Pope Francis Calls for a Culture of Nonviolence

Photo by Simone Savoldi via Unsplash

Pope Francis has long advanced the spirit and practice of nonviolence. On March 30, he underscored its centrality to the mission of the Church and to the healing of our wounded world by calling on people everywhere to pray throughout the month of April for a “nonviolent culture.”

“Let us make nonviolence, both in daily life and in international relations, a guide for our actions,” he declared in print and in a short but powerful video, which you can see here. “And let us pray for a greater diffusion of the culture of nonviolence, which involves the lesser use of weapons, both by States and by citizens.”

Marking the 60th anniversary of Pacem in Terris, the historic declaration on peace issued in 1963 by Saint Pope John XXIII in the wake of the Cuban Missile Crisis, Pope Francis has shared with his Worldwide Prayer Network this call for a culture of nonviolence, writing that, “Living, speaking, and acting without violence is not giving up, it is not losing or giving up anything, but aspiring to everything.”

This is in keeping with his recent pilgrimage of peace to the Democratic Republic of Congo and South Sudan, January 31-February 5, 2023. "Those who claim to be believers should have nothing more to do with a culture based on the spirit of vengeance,” he declared during a stop in Juba, South Sudan’s capital. Instead, he encouraged the 50,000 people who had assembled to commit to "spreading Jesus' way of nonviolence." 

In the wake of this historic visit, the South Sudanese Council of Churches issued a powerful statement on nonviolence, which stated in part:

“South Sudan has recently experienced the joy of the Ecumenical Peace Pilgrimage to South Sudan by Pope Francis, Archbishop Dr Justin Welby, and Rt. Rev. Moderator Dr lain Greenshields. All three of our global Church Leaders were united in their call for nonviolence as the solution to South Sudan's problems. Deeper than simply avoiding war, nonviolence calls us to a new way of life which respects the dignity of every person and the integrity of creation.

“Nonviolence names a core value of the Gospel, in which Jesus combined an unmistakable rejection of violence with the power of love and truth in action for justice and peace. Nonviolence is broader than pacifism. It is much more than the absence of violence and it is never passive. It is a spirituality, a constructive force, an effective method for social transformation, and a powerful way of life committed to the well-being of all.

“…the CHURCH of Christ in South Sudan, both through its individual members and its Council of Churches, recommits itself to Gospel nonviolence. It rejects any form of violence and commits itself to a prophetic stance against violence and injustice. This is not a passive approach, not simply submitting to or colluding with violence, but it is active and prophetic in responding to all forms of violence, amongst individuals, families, clans, tribes, and political and military factions, and including systemic violence embedded in our cultural, societal, and political life.”

Pope Francis’ call for nonviolence—including his 2017 World Day of Peace message, “Nonviolence: A Style of Politics for Peace”—is bearing fruit around the world. It has deepened in the wake of the catastrophic war in Ukraine (strengthening his repudiation of “just war theology”), many other wars, and all forms of violence globally.

Since 2015, Pace e Bene has been an integral part of Pax Christi International’s Catholic Nonviolence Initiative as it has worked to move Gospel nonviolence from “the margins of the Church to the center.” We are grateful for the prophetic leadership Pope Francis has shown in this regard, and the many ways he has worked to translate this theological vision into practical and durable impacts, including the Vatican’s recent repudiation of the Doctrine of Discovery and the immense violence wreaked across the world through colonization; the condemnation of the possession, as well as use, of nuclear weapons; and the declaration that the death penalty is “inadmissible.”

In December 2022, Pax Christi International co-sponsored its third conference in Rome, entitled “Pope Francis, Nonviolence, and the Fullness of Pacem in Terris.” The following paper, presented at this conference by Ken Butigan, illuminates the importance of understanding the comprehensiveness of the global culture of violence—what Francis calls “The Third World War in Piecemeal”—as we seek to nurture what Pope Francis has called for this month: a culture of nonviolence.

Pope Francis and the Global Challenge of Violence

To understand active nonviolence, we must first acknowledge the breadth and depth of the reality of structural violence that nonviolence is seeking to challenge, transform and dismantle. Pope Francis illuminates this for our time as one who hears and seeks feverishly to respond to the unceasing global cry for justice and for an end to oppression. From where he stands, Francis has relentlessly come to see and call out the global crisis of systemic violence: the ongoing structural catastrophe of violence that billions of people, including the poor and marginalized around the world, suffer and that threatens to engulf all of humanity and the planet itself in an unprecedented tsunami of destruction.

The image for this culture of global violence Francis has shared numerous times is “a third world war in installments.” 

For example, in his 2014 address to the World Meeting of Popular Movements, “Francis said that we are going through ‘World War Three but in installments,’ adding, “There are economic systems that must make war in order to survive…arms are manufactured and sold ..And no thought is given to hungry children in refugee camps; no thought is given to the forcibly displaced; no thought is given to destroyed homes; no thought is given, finally, to so many destroyed lives. How much suffering, how much destruction, how much grief.” 

While there are particular wars taking place in different parts of the world, Francis’ image of a third world war in installments goes far beyond specific examples of armed conflict.  His image suggests that there is a global, interconnected regime of immense violence that is economic, political, and cultural. 

In Fratelli Tutti, Francis’ 2021 encyclical or major Church teaching, he illuminates the interlocking economic, political, social, and technological structures that have congealed to create a catastrophic “us versus them” world, dividing the privileged minority from billions of others, including the poor, migrants, women, the sick, the elderly, and all who have been subjugated to the merciless dictates of global economic systems, racism, gender violence, environmental destruction, and authoritarian regimes.  To nonviolently transform the world, we must first glimpse its violence, and Pope Francis does not spare us in this. 

Here, Francis is helping us see what Fr. John Dear has named “the total violence of today’s world [occurring] on many levels, from the violence within us, to interpersonal and societal violence, to the global, structural violence of war, nuclear weapons, hunger, sexism, racism, homelessness, torture, the death penalty, environmental destruction and the rampant poverty that leaves nearly four billion people in misery, surviving on less than two dollars a day, what the church in recent decades has called “systemic injustice, institutionalized and legalized, [structural] violence.”

Being aware of the stupendous breadth of these interconnected forms of violence is important.  Seeing how the direct violence we experience is embedded in structures and reinforced by the ideologies, narratives, and assumptions of cultural violence – this very important.  Recognizing the immense harm and trauma these realities cause synergistically for billions of people is monumentally important.  But perhaps most important of all is glimpsing the impact this has on the soul of people everywhere when violence colonizes our minds.

People everywhere undergo a relentless formation in the belief, allegiance to, support for and practice of violence, reinforced by what scripture scholar Walter Wink called “the myth of redemptive violence”: the belief that violence saves us. “Violence is so successful as a myth precisely because it does not seem to be mythic in the least,” Wink writes. “Violence simply appears to be the nature of things.”  When we do glimpse it, we often simply say, “that’s just the way things are” and respond typically with one of three traditional scripts: we ignore it, we accommodate it, or we use counter-violence.  Often these responses do not resolve the problem but reinforce the “violence system” by escalating it or by failing to address its root causes.

By invoking the image of a piecemeal world war, one might conclude that Francis is succumbing to an apocalyptic fatalism.  But he has tirelessly made this point, not to deepen our despair, but to stoke the massive transformation that is required.  In his 2022 book, Against War, Francis writes: “…step by step, we are moving toward catastrophe. Piece by piece the world risks becoming the scene of a unique Third World War. We are moving toward it as if it were inevitable.  Instead, we must forcefully repeat: No, it is not inevitable!  No -- war is not inescapable!” (4). 

Francis uses this image, I believe, as a dramatic plea for us to become agents of nonviolent transformation joining with many others equipped to challenge, intervene in, de-escalate, and quell this very different kind of war. Because this multifaceted state of global misery is so much more universal and interconnected than what we typically think of as “war,” we need an even bolder form of “conscientious objection” and “nonviolent intervention” than is traditional: one that activates the spirituality, way of life, method of change, and universal ethic of Gospel nonviolence.

Specifically, Francis offers us a catechesis for faithfully grappling with the reality of violence, and thus for following the nonviolent Jesus.  Some of these steps of a nonviolent identity and practice include Grief and Transformation.

First: Grief

Just as Jesus wept over Jerusalem as he foresaw what would become of the city because it did not know what makes for the ways of peace, so too, does this pope lament over our own times.

While definitions of violence, like that of the World Health Organization might bring precision – it declares that violence is “the intentional use of physical force or power, threatened or actual, that either results in or has a high likelihood of resulting in injury, death, psychological harm, maldevelopment or deprivation” (Krug et al., 2002,p.5) – Pope Francis likely has more affinity with the simplicity of the description offered by activist and author Kaza Haga, who crisply defines violence as “physical or emotional harm.” (Haga, Healing Resistance).

Francis grapples with violence – and teaches all of us to grapple with it – first by grieving over it, by weeping, by mourning, by responding to the cry of the poor and the cry of the earth by crying himself.  He tells us that, in visiting Normandy, he wept, thinking of all those who lost their lives on those beaches.  His “World War in Installments” is not simply a clever idea but one that has emerged from a meditation on the realities of violence and by simply being aghast by it. As, for example, when he said, on his flight back from Japan in 2019, “Hiroshima was a true human catechesis on cruelty.”

In the end, this reckoning with global violence is an intensely spiritual journey of transformation, calling us to stand nakedly before the horror of profound evil and to be led by the God of peace and nonviolence to a conversion from violence to true discipleship. 

Hence the tears, including all the tears he seems to have shed this year as he has grappled with what he has repeatedly call the “madness” of the war in Ukraine: “Our hearts cannot but weep before the children and women killed, along with all the victims of war,” Pope Francis said.

Second: Transformation

But the pope does not only grieve or lament.  He also calls us to seeks a nonviolent alternative, even in intractable conflict, grounded in the grace of the nonviolent God and His Son who told us to be peacemakers. 

The pope’s stance toward violence has only deepened during the Ukraine war, an approach conveyed in a prayer he offered in March: “Stop us, Lord, stop us, and when you have stopped the hand of Cain, take care of him also. He is our brother.”

Francis is calling on God to stop our own violence and to stop the aggressor’s violence, but to also recognize that, like us, the aggressor is a child of God.  He is hewing to an enormously challenging, but also enormously Christian, stance.

In so doing, Francis calls us to abandon the traditional scripts for dealing with violence and conflict: avoidance and accommodation, but also aggression and attack.  As he suggests in Fratelli Tutti, our call is not to tranquility, but justice. (FT 234).  “We are called to love everyone, without exception,” Francis writes. “At the same time, loving an oppressor does not mean allowing him to keep oppressing us, or letting him think that what he does is acceptable. On the contrary, true love for an oppressor means seeking ways to make him cease his oppression; it means stripping him of a power that he does not know how to use, and that diminishes his own humanity and that of others.” Justice, Francis is saying, demands confronting oppression. 

But how are we to confront it?  How do we strip the oppressor of a power he does not know how to use, and that diminishes his own humanity and that of others?  Francis says further on in Fratelli Tutti, “The important thing is not to fuel anger, which is unhealthy for our own soul and the soul of our people, or to become obsessed with taking revenge and destroying the other. No one achieves inner peace or returns to a normal life in that way.” 

Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. called this “defeating injustice, not people.” And the late change-maker in the United States Barbara Deming called this the creative tension of “the two hands of nonviolence.”  Deming offers us a way of teasing out what Pope Francis may be suggesting here:

With one hand we say to one who is angry, or to an oppressor, or to an unjust system, ‘Stop what you are doing. I refuse to honor the role you are choosing to play, I refuse to obey you, I refuse to cooperate with your demands, I refuse to build the walls and the bombs. I refuse to pay for the guns. With this hand I will even interfere with the wrong you are doing. I want to disrupt the easy pattern of your life.’ But then the advocate of nonviolence raises the other hand. It is raised outstretched — maybe with love and sympathy, maybe not — but always outstretched . . . With this hand we say, ‘I won’t let go of you or cast you out of the human race. I have faith that you can make a better choice than you are making now, and I’ll be here when you are ready. Like it or not, we are part of one another.’

Deming continues: “This is the heart of my argument: We can put more pressure on the antagonist for whom we show human concern. It is precisely solicitude for his person in combination with a stubborn interference with his actions that can give us a very special degree of control (precisely in our acting both with love, if you will—in the sense that we respect his human rights—and truthfulness, in the sense that we act out fully our objections to his violating our rights). We put upon him two pressures—the pressure of our defiance of him and the pressure of our respect for his life—and it happens that in combination these two pressures are uniquely effective.”

 “We can put more pressure on the antagonist for whom we show human concern.”

Francis, like Jesus, will go beyond “human concern” to love: a love that is clear and public.  A love that takes violence out of one side of the equation to create a disorienting situation, that open space, like Francis kissing the shoes of the South Sudanese or going into a warzone in the Central Africa Republic to be with Muslims who were surrounded by Christian militias.

Hence Francis’ relentless rejection of violence as the way to meet violence, when he says in his 2021 book, Peace on Earth: Fraternity is Possible:

“’Put your sword back into its sheath.’ The words of Jesus resound clearly today …In the Gospel of Luke’s version of the story, Jesus tells his disciples, ‘Stop, no more of this!’ Jesus’ sorrowful and strong, ‘No more,’ goes beyond the centuries and reaches us. It is a commandment we cannot avoid. ‘No more’ swords, weapons, violence, war.”

When Francis met with three French activists in March 2021, he gave them the following orders: "Start a revolution, shake things up. The world is deaf; you have to open its ears.” 

But what kind of a revolution might he have in mind?  Maybe, as theologian Emmanuel Katongole says, it is a “revolution of tenderness,” but also a revolution determined to end the Third World War in piecemeal, once and for all. After all, he tells us that war is not inevitable.

Such a revolution in this time of massive violence will mean nurturing the paradigm of the fullness of life and a culture of nonviolence, justice, and reconciliation throughout the world, and ceaseless nonviolent initiatives and movements.  As it has in different times and places, the Church is called by this Kairos moment to join in this global process of nonviolent conversion.

This will be costly as we confront these systems.  To take this nonviolent revolution seriously, it means taking seriously the risks and consequences of confronting systems of oppression day by day and over the course of our lives.  In short, following Jesus to the Cross, as many of you are doing.

On November 26, Pope Francis spoke to the Superiors General of Religious Congregations from around the world, saying, “We either work for Peace…or we are not Christians!”  How can we work for peace that is consistent with Christianity?  It will mean abandoning the fidelity to violence.  It will mean saying no to injustice and yes to the sacredness of our enemy.  It will mean waging conflict without avoidance, accommodation, or attack.  It will mean the Church nurturing a formation in the theology and practice of Gospel nonviolence.

And it will mean following the nonviolent way forward, no matter what.