence: A Style of Politics for Peace”: “Nonviolence is sometimes 

taken to mean surrender, lack of involvement and passivity, but this is not the case” (§4).  

8. The most famous spokesman for this widespread assumption remains the twentieth-

century Protestant theologian Reinhold Niebuhr; see, for example, “Why the Christian 

Church is not Pacifist,” in Christianity and Power Politics (New York: Charles 

Scribner’s Sons, 1940), 1–32.  

9. See Walter Wink, The Powers That Be: Theology for a New Millennium (New York: 

Doubleday, 1998), which provides a condensed version of his three-volume series on 

Naming the Powers, Unmasking the Powers, and Engaging the Powers, published by 

Fortress Press, 1984–1992.  

10. Glen H. Stassen, Living the Sermon on the Mount: A Practical Hope for Grace and 

Deliverance (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2006), 91–98. Also note additional resources 

from Stassen in footnote 13. 

11. Pope Benedict XVI, “Angelus,” The Holy See, February 18, 2007, 

http://w2.vatican.va/content/benedict-xvi/en/angelus/2007/documents/hf_ben-

xvi_ang_20070218.html. 

12. Pope John Paul II, Centesimus annus, The Holy See, 1991, §23,  

http://www.vatican.va/content/john-paul-ii/en/encyclicals/documents/hf_jp-

ii_enc_01051991_centesimus-annus.html. 



Learning from Pope Francis’s Peacebuilding Pedagogy 150 

 

13. Stassen laid out his exegetical evidence in greatest detail for biblical scholars in “The 

Fourteen Triads of the Sermon on the Mount (Matthew 5:21–7:12),” Journal of Biblical 

Literature 122.2 (Summer 2003): 267–308. His most accessible elaboration for a general 

audience is Living the Sermon on the Mount. Also see Glen H. Stassen and David P. 

Gushee, Kingdom Ethics: Following Jesus in Contemporary Context (Downers Grove, 

IL: InterVarsity Press, 2003); Glen H. Stassen, “Healing the Rift Between the Sermon on 

the Mount and Christian Ethics,” Studies in Christian Ethics 18.3 (2005): 89–105; and 

Glen H. Stassen, A Thicker Jesus: Incarnational Discipleship in a Secular Age 

(Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 2012).  

14. See my own extension of Stassen’s work in this direction: “‘Confessional’ Nonviolence 

and the Unity of the Church: Can Christians Square the Circle?” Journal of the Society of 

Christian Ethics 34.1 (2014): 125–44. “A ‘Manual’ for Escaping Our Vicious Cycles,” 

Journal of Moral Theology 7.2 (June 2018): 86–91; “A ‘Manual’ for Escaping Our 

Vicious Cycles: The Political Relevance of Enemy-Love,” Modern Theology (2018), 

https://rdcu.be/bfWNE; and the final two chapters of A Pilgrim People: Becoming a 

Catholic Peace Church (Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 2019).  

15. Pope Francis, “Nonviolence: A Style of Politics for Peace” §6. 

16. This is one of the statistically backed arguments in Erica Chenoweth and Maria J. 

Stephan, Why Civil Resistance Works: The Strategic Logic of Nonviolent Conflict (New 

York: Columbia University Press, 2011). Note, however, that the focus of Chenoweth 

and Stephan is nonetheless on nonviolent civil resistance, prior to governance, more so 

than robust nonviolent governance. Although they do find statistical relevance in how the 

former cultivates the habits and political conditions for significant characteristics of 

nonviolent governance, such as participation, consensus decision-making, resilience, 

creativity, and nonviolent structures, etc. For more on fostering nonviolent governance, 

see Véronique Dudouet, “Powering to Peace: Integrated Civil Resistance and 

Peacebuilding Strategies,” International Center on Nonviolent Conflict, Special Report 

Series 1 (April 2017), https://www.nonviolent-conflict.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/07/ 

ICNC-Special-Report-Civil-Resistance-and-Peacebuilding.pdf; and Nadine Bloch and 



151  Schlabach 

 

   

Lisa Schirch, Synergizing Nonviolent Action and Peacebuilding: An Action Guide 

(Washington, DC: U.S. Institute of Peace, 2018). 

17. See Leo Driedger and Donald B. Kraybill, Mennonite Peacemaking: From Quietism to 

Activism (Scottdale, PA: Herald Press, 1994). 

18. I dare say that the resulting book that I co-edited with Duane Friesen, At Peace and 

Unafraid: Public Order, Security and the wisdom of the Cross (Scottdale, PA: Herald 

Press, 2005) would offer many leads and lessons for Catholic peace activists.  

19. See Gerald W. Schlabach, “Just Policing: How War Could Cease to Be a Church-

Dividing Issue,” Journal of Ecumenical Studies 41.3–4 (Summer-Fall 2004): 409–30; 

“Just Policing, not War,” America July 7–14, 2003: 19–21, or Schlabach et al., Just 

Policing, not War: An Alternative Response to World Violence, with Drew Christiansen, 

S.J., et al. (Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 2007). 

20. Schlabach, Just Policing, not War 3. Also see Schlabach, “Just Policing: How War Could 

Cease to Be a Church-Dividing Issue” 410.  

21. Pope Francis, “Nourish the Planet: Energy for Life,” Video message of his holiness Pope 

Francis on the occasion of the meeting of national and international representatives: 

“EXPO of Ideas 2015—Toward the Milan Charter,” The Holy See, February 7, 2015, 

http://w2.vatican.va/content/francesco/en/messages/pont-

messages/2015/documents/papa-francesco_20150207_video-messaggio-expo-

milano.html. 

22. Pope John Paul II, Evangelium vitae, The Holy See, 1995, §56,  

http://www.vatican.va/content/john-paul-ii/en/encyclicals/documents/hf_jp-

ii_enc_25031995_evangelium-vitae.html. 


