Can Catholic social teachings help bring peace to Ukraine?
Can Catholic social teachings help bring peace to Ukraine?
By Anthony Annett and Jeffrey D. Sachs
Apr 17, 2022 at 10:00 AM
In the season of Easter, Passover and Ramadan, we yearn for peace, and yet the world is in the midst of war. The world seems unhinged. Russia brutally attacks Ukraine, new variants of COVID sweep across the globe, the urgency of climate change is ignored and the major powers threaten each other with “red lines” and dire warnings. How can we regain our footing?
One place that both of us turn is to the Catholic social teachings. These are a font of knowledge and insight about how to achieve what we want in society: an end to the fighting and divisions that wrack the planet, an economy that works for all. They stretch back to the wisdom of the Greek philosopher Aristotle, the Gospel teachings of Jesus and the remarkable synthesis by Thomas Aquinas in the Middle Ages. Starting in 1891 with Pope Leo XIII’s encyclical Rerum Novarum, and continuing until today, the Popes have drawn on and updated this profound body of wisdom to shed light on the most difficult challenges facing each generation.
We have studied the Catholic social teachings and also seen close at hand how they can help to solve real-world challenges, including the toughest we face. Annett’s new book ”Cathonomics: How Catholic Tradition Can Create a More Just Economy” shows how the Catholic social teachings can help to make our economy more prosperous, fair and resilient. Sachs’s 2013 book ”To Move the World: JFK’s Quest for Peace” described how Pope John XXIII, with his remarkable encyclical Pacem in Terris, helped President John Kennedy and Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev reach a peace agreement in 1963 at the very height of the Cold War.
In the same way, the Catholic social teachings have contributed to the restoration of freedoms in Eastern Europe at the end of the Cold War, debt relief for the world’s poorest countries in the 2000s, the adoption of the Sustainable Development Goals and Paris Climate Agreement in 2015, and the fight against human enslavement.
In two remarkable encyclical messages to people of all faiths, Pope Francis has shown how Catholic social teaching can help to illuminate the way out of our current travails.
Francis’s 2015 encyclical Laudato Si’ helped to inspire world leaders to agree in Paris in 2015 to take coordinated actions to help stop human-induced climate change. His 2020 encyclical Fratelli Tutti (Brothers and Sisters All) is a powerful statement of how to achieve peace in a world of diversity and division. Its message is especially urgent to help end the war in Ukraine.
In Fratelli Tutti, Francis calls for human fraternity between peoples in a way that transcends barriers and boundaries. The encyclical proved prescient. “Ancient conflicts thought long buried are breaking out anew,” he says, “while instances of a myopic, extremist, resentful and aggressive nationalism are on the rise.” He laments what he calls the dark clouds over a closed world, marked by a zero-sum approach to human interaction, rising distrust and polarization, a culture of walls, globalization hijacked by the rich and powerful, and rising inequality in the context of an aggressive form of solidarity-shredding individualism.
“In today’s world, the sense of belonging to a single human family is fading,” he says, “and the dream of working together for justice and peace seems an outdated utopia. What reigns instead is a cool, comfortable and globalized indifference, born of deep disillusionment concealed behind a deceptive illusion: thinking that we are all-powerful, while failing to realize that we are all in the same boat.”
Francis is at his most passionate in his denunciation of war and conflict. The first victim of every war, he says, is humanity’s innate vocation to brotherhood. “Every war leaves our world worse than it was before,” he says, “War is a failure of politics and of humanity, a shameful capitulation, a stinging defeat before the forces of evil.” “Never again war,” he cries.
In the face of conflict, Francis is clear that the answer is tireless recourse to negotiation, mediation and arbitration under the auspices of the Charter of the United Nations. True peace requires patient dialogue.
Inspired by Francis, the UN Sustainable Development Solutions Network has recently sent a message to all UN member states and the leadership of the United Nations. “The war in Ukraine threatens not only sustainable development, but the survival of humanity. We call on all nations, operating in accordance with the UN Charter, to put diplomacy to the service of humanity by ending the war through negotiations before the war ends all of us,” says the statement. Despite the darkness of war, we and the other signatories of this statement believe there is a path to peace, a path marked by dialogue. Instead of escalation by NATO into Ukraine, Russia would withdraw from Ukraine and Ukraine would become a neutral, non-NATO country, living in peace with neighbors both east and west.
Any escalation of this awful war would be unthinkable. On this Easter day, we must return to the teachings of Jesus, who said “blessed are the peacemakers.” Or as Pope Francis said on Good Friday: “Inspire adversaries to shake hands, and taste mutual forgiveness. Disarm the hand of brother raised against brother.”
Annett is senior adviser at the Sustainable Development Solutions Network, and author of “Cathonomics: How Catholic Tradition Can Create a More Just Economy.” Sachs is University Professor at Columbia University and president of the UN Sustainable Development Solutions Network.