On a night when Joe Biden and Sarah Palin held a nationally-televised vice presidential debate, the Skutt Student Center ballroom was filled with people listening to a different kind of debate.
The 15th annual Markoe-DePorres Social Justice Lecture Thursday was a dialogue on war and peace between two prominent Catholic intellectuals, each offering different views on Catholic thought about just-war theory.
The first speaker, The Rev. Drew Christiansen, S.J., is the editor-in-chief of America magazine, the national Jesuit weekly, and from 1991 to 1998 headed the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops Office of International Justice and Peace. His speech focused on the changes of Catholic thinking on war and peace.
Christensen cited the late Pope John Paul II as being a major influence on the Catholic Church’s current teaching on the proper use of force to resolve crises.
“Unlike many international liberals and activist conservatives, John Paul set the standard for the use of force very high: risk to entire populations, that is, genocide,” Christensen said.
The Church permits pacifism for individuals, but does not endorse that position. Rather, it permits the use of force as a last resort, a policy known as just war theory.
“The Christian conception of the just war is contrasted with the secular conception,” he said. “It’s based on defense of the innocent.”
Christensen said the Church’s current philosophy is that it is important to protect the innocent, but it is concerned with exploring all methods of accomplishing this protection through international communication.
The second speaker, George Weigel, is distinguished senior fellow, Ethics & Public Policy Center, in Washington, D.C. and the author of “Witness to Hope: The Biography of Pope John Paul II,” which has been translated into 13 different languages. He was also a proponent of the United States’s 2003 invasion of Iraq.
Weigel’s speech focused on criticizing the Challenge of Peace, a 1983 letter from the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops addressing the threat of nuclear weapons.
“It seems to me today, as it did 25 years ago, that the letter displayed many of the defects of the American Catholic debate on war and peace that preceded it, even as it attempted to create a sustainable framework for Catholic reflection on these issues,” he said.
Weigel argued the document focused too much on arms control. It thought it could create disarmament by addressing the means of warfare, not the people who might seek to use them. Instead, it should have focused more on addressing the need for social reform in places like the Soviet Union, even the document dealt with it at times.
“This approach to the problem of the Cold War, peace achieved through dramatic political change, rooted in human rights activism that dealt with causes, not consequences, seems to have been closer to the strategic vision of John Paul II than the arms control approach of the Challenge of peace,” he said.
In his rebuttal, Christensen defended the Challenge of Peace, saying it’s still a valuable tool for shaping Catholic thought on just war theory.
“The nuclear question, didn’t disappear after the Challenge of Peace, the nuclear question is still with us,” he said.
Weigel agreed that nuclear weapons are a major problem, saying: “The United States — (should) declare as its settled policy the abolition of nuclear weapons in the world at some point in time in which this is achievable with acceptable safeguards.”