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The Challenge of Peace: God's Promise and Our Response is a 1983 pastoral letter of the American Catholic bishops addressing the issue of war and peace in a nuclear age. It reviewed the Catholic Church's teachings about peace and war, reaffirmed the just war theory as the main principles for evaluating the use of military force, acknowledged the legitimacy of nonviolence as an alternative ...
Although it has inherited some elements (the criteria of legitimate authority, just cause, right intention) from the older war theory that first evolved around a.d. 400, it has rejected two premises that underpinned all medieval just wars, including crusades: first, that violence could be employed on behalf of Christ's intentions for mankind ...
The just war theory postulates the belief that war, while it is terrible but less so with the right conduct, is not always the worst option. The just war theory presents a justifiable means of war with justice being an objective of armed conflict. [4] Important responsibilities, undesirable outcomes, or preventable atrocities may justify war. [3]
The hoary doctrine of “proportionality” from the “just war” theory is being sorely tested by the wars in the Middle East and Ukraine.
The Orthodox Church took the view that it was better to change the soul of the enemy rather than to kill them; [11] however, they also saw an obligation to defend against a threat, and as such saw war as a lesser, necessary evil. In the 13th century, Thomas Aquinas set out the criteria for a just war in the Summa Theologica. [12]
George Weigel is a prominent Catholic political and social author who serves as a Distinguished Senior Fellow of the Ethics and Public Policy Center.In his book Tranquillitas Ordinis: The Present Failure and Future Promise of American Catholic Thought on War and Peace, published in 1987, Weigel defines tranquillitas ordinis as the peace of "dynamic and rightly ordered political community" and ...
The early Christian church believed that Christians should not take up arms in any war, [7] and so struggled attempting to balance the obligation to be a good citizen and the question of whether it was permissible to take up arms to defend one's country. There developed a gap between the reasoning of the moral theorists and the practice of the ...
Many philosophers in the early centuries have dabbled in defining what is ethically and morally acceptable in war. However, St. Augustine is considered to be the father of just war theory. St. Augustine was a Roman Catholic who constructs the idea from a Christian perspective. He is the credited founder of the term jus ad bellum itself. [4]