In April 2016, a conference was held in Rome entitled “Nonviolence and Just Peace: Contributing to the Catholic Understanding of and Commitment to Nonviolence.” In what can now seem like a long time ago (before the disheartening stories of 2018 broke: McCarrick, Vìgano, etc.) the spring of 2016 was a hopeful moment for many Catholics. Indeed, conference participants generally seemed confident that Pope Francis was about to issue an encyclical that would bring significant change to church teaching on war and peace. Choosing Peace: The Catholic Church Returns to Gospel Nonviolence is a product of that conference—and of that moment.

This volume reads like the conference proceedings it is, and would certainly be helpful in undergraduate and graduate courses. It opens with messages to those gathered from Pope Francis and from Hildegard Goss-Mayr, a longtime Catholic peace activist, perhaps best known for leading a peace lobby to Rome during Vatican II that included Dorothy Day, Jim Douglass, and Eileen Egan. An introduction next presents the two central concepts of the conference and volume: nonviolence and “just peace,” which are described as “a Christian school of thought and set of practices for building peace at all stages of acute conflict—before, during, and after” (11).

Following this introduction, the volume breaks into several sections, with each section focusing on a particular theme, such as the idea of nonviolence in a violent world, scriptural evidence regarding Jesus and nonviolence, traditional Catholic thinking about and practice of nonviolence, the Catholic just war tradition, and the practice of just peace. Each section provides a summary of the papers presented at the conference with lengthy quotations. Some sections also include extended papers, e.g., Lisa Sowle Cahill's paper on nonviolence in the Catholic tradition. While these extended papers (which, regrettably, are almost entirely from US scholars) are generally helpful, what is most engaging and valuable in this volume are the accounts from scholars, activists, and church leaders from various war-torn regions in the world, among them Palestine, Croatia, and Afghanistan. For instance, Sr. Nazik Matty, OP, described having her whole community displaced by ISIS from the Iraqi city of Mosul while Archbishop Jean Baptiste Odama discussed his experience negotiating with Joseph Kony and the Lord's Resistance Army in Northern Uganda. Reading these reflections on the very real struggles of practicing nonviolence in the face of extreme violence was sobering and serves as a reminder to first-world readers of what nonviolence and just peace entail.

The volume also includes what is described as a consensus statement that was released at the end of the conference; it includes a call for the Catholic Church “no longer [to] use or teach ‘just war theory’ ” (25). Some may question the extent to which the Catholic Church has ever actually taught or employed the just war theory; nevertheless, the call for the church to reject it outright is daunting. As Elizabeth Anscombe and others have noted, while both pacifists and realists seem to reject the idea that morality can be applied to warfare, the value of the just war theory has been to allow moral deliberation regarding the war—ad bellum, in bello, and even post bellum—to occur. Without the constraints of the just war theory, all war is total war.

One case that offers a caution to dispensing with the just war theory has to do with Franz Jägerstätter, the Austrian Catholic who was executed in 1943 for refusing to enlist in the Nazi army. His dramatic story was told in Gordon Zahn's In Solitary Witness (1964), which clearly portrayed Jägerstätter as a pacifist. In 1990, though, papers from Jägerstätter's trial turned up in Prague; these papers seemed to suggest that he was not a pacifist, but had requested non-combatant duty in the German army. Jägerstätter's wife had earlier claimed that her husband would have fought for an Austrian resistance to the Nazis had there been one. In response to this new evidence, Zahn (a conscientious objector in World War II and later the cofounder Pax Christi USA) conceded that if it was true, Jägerstätter should be regarded as the “patron saint of the just war theory.” The just war theory—not always, of course, we all know—can serve to check the power of a war-making state and provide a basis for refusing to bend under its heel.