In an essay published by America magazine on April 23, 2018, San Diego’s Bishop Robert McElroy writes about Pope Francis’ “contributions to Catholic social teaching have reflected the three Franciscan priorities of poverty, peace and the planet.” Bishop McElroy writes that the pope’s Latin American roots must be considered and respected when assessing his positions, as much as St. Pope John Paul II’s Eastern European roots were.

Bishop McElroy writes, “[One] element of the new lens that Pope Francis brings to Catholic teaching on poverty, peace and the planet is the reintegration of nonviolence into the heart of Catholic teaching on war and peace. … For most of the church’s history … nonviolence has been seen as a heroic though unrealistic choice, an eccentric part of our patrimony that was displaced by St. Augustine’s powerful logic of war as last resort.

“In his World Day of Peace message in 2017, Pope Francis … reiterated the contention of the early Christian community that Christ’s call to love of neighbor and enemy alike is, in an unrelenting way, incompatible with recourse to war. … Can the church do anything less than seek to construct a powerful and realistic politics of nonviolence rooted both in reality and in the words of the Lord himself?”

Photo used under Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International