- Good afternoon, everyone.
My name is Shaun Casey,
and I'm the director of the Berkley Center
for Religion, Peace and World Affairs
here at Georgetown university.
It's my distinct pleasure to welcome you
to today's event, Toward
a Post-Nuclear Just Peace,
co-sponsored with
Georgetown University Press.
Before we get started, let me remind you
of a couple of logistical questions.
First of all, we will
have a Q and A session
towards the end of today's event,
and if you will look at
the bottom of your screen,
you should see a Q and A
tab on which you can click
and start typing your questions.
I ask that you start doing that
as soon as you have a
question appear in your brain
so that we have a robust list of questions
for our participants today.
And secondly, this event is being recorded
and will be posted on our
website within a few days.
So please come to our website,
and you can share the
link with other people
or you can watch the event again yourself.
We come together today for
an important discussion
between two interesting
and learned thinkers,
Drew Christiansen, who is
distinguished professor
of ethics and human development
in Georgetown School of Foreign Service
and also a senior fellow
here at the Berkley center,
and he's co-editor with Carol Sargent
of the new volume, "A World
Free From Nuclear Weapons",
and his conversation
partner is Eli McCarthy,
adjunct professor here at Georgetown
and editor of his new volume,
"A Just Peace Ethic Primer".
It's always possible to label any moment
in the nuclear age as a dangerous one,
but I think our current moment is rife
both with threats but also
new opportunities for peace,
especially in light of Pope
Francis' recent remarks
regarding the possession
of nuclear weapons.
Against the background of both global
and national political instability,
the daunting moral
questions around the use
and possession of nuclear weapons
take on even more
significance in this age.
We're fortunate to have
a very august, smart,
and learned discussion on
tap today to help us begin
to parse these complex new
questions we're facing.
We're honored by your presence today,
and we are thankful and grateful
that you've chosen to
spend this hour with us.
I'm now going to turn the discussion,
or the program, over to Carol Sargent,
who is the co-editor
with Drew of his volume.
Carol is the founding director
of Georgetown's Office
of Scholarly Production.
So Carol, over to you.
- I was delighted to meet Father Drew
over the issue of Catholic
sisters in nuclear disarmament.
Catherine Marshall sent
me to him, actually.
She said, "Well, you really have to talk
"to Drew Christiansen if you're
talking about disarmament."
And it was just a wonderful match
because he had such an interest
in global resistance to nuclear buildup,
but also in the work of these sisters.
That was just a a very
deep interest with him.
So what I'm gonna talk about
briefly is two sections:
people in our volume who
either were survivors
or in some way have had this
very firsthand engagement
with the reality either of nuclear weapons
or of other sorts of war and violence,
and so that's a specific list,
and I'll share them with you,
and then I'm going to go through
just a few of the sisters,
who may surprise you a little bit,
who are globally focused on
abolition, not deterrence.
So the first group that
we're gonna consider,
we will start of course with
a woman who is hibakusha,
and the term hibakusha, as
many or most of us know,
is a survivor of either
Hiroshima or Nagasaki.
And her name is Masako Wada,
and she's the assistant secretary general
of the Japan Confederation of A-
and H-Bomb Sufferers Organization,
and she's a survivor of Nagasaki,
and she was able to share that experience.
I had the privilege after
going to this conference
of going from Rome to
Hiroshima, it was just,
I was invited separately,
it had nothing to do
with nuclear disarmament,
I was simply invited by the university,
but I saw that she was all over
the front page of the Japanese news,
and they said she was meeting
with some guy in Rome.
So there was a very amusing
kind of difference in,
you know, what comes above the fold.
So her testimony is there.
The next person I wanna list as a survivor
is a different kind of survivor,
and that is Nobel Laureate
Mairead Corrigan Maguire,
the Northern Irish peace activist,
because she experienced violence
in a different way in Northern Ireland,
and her understanding of what violence is
is very tactile and immediate,
and I just was very riveted
by her message and her testimony.
And she founded the
Community of Peace People,
and is a really interesting person
from an earlier era to look up and know.
Another woman that I
categorize as a survivor,
again, to use this term somewhat loosely,
is Marie-Noëlle Koyara, Minister of State
for Defense of the
Central African Republic,
a very poor country that is receiving
so many of its neighbors as refugees
because it has a policy of
welcoming a lot of people.
And the violence there,
she said, is daily.
They're trying to disarm,
and it's very hard to disarm
when people are privately armed
and becoming violent against one another
in these sorts of conflicts.
And so she is a survivor, I believe,
of a very different type, but extremely
and keenly aware of the
need for peacekeeping.
Monica Attias survives in a different way
as a member of the
Community of Sant'Egidio.
It's a Catholic lay movement based in Rome
that works with migrants and refugees.
And in her chapter, she shows how forced,
or, excuse me, how war leads
to forced displacement,
and she makes a special plea
for humanitarian corridors
of safe passage for the
victims of armed conflict.
And I see her as a survivor too.
We've been trying to get
her attention all summer,
and she says, "I'm too busy."
She's at the front lines with people,
and she doesn't have time to stop and work
with me on a piece for the media.
Right, I get it, but what an
amazing life and testimony.
And the last survivor is
a different one entirely
because it's Mazda Motors Corporation,
which I had no idea was bombed.
And you think about, when we think
of Hiroshima and Nagasaki,
we think of hibakusha,
but we don't often consider companies
that employed a lot of people,
and so that Bruno Mueller's testimony.
I don't know if I have enough time
because I really wanted to keep
this to under five minutes.
Do you want me to go through the sisters,
or would you like me to
send that as an attachment?
I can also share that with people.
There are sisters in
Japan, sisters in the US,
sisters in the Netherlands,
sisters in the UK,
all united in disarmament,
but I will leave it up to my hosts
to decide whether we have time for that.
- Thank you, Carol.
So I think I'll take over from here.
I'm Al Bertrand, I'm the director
of Georgetown University Press,
and I wanted to say that
we're absolutely delighted
to be the publisher of these two books,
and I'm grateful for this opportunity
to put these two authors in conversation.
So I thought I'd start
with asking you both
to give just a brief
overview of your book,
but before we do that, I just
wanted to remind everyone
to please submit questions
using the Q and A function.
We'll get to as many of them as we can,
and we'd be delighted to do that,
so please use the Q and A
function for your questions.
So Eli, I thought I'd start with you,
and just, I guess, ask
first a very basic question.
Can you define what the
just peace ethic is?
And how did it, maybe take a
bit of a historical approach,
how did it arise from the gospels
and the way of Jesus, as well as building
on contemporary Catholic social thinking,
which of course challenges
us to see peacemaking
as more than the absence of violence?
- Thanks, Al.
It's wonderful to be with everyone today.
I'm very excited about this conversation.
So the just peace ethic is an
attempt to draw our attention
to how we can develop virtues and skills
to engage conflict well, to
break cycles of violence,
and to build sustainable peace.
So I'll jump into some of those norms,
I think, a little bit later,
but some of the background
on this approach.
There's a framework essay in
our book by Gerald Schlabach
where he writes about
kind of the scriptures,
the Christian scriptures,
particularly Sermon on
the Mount and so forth,
and this is really drawing
from the theme of Shalom
in the Hebrew scriptures
that draws our attention
to this reality of justice
and peace shall kiss.
In other words, they are interconnected
and interdependent in some
surprising and creative ways.
So Jesus models the way of just peace
by becoming vulnerable,
caring for the outcast,
prioritizing those in urgent need,
loving and forgiving enemies,
challenging the religious, political,
economic, and military powers,
healing persons and communities,
praying and fasting,
along with risking and
offering his life on the cross
to really expose and transcend
both injustice and violence.
And we know God's way of love
primarily through how Jesus lived,
hence he gives the new commandment:
to love "As I have loved you."
That is the nonviolent love of neighbor,
strangers, and enemies.
And with Jesus's focus on
healing and reconciliation,
even with enemies, we've
been increasingly learning
that the kind of justice
Christ seems to lean us toward
is a restorative justice.
So in the Sermon on the Mount,
Schlabach draws on Glen Stassen's insights
about these transforming initiatives
that he finds in that
section of Matthew 5,
where he notices that Jesus first names
the traditional righteousness
that his Jewish listeners had heard,
and then he diagnoses the vicious cycles
from which this traditional
righteousness could not escape.
And then, he offers realistic,
practical, transforming initiatives
to escape those vicious cycles at last.
So in Matthew 5, for example,
there's a section where he talks about,
"You heard an eye for an
eye, tooth for tooth,"
this was the traditional righteousness.
But there's recognition
that an eye for an eye
still perpetuates a cycle of violence.
So Jesus says, "Do not
resist in an evil way."
In other words, do not respond
in kind, i.e. with violence,
but rather assert and live
in accord with our dignity,
in, i.e., nonviolent resistance and love,
and this is that
transforming initiative part.
Now, kind of fast forward, so to speak,
to contemporary Catholic social teaching,
and Lisa Cahill has a
great framework essay
in the book as well focused on this topic.
So some key trends in this direction,
this is of course not all
of Catholic social teaching,
but there is a clear
trajectory that's emerging.
So we can see in Pope John XXIII
in his 1963 encyclical "Peace on Earth",
there is this shift toward
human dignity and human rights,
as well as social justice and nonviolence,
a strong critique of the arms race,
and he says, quote,
"In an age such as ours
"which prides itself on its atomic energy,
"it is contrary to reason to hold
"that war is now a suitable
way to restore rights."
A couple years later at Vatican II,
there's a development
that, a recognition that,
all are called to holiness,
not merely the clergy,
and dignity is identified as inalienable,
and they say, "It is our clear duty
"to strain every muscle for the time
"when war can be completely outlawed."
So Pope Paul then says things like,
"If you want peace, work for justice,"
quote, "The Church cannot accept violence,
"especially the force of arms,
"because she knows that violence
always provokes violence
"and irresistibly engenders
new forms of oppression."
Pope John Paul, who worked
with a solidarity movement
against the Soviets in Poland,
he said, "Violence is evil.
"It goes against the truth of our faith.
"It destroys what it claims to defend:
"the dignity of a human being.
"Violence is a crime against humanity.
"It's an enemy of justice."
And then Pope Benedict
says, "It's impossible
"to interpret Jesus as violent.
"Violence degrades the dignity
"of both the victims
and the perpetrators."
And finally, today,
Pope Francis is doing some amazing things.
He calls us to mercy, which
is about meeting the needs
of all parties in a conflict.
He says, "War is never a necessity."
He talks about integral disarmament.
He says, "Justice never
comes from killing."
He mobilized to prevent
US bombing in Syria,
called us to confront ISIS,
but not to bomb or make war,
and even to be open to dialogue with ISIS.
And then finally, his World
Day of Peace message in 2017,
he said, "True discipleship entails
"following Jesus' way of nonviolence."
So this is the recent trajectory
as the licitness of war and violence
becomes increasingly
narrowed and minimized
in Catholic social teaching,
especially with the contemporary Popes.
Thanks, all.
- Thank you, Eli.
I appreciate that, that was a wonderful,
succinct overview of the book.
So Drew, I'm gonna turn to you now,
and I was thinking first,
perhaps you could just
tell us a little bit
about the origins of the
book and how it came to be,
and then maybe we could explore
some of the major themes of it.
- Sure.
The book is the outgrowth of a process
that the Vatican had been
in for a number of years,
beginning with the latter
years of Pope Benedict,
where the Holy See made
clear in various UN meetings
and at meetings of the
International Atomic Energy Agency
that it was critical of deterrence,
that deterrence had once
served a legitimate purpose,
but it had outlived that purpose,
and indeed that purpose
was being bent to ends
that were not moral at all,
and so the kind of
schema that the Holy See
had used and the bishops had used
of accepting deterrence
provisionally back in the '80s
no longer held, but that wasn't worked out
in any kind of detail.
But gradually, the Holy See got involved
in a program led by the civil
society agencies, global ones,
called the Humanitarian
Consequences Movement,
beginning in 2013 with meetings in Oslo
and then Nayarit in Mexico
and finally in Vienna,
and there, Pope Francis,
Archbishop Tomasi,
and the Dicastery made clear
that deterrence could
no longer be justified.
Well, in keeping with that, in 2017,
the Holy See participated
in the UN conference
that led to the treaty to
prohibit nuclear weapons.
I was privileged to be part
of the Holy See delegation
to the gathering that drafted that treaty.
And the following fall,
so that was accepted
by 122 members of the 124 who
had gathered for the meeting,
and in the fall, the
Vatican signed the treaty,
Archbishop Gallagher, the Secretary
for Relations with States,
that is the foreign minister,
signed it at the UN and
presented the documents
of ratification by Pope Francis.
So the Holy See became part
of the international system
that now looked at the
condemnation of not only the use
but the very possession
of nuclear weapons,
as it says in article one of the treaty.
And in November, they
gathered about 300 people
in Rome at the Synod Hall
to mark the passage of the treaty,
and various actors who
were part of it were there.
So you had diplomats, you had
Nobel Peace Prize laureates,
you had representatives
of the civil society
who had really promoted
it, particularly ICAN
and its a spokesperson, Beatrice Fihn,
who received he the Nobel
peace prize that year
just a month before in October,
and along with various
other religious speakers
and a number of the people
who were victims or witnesses
to the problems of nuclear warfare
that Carol has talked about.
And it's those presentations
at that conference that we represent here,
but do it in the hope that
it nourishes a conversation
within the Church and outside the Church
about the limits of warfare
and help to proscribe
nuclear weapons in keeping
with the treaty on the
prohibition of nuclear weapons,
and work to create a much
safer environment for the world
as we move from our present situation
towards nuclear zero in the future.
- Thank you.
So if I might follow
up, I wanted to ask you
a little bit about the introduction
to your book with Carol,
that you've called the introduction
"Towards a Positive Peace",
and can you talk us through
what you mean by this phrase
when it's applied to nuclear disarmament,
and how and why the Church's
thinking on this issue
has evolved in the years since Vatican II?
- Well, the positive peace concept is kind
of the averse of what
you talked about earlier,
that is that the Church doesn't regard
the near absence of war
as a condition of peace.
Peace is a situation in which human beings
are safe and can thrive,
and enjoy their human rights
and their full human development.
That's the content of the
Catholic social teaching.
But the specific content
of the positive peace
I think got filled out in
Catholic social teaching,
decade by decade.
So with Paul VI, for instance,
well, with John XXIII,
John really pointed to human rights
as kind of the realization of peace.
So his notion of a
peaceful world is a world
in which states guarantee
the rights of their people,
they defend them and they uphold them,
and if they fail to, other
political authorities
will intervene to support
those human rights.
And the Catholic Church
really was at the heart
of the human rights revolution,
beginning in the '70s in Chile
after the coup to overthrow Allende.
And political analysts talk
about a third way of democracy;
what they mean is the
democratizations that took place,
beginning with the '70s,
with Catholic countries,
especially in Latin America,
the Philippines, places like that.
The second stage was the
emphasis on development,
which Eli has already quoted.
"Development is the new name for peace,"
said Paul the sixth.
And so it was a focus on development
as a way to uplift the poor,
not just economic development,
but socioeconomic development
where everyone's involved,
but they are served by
having various kinds
of institutions that aid
their human development,
organized and supported
within their home societies.
And the last component, I think,
is really brought to us
first by John Paul II
in his 1990 World Day of Peace statement,
"Peace with God, Peace
with All of Creation",
but really has been elaborated
much more fully by Pope
Francis' "Laudato si'",
that is on our common home,
which promotes integral
ecology as kind of the way
in which we enjoy that peace.
The Vatican talks about another element,
it loves this word integral,
now you find it all over
Vatican documents these days,
but integral with respect to disarmament,
and this goes back to John XXIII,
means disarmament which understands
that it's not just actually
disarming which counts,
that the atmosphere of
international society must be one
in which there is an attitude of peace,
a willingness to compromise,
a willingness to find new solutions
to the problems of disarmament, and so on.
So integral disarmament is the change
of mind and disposition that
helps advance the process
of disarmament for a world
that's less dangerous
and more secure for all people.
And I think that involves
creating certain conditions
for peace and instrumentalities for peace.
In the wake of the collapse
of the Iron Curtain
and the end of the Soviet Union,
the US and Russia developed a number
of kind of devices for
controlling conflict.
There were threat reduction efforts,
there were joint efforts to
corral free nuclear materials
so they couldn't be
stolen by rogue elements,
there were, if you will,
crisis management situations
where military officers
would get together in a crisis
situation to kind of talk
and explain to one another
what they were doing
and find ways out of the crisis.
There were also, as a result
of the many ethno-religious
civil wars of that period,
forgiveness processes that got underway
in various parts of the world
that created peace between groups.
It's promoting those kinds
of practices and institutions
that is an essential part of
building a positive peace,
which is one of the duties that comes
to us through Catholic social teaching.
- Thank you.
So I'd like to ask one more followup,
and then turn back to Eli for a moment.
So I wonder if you could
talk about how, you know,
our current nuclear situation
in which nuclear weapons
are maybe more widely
dispersed in the past
where what we might think
of as hostile regimes
or rogue nations are trying
to develop nuclear weapons,
how does that complicate
the road to disarmament,
compared to the situation where maybe you
had mainly the US and the Soviet union,
and kind of structures in place to
at least begin the process of disarmament?
- Well, the situation
is much more complicated
than it was back in the 1960s
when notions of deterrence developed,
and more complicated than the 1980s,
when those are still the
dominant defining features
of a geo-strategic map.
There are nine countries
that have nuclear weapons.
Only five of them are members
of the nonproliferation treaty,
so India, Pakistan,
Israel, and North Korea
are not members of the
nonproliferation treaty.
So they're not under any
international commitment to disarm,
although I have to say that
the nuclear-armed states
have not taken those
commitments seriously.
They've always used the NPT as a way
to make other people
refrain from acquiring arms,
rather than to bind themselves to disarm.
The current nuclear
situation is very dangerous.
It's the most dangerous,
according to the Bulletin
of the Atomic Scientists,
since the Russians got
the hydrogen bomb in 1952,
because not only are there
more people and more nations,
it's much harder to have
a deterrent structure
when there are nine rather than just two,
and only five are part of the NPT,
but also, various powers,
including the US and Russia,
are quite clear that
they don't see deterrence
as kind of a different question
than conventional war questions.
Nuclear weapons are on a continuum,
and so both the US and Russia
and the other States involved
see no firebreak, as the physicists
and the nuclear arms
controllers used to say,
between nuclear weapons and conventional,
so that if we failed by conventional means
to obtain an end by
armed conflict, you know,
use of nuclear weapons is on the board.
Secondly, there are
monitorizations in the way
they make nuclear weapons
much more usable, supposedly,
for this kind of situation,
and that increases the danger.
And I could go on and on
multiplying the complexities
that have come in since the 1980s,
but artificial intelligence
and autonomous weapons,
along with various kinds of militarization
of space and cyber problems
make the situation much,
much more complicated.
And I like to argue, being a defender
of the treaty to prohibit nuclear weapons,
that makes the treaty much more important
as an alternative to the kind of
small measures that arms
controllers are now talking about
that are much too small and ineffective
to deal with this very
complicated situation.
We do have a prospect of
being able to make progress,
I think, with the Russians.
I recently heard from Russian experts
that the Russians have now eliminated all
of their conditions for further talks.
And I've heard Chinese
experts, who are well-informed,
say that China will not
enter into negotiations,
it really wants to see serious progress
by the two superpowers first,
but it will enter into, you know,
kind of sideline discussions,
and that's, that's very promising
for the future of arms control.
But it seems to me that
we have a long way to go
to get US politics and
even US arms controllers
to engage that kind of situation.
And finally, the rogue states,
I don't think, in the long-term,
if there's a new
administration in the new year,
that Iran will remain a difficult party.
Iran has already shown its willingness
to curb its nuclear activity
in return for the relief of sanctions,
and still shows restraint
even though the sanctions
are very, very tight right now.
I think it'll be willing to negotiate back
into some JCPOA, perhaps a new one
that would control the missiles and so on,
but at least the JCPOA
could be effectuated.
North Korea is much more difficult,
and I can't read the tea leaves there.
I mean, all the experts
have difficulty reading it,
with Kim Jong-un seeming to be ill,
his sister's having more authority,
and different signals
being given all the time.
Israel, it seems to me, is a problem.
I think it should join in with any kind
of agreement on the JCPOA,
not be an obstacle to it,
but it sees Iran as its
major opponent in the area
and wants its nuclear
weapons to counter Iran.
But even when Iran was in the JCPOA,
it took it as an enemy, and I
think that remains a problem.
The last nuclear
nonproliferation treaty review
did not come to a common agreement
simply because the US,
Canada, and Britain refused
to come onboard a consensus
statement to defend Israel,
not a member of the NPT,
with proposals that progress be made
on a Middle East nuclear-free zone.
And I think, you know, the
upcoming NPT meeting in January
is a real test of the
future of arms control,
and whether the NPT
remains the cornerstone
or whether we have to
really move to the treaty
to prohibit nuclear weapons
to be the map, if you will,
of the ground plan of a new nuclear age.
- Thank you so much.
So I think we might take a couple
of questions from participants right now,
because they're relevant to
this part of the conversation.
So I think this question for both of you,
what do the authors think
about direct Catholic action
regarding the US nuclear arsenal?
- Can I jump in with a quick thought,
'cause I can only speak for myself,
but I personally support Plowshares
and other direct Catholic action,
but I will not speak for the panelists,
I only speak for myself.
I believe they are prophets.
- Eli, did you wanna pick up?
- Yeah, so I guess the question
is about direct action,
like nonviolent civil disobedience,
is that what you're referring to?
Okay.
Yeah, I mean, I think it's pretty clear,
you know, as a Christian
and what Jesus has taught a long time ago,
and now the Pope has, you know,
affirmed more explicitly
about non-possession,
and that, you know, the US clearly
has the most nuclear weapons in the world,
so I think for Christians
or Catholics in the US,
like we have, you know, a big opportunity
and responsibility to use a broad range
of strategic, creative,
nonviolent actions,
and it's gonna take
sustained kind of organizing,
not just kind of one off events.
We need to coordinate with each other
so that the folks doing direct action
are coordinating with the advocacy folks,
and that we're kind of pushing levers
at the right time and in the right way,
and I think that would have
more and more of an impact,
as well as obviously working
beyond kind of Christian
communities as well.
- Thank you.
Drew, did you wanna add anything to that?
- Yeah, I'd say, I
think it's important too
that Catholics look at both
sides of a prophetic action,
and look both at faithfulness
to the gospel witness on the one hand,
and on the other hand,
that they look to what's more successful
and more persuasive within society.
This is a huge issue.
Prophetic action that
is just self-satisfying
of one's own righteousness
is not what we need.
We need kind of boycotts
and demonstrations
and petitions and lobbying
that result in concrete changes
that alter the situation
and create new modalities
for controlling nuclear weapons.
And sometimes, if we get
into the prophetic mood,
our own sense of righteousness
overcomes our sense
of where we can actually make progress.
It's not a question of
doing just one thing.
There are many things that can be done,
and people oughta discern
certain very carefully
what are the most effective
things that can be done
as well as what's going
to move people the most.
- [Al] Eli?
- Yeah, you know, I just
want to build on this.
This is really, I think,
relevant to the conversation
around kind of peace-building approaches
and nonviolent action approaches.
I mean, sometimes there can be
different threads of research
or people talking to each other
in those different spaces,
and I think bringing those together,
which like the US Institute of
Peace has been trying to do,
to bring together the
sort of peace-builders,
the advocates, the dialogue, you know,
the writers and so forth with
the nonviolent action folks
that are doing not only civil disobedience
but strikes and boycotts
and demonstration things,
and thinking about the pillars of support
that are enabling the
unjust nuclear regime,
and I think if those can collaborate more,
we could have a lot better impact.
And, you know, in a way,
the just peace ethic
is really trying to bring
those strands, those threads,
those groups together
with an ethical framework
which has grown out of many
voices in violent conflict zones
like Colombia and the Philippines
and South Sudan and Iraq,
who are kind of calling
out for this reweaving
of the peace-builders and the
nonviolent action communities.
- Thank you.
I think that segues nicely
into my next question
for you, Eli, which was
to ask you a little bit
about a model that you describe
of the just peace ethic
in the last chapter of the book
where you refine the model
that you've worked with
through the book, and then describe
a model of just peace in action.
So I was wondering if you could tell us
what the elements of that model are,
and then describe one of the case studies
in the book of that model in action?
- Yeah, happy to do that.
So let me put in the chat box a link
to a sort of summary of
the just peace norms,
and I'll share my screen as well.
So you'll see on this
handout that these norms
kind of operate in three
different categories
that I mentioned earlier, right?
And they can overlap in time and space,
but sort of the crux of it is
that strategies and actions that we choose
should enhance these norms,
or at least not obstruct them,
as well as try to keep means
and ends keep consistent.
So you see these three categories,
and there's a set of norms
within each category.
The first one has like
sustaining spiritual disciplines.
So this is like
discernment and meditation,
virtuous habits like mercy,
and empathy, and compassion,
courage, education and
training in key skills,
different nonviolent skills
like nonviolent communication,
so forth, participatory processes,
and forming nonviolent
peacemaking communities
or cultures or even institutions.
So these can all help us
engage conflict constructively
as an opportunity for growth.
And then the second
category is breaking cycles
of destructive conflict or violence.
Reflexivity is keeping means
and ends consistent, re-humanization.
Conflict transformation is kind of getting
to the root causes and needs
underneath the conflict.
Acknowledging responsibility for harm,
which includes trauma
healing, restorative justice.
Nonviolent direct action is
unarmed civilian protection,
civilian-based defense, and, you know,
nonviolent resistance
that we've talked about.
Integral disarmament, which the Pope
has mentioned and called us to do.
And then building sustainable
peace is the last category.
So we've got some more common
themes like relationality,
civil society, just covenants,
human rights and racial
and gender justice as well.
So to kind of jump into a case,
so in the book, there's a range of cases
around racial and environmental
justice, the death penalty,
as well as gang violence in El Salvador,
civil war in South Sudan, ISIS in Iraq,
gender-based violence in the DRC,
women-led activism in the Philippines,
and ethnic violence in Kenya.
So I'm gonna talk briefly about
the case on US immigration
from Leo Guardado, who's
at Fordham University
and did a really great job on this.
So basically he talks about how
immigration to and in the US
is marked by direct and
institutionalized violence.
So he says, "A framework
of just peace provides
"a more capacious approach for the Church
"to discern its responsibility
"to accompany and protect people
"whose life is being threatened.
"The just peace ethic can
help us see more clearly
"the root causes of this,
such as direct violence
"of militarization,
games, domestic violence,
"but also social economic instability,
"like even as trade policies
and political repression,
"like our support for leaders
who violate human rights."
So the first category,
virtues and skills to engage
conflict constructively,
Leo talks about how that
suggests the importance
of cultivating virtues and mercy
and hospitality and solidarity,
as well as the spiritual
discipline of discernment
about the possibility of the
Church offering sanctuary.
And such discernment lifts up the norm
of participatory processes as well.
The second category he refers to
is the breaking the cycles
of violence category,
and here he kind of
hones in on how sanctuary
is a form of re-humanization of migrants,
as well as a form of
nonviolent direct action
and unarmed protection,
rather than merely something
that simply entails risk
or may subvert the law,
which is sometimes how we hear it talked
about by certain Catholic leaders.
So finally, he talks about
building sustainable peace
as the third category, and says how calls
for a civil initiative,
or, in other words,
enhancing a robust civil society,
and the Church ought to
play a key role in this,
that offering sanctuary actually
enhances racial justice,
as well as provides a window
to creating more just governance.
So he kind of wraps up
by saying, you know,
as long as violence in
central America continues,
those that flee to the US and enter,
the Church has a responsibility to protect
that entails risking
our security for theirs
in order to resist the legalized
violence of our government.
So in short, you know, a just peace ethic
will better form us as peacemakers,
both in our imagination
and our discipline,
transform conflict and
get to the root causes,
prevent structural and cultural violence,
such as the arms race and dehumanization,
and get us closer to outlawing war
and even better, prevent
and limit war as an end.
So that's one example.
I hope you'll dive in,
and maybe read some of the other examples.
- Thank you so much.
It's extremely helpful to hear
about the just peace ethic in action,
and that was a great example,
so thank you for sharing that.
I think in the time we have left,
I'd like to try and turn to the roles
of different members of society
in the Catholic community
in helping to create a world
with the just peace ethic,
and one of our questions
from one of the participants
I think is relevant here.
How well have you US bishops
brought the Pope's revisions
of Church teaching on
deterrence and disarmament
to US Congress members or
to their own parishioners?
I guess the question is how well
have US bishops communicated this change
from deterrence to abolition
of nuclear weapons?
Do you want to take that, Drew?
- Sure.
I think the USCCB, the
Bishop's Conference,
has generally supported the
movement towards abolition,
but not explicitly focused
on the Pope's condemnation of deterrence.
Some have, individual bishops.
I think it's a question
of further education.
It's one of the reasons
we published this book,
"A World Without Nuclear Weapons",
and we're preparing another one
that will help people bridge the gap
between traditional moral theologies
and the Pope's condemnation,
to be able to realize responsibility
for nuclear abolition within the Church.
I mean, Francis and his prophetic way
jumped ahead of the traditional process.
It used to be Popes would wait
for a consensus among
bishops and theologians
before issuing a document,
but the Pope is ahead of us,
and so the question
is, how do you fill in?
And that's what we'll try to do,
and we have lots of good
contributions of new ideas in that.
I think in terms of response,
I kind of emphasized that we tend
to think of moral questions as either or,
and it seems to me that they
are either or, or, or, or,
that there are lots of options.
Paul VI and the Second Vatican Council
both talked about there are lots of ways
of fulfilling the obligations,
even in this kind of area.
And I think in terms of direct action,
and we were just talking about it,
certain elements of the
sanctuary movement in the '80s
learned from the Quakers of
Pendle Hill in Philadelphia
a different style of direct
action called civil action,
where they declined to
do civil disobedience
and chose instead to try
to engage the police,
engage the authorities, and
bring them into dialogue,
and so developed friendships
around which they could
work over a period of time.
It seems to me that, as
John Paul later on says,
"We need moral imagination
"to find ways out of these problems,"
and that at every level of
the Church, that's important.
I think at the local parish level,
the most important thing
is to develop communities
of moral discourse and discernment.
I take the term moral
discourse from James Gustafson,
a famous Protestant moral theologian,
but what Catholic teaching on the signs
of the times adds to that,
this notion of discernment,
it's not just to discuss the
issue and persuade people,
it's a matter of developing unity together
and discerning a pathway ahead together.
And so the discernment is what you
should be doing in these groups.
We think usually the
parish is one big unit.
A number of official documents,
including the Church in America,
this was in a document of 1999,
the Senate described the parish
as a community of
communities and movements,
and it seems to me there
can be different people
taking different courses of action
who still need to support one another
and value that unity
within that one parish.
I'll stop there and you can
follow up when you want.
- Thank you.
Eli, would you like to comment
on the role of bishops and priests
in promoting the just
peace ethic more broadly
on other issues as well as disarmament?
- Yeah, sure.
I mean, I think, you know,
there's a a noticeable trajectory
where, you know, I've worked for CMSN,
which was the conference
of religious leaders
in the US for about eight years,
so I interacted a lot
with the USCCB staff,
kind of advocating on
some of these issues,
and what I noticed over that
period of time was that,
you know, there is increasing attention
to not simply kind of advocating
for development funding,
but also advocating for
peace-building funding.
And this is something that, you know,
a number of NGOs and advocacy groups
have kind of been behind,
but the bishops have really
started to step up in that area,
and they're improving.
And I think that's a good
sign, and I think as Catholics,
we need to continue to call on them
and kind of encourage
them in that direction.
You know, regarding nuclear weapons,
it's kind of new territory now,
and I think some of them are jumping in
and others are being a
little more cautious,
so that's gonna take a little bit of time,
but, you know, in general, there
still is a big growing edge
in terms of Catholics in general,
but also Catholic leaders
and kind of really explicitly pushing back
on military spending in general,
whether it's nuclear weapons,
or the Pentagon budget,
or preparation for war, like,
we have a lot of room
to grow in that area,
and hopefully, with some of the stuff
the Pope's been writing and
some of the other developments
around just peace, we can grow.
- Thank you.
We have a question from a participant
that's, I think, relevant here,
about the responsibilities
of those in authority,
and I'll just read it out.
According to ICAN, 50 US universities,
including some Catholic universities,
are involved in nuclear
weapons production,
ranging from direct
management of nuclear labs
to research programs and partnerships
and recruiting the next
generation of weapons scientists.
What might be done about this?
I guess another way of phrasing
that question might be,
what are the responsibilities
of university administrators
and faculty in this regard?
- Well, I think, since I've been involved
in this at different times,
let me give you an example from the '80s,
from the time of the
bishops' peace pastoral,
that I think is relevant.
At that time, Lawrence
Livermore labs and Berkeley labs
were both involved in
the nuclear business,
and within the diocese of Oakland,
Bishop John Cummins,
then the Bishop there,
pulled together dialogue
between the theologians
and moralists at the
Theological Union in Berkeley,
including the Jesuit school,
and some others from elsewhere,
with weapon scientists.
The weapons scientists themselves
had sought the Bishop's help
in trying to figure out
their responsibilities,
and over about four years, we
made some decisions together.
And what's impressive is that people chose
a variety of things to do.
I talked about the variety of options.
So some just chose to
move on into other work,
move to academia and simply
teach nuclear physics,
and others changed the direction
of their work at the lab,
so instead of working in weapons,
they worked on verification
and monitoring.
Some shifted from working in that area
to an area they could work in, then,
at the time of the Carter administration,
or after the Carter administration,
in the area of alternative energy sources.
So they did many different
things to respond to that,
but that doesn't deal
with the responsibility
of the University of California
or the state system in
California doing that.
I think, at the present time,
they really have to acknowledge
that the universities
are directly involved in arms development
and need to acknowledge that they are part
of the military-industrial complex
which prevents the progress
towards disarmament,
and therefore they have
very grave responsibilities
to consider disengaging
from that kind of work,
even though it brings them lots of support
and high levels of talent
and so on and so forth.
I think it's really important
for everyone who's concerned
to read President
Eisenhower's famous remarks
on the military-industrial complex.
He really thought that
they were running away
with the country, and they have,
and they have especially with
this monitorization process.
The corporations and the
academic institutions
that work with them really
have run away with the policy
and they need to walk away
from that, it seems to me.
- Excuse me, thank you.
So we have just over five minutes left,
and I thought maybe we
could end by talking
about what role do we as
ordinary parishioners,
as scholars, as publishers,
what role do we have
in working to create a just peace
and a world free from nuclear weapons?
Eli, do you want to start?
- Sure, thanks, Al.
Well, it's a pretty pivotal role.
Civil society is gonna
be kind of the engine
to fuel some of these
changes, as it is so often,
particularly in US history.
So, you know, for academics,
you know, one thought is to work with
and try to refine the just peace ethic
to work with it on different cases,
to kind of develop its thinking.
I mean, the book is actually,
it starts with an initial
version of a just peace ethic,
and then authors are invited to work
with it on different
cases, and then at the end,
it gets refined based on the insights
and proposals from the
authors on the cases.
So I think to make that
sort of an ongoing process
would be a great
contribution of academics.
And if your university
doesn't yet have, you know,
a peace and justice studies program,
or a justice, piece, and
nonviolence studies program,
I encourage you to work
on developing that,
and to resource it,
and to make it a major.
This is something that
Pope has actually called
on the Church to develop
these peace studies programs.
And it would be great to
have a series of sessions
like this on just peace cases
or how it would impact the
government or the military,
and so on and so forth.
And I think, for parishioners, you know,
really focusing on building
peace in our families
and in our communities and how
we engage national policies
and what we vote for, joining
social movements, you know,
exploring relationships with
groups like Black Lives Matter,
establishing local peace teams
to regularly provide
nonviolence skill training
and spirituality of nonviolence.
Publishers, it'd just
be great to, you know,
try to mainstream and prioritize books
on nonviolence and
peace-building and just piece.
You know, we have lots of research
and lots of things written about war
and frameworks related to war;
we could really make a great contribution
in some of these other areas.
- Thank you so much, Eli.
Drew, we have about three minutes left.
Would you like to have
the final word on this?
- Of course, yeah, thank you.
I'd say, the first thing
I'd say in parishes
is that pastors should not be afraid
to allow their parishioners
to discuss these issues,
that the Church encourages these kinds
of groups to gather in parishes.
A pastor doesn't have to
be the one who moderates.
There are lots of experienced people,
educators and public figures in the parish
that can moderate, and
well-respected people,
do a good job of
moderating the discussions.
When I was at the
Conference, we experimented,
particularly in the area of environment,
to have these kind of discussions.
We discovered that after 20 minutes,
people really get down to the issues,
and by and large, people wanna
discuss pressing moral issues
in their churches.
It's a suitable environment for it,
but if you're not equipped to handle
what you perceive as the tensions,
and you can misperceive the tensions.
The first time we gathered,
the scientists and the theologians
both wanted to have meetings,
but Bishop Cummins' heard
us saying different things,
and so he called off the planning.
And we weren't, we knew we would talk
in different languages to
talk about the same topic.
So you can have
apprehensions that are wrong.
People really do wanna
discuss these issues.
Encourage people who
are similarly involved
in issues to come together.
Allow mixed groups to come together,
in dialogue with people who
are presently engaged in these areas,
whether it's part of the military,
military-industrial
complex, or the think tanks,
to think about these issues.
And allow, create an
atmosphere that is conducive
not just to discussion, but
as I said, to discernment.
I think for academics,
I think it's important
to them to understand that,
insofar as they can address these issues,
that they're not just ivory tower people,
that they can be public intellectuals.
the Church expects them
to be public intellectuals
in times like these, and to
use their academic resources
to penetrate the issues
and help the general public
and particularly their fellow
Catholics to understand them.
I like to use the phrase
that Gerald Schlabach
and I have made famous, that is we need
to make the Church's
opposition to nuclear weapons
known by the faithful
Church-wide and parish-deep.
And it seems to me, academics
can assist us in that.
Publishers, it seems to me that
there are other responsibilities, I think.
I would encourage authors who want to see
an active citizenry out
there, that's what we need,
and yes, it's important
to analyze the questions,
but it's also important to help people
kind of understand how you
get engaged in these issues
and to do that.
And publish books in which believers
can understand these problems
and integrate them into their faith.
You know, there's a tendency
in a lot of journalism
to look at it as either
the Church is wrong
or the Church is right on these issues.
No, the question is not that;
the question is what are you gonna do
as an Orthodox Catholic
to meet the Church's
teaching in this area?
How do you live it out?
And publishers ought
to also consider books
and encourage authors who will help people
be active participants, active
citizens in their societies
who are informed by their Christian faith.
- Well, thank you, Drew.
I hope we've made a good
start with these two books,
and on behalf of the Berkley
Center and the Press,
we wanna thank you, Drew, and you, Eli,
for this conversation, which I think
was really enlightening and wonderful,
and great to see these two
books talking to each other.
Thank you very much.
