The problem is not limited to the laity. A Catholic priest once told me that in seminary he spent exactly one afternoon learning about “Just War,” one afternoon in seven years, and he never learned anything about nonviolence. Some priests think nonviolence is a Quaker thing or a “60s” thing or a sign of the feminization of the Church.
This is the story behind my new class Bread Alone: A Contemplative Study of The Hunger Games for Christians, how it came to be, and why Christian parents might want to enroll in it, alongside their teenage children, this summer.
In The Harvest of Justice is Sown in Peace (1993), the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops wrote: “An essential component of a spirituality for peacemaking is an ethic for dealing with conflict in a sinful world. The Christian tradition possesses two ways to address conflict: nonviolence and just war…Throughout history there has been a shifting relation between the two streams of the tradition which always remain in tension.”
If there is any tension between these two streams of the tradition, it exists only in the most erudite circles of the Church, in my opinion. While teaching ancient literature to high school freshmen at a classical Catholic school for ten years, I discussed themes of war, violence, and murder with my students on a weekly basis: Their ideas, perspectives, and assumptions could hardly be distinguished from those of the most worldly secular humanists. It wasn’t their fault: There was no “tension” in their minds about the two traditions because they didn’t know anything about them.
The problem is not limited to kids. Most adults cannot tell you the criteria of the “Just War” doctrine. Some Catholics can tell you that such a doctrine exists — but that’s it. Back when the The Hunger Games films were first released, I noticed something curious about Catholic reviews (which I wrote about at LRC here). To summarize: Catholic film critics “saw very little about the central human problem of war in this wildly popular film that was, in the words of its Roman Catholic author, written about war, and after a decade of living under a government that is perpetually waging war.” It was a massive blindspot.
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