We are educated not for war, but for peace. In war there is need for much equipment, just as self indulgence craves an abundance. But peace and love, simple and plain blood sisters, do not need arms nor abundant supplies. Their nourishment is the Word, the Word whose leadership enlightens and educates, from whom we learn poverty and humility and all that goes with love of freedom and of mankind and of the good. In a word, through Him, we become like God by a likeness of virtue. (Clement of Alexandria, Christ the Educator, 1.12)
God prohibits killing...and so it will not be lawful for a just man to serve as a soldier - for justice itself is his military service - not to accuse anyone of capital offense, because it makes no difference whether you kill with a sword or with a word, since killing itself is forbidden. And so...no exception ought to be made to the rule that it is always wrong to kill a man, whom God has willed to be a sacrosanct creature. (Lactantius, Divine Institutes, VI.20.15)
In the early church the community followed the example of Christ, the Prince of Peace, and the Apostles in living a complete life of non-violence. They rejected abortion, war, capital punishment, and all other threats to human life. The Lord Jesus is the fulfillment of all that came before him, the authentic interpreter in word and deed of the Law. In what Jesus taught and in how he lived, he rejected the use of violence and chose to suffer and die rather than shed blood himself. The early church grew because they represented an entirely new way of living - different from the violence that kept the Roman Empire in existence, different from the violence that marks the great stories of antiquity, different from the violence encouraged at every turn.
Sadly, the ideal of non-violence for the entire Christian community came to an end when the Constantinian era began. Monks and clergy were forbidden from shedding blood in any way, but the laity were exempt from this ideal. The just war theory and the theory of the diseased limb to justify capital punishment come to dominate the Christian world. Yes, the church grew during this time as it became socially acceptable to belong to her. However, the seeds of decay were sown through the use of violence.
The violence of the Crusades cemented the Great Schism between eastern and western Christianity. The violence of the inquisition led to the rupture of the western Church during the Reformation. And the violence of the religious wars created the secularism and loss of faith that has persisted in the western world ever since. As the Church aligned itself with monarchies and violent regimes throughout the centuries, her credibility became more and more compromised up to the present day.
Today we continue to see Christians justifying violence in the name of Christ, and yet how irrational these voices are. Priests and bishops of one nation bless the arms and soldiers of one regime while in the opposite camp clergy do the very same. That same irrationality can be seen in the wake of a terrible tragedy of a mass shooting in Colorado when people assert that to prevent such occurences we need more guns and more violence, not less.
We also see this irrationality when Christians endorse one candidate or political party over another: a group of nuns declare one candidate exemplary of Catholic values, while another group blesses the platform of the other party. The violence of words in these campaigns is just as reprobate as the violence we have come to justify on the battlefield and prison.
This violence is the direct result of our fundamental failure to follow the poverty of Christ, as Clement noted above. When we become attached to our power, our possessions, and our own lives we cannot give them up and so we justify violence in order to preserve what does not belong to us in the first place. Like an addition, we cannot seem to overcome its hold upon us. As Thomas Merton noted:
The most obvious fact about war today is that while everyone claims to hate it, and all are unanimously agreed that it is our greatest single evil, thre is little significant resistance to it except on the part of small minorities who, by the very fact of their protest, are dismissed as eccentric....War represents a vice that mankind would like to get rid of but which it cannot do without. Man is like an alcoholic who knows that drink will destroy him but who always has a reason for drinking....The only possible conclusion is that man is so addicted to war that he cannot possibly deal with his addiction. And yet if he does not learn to cope with it, the addiction will ruin him altogether. (Merton, Love and Living, p. 128-129)
The teaching Church herself has come to recognize the folly of war and violence. Blessed Pope John XXIII noted in 1963, "Therefore 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 which have been violated." (Pacem in Terris, #127) This teaching was echoed by the Second Vatican Council when it stated, "Divine Providence urgently demands of us that we free ourselves from the age old slavery of war...It is our clear duty therefore to strain every muscle in working for the time when all war can be completely outlawed by international consent." (Gaudium et Spes, #82)
Peace is not achieved by preparing for war. A society free from violence is not created by making guns more accessible to its populace. Peace and non-violence are like any virtue: we only achieve them when we practice them diligently.
A young theologian named Joseph Ratzinger announced in 1966 that the Constantinian era has come to an end in the Church.
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