Conference on the Future of Catholic Peacebuilding
April 13-15, 2008
University of Notre Dame
Notre Dame, IN
CPN in the News:
Peace-Building Network Participants to Finish Book on Theology, Peace
By Gene Stowe, Catholic News Service
NOTRE DAME, Ind. (CNS) -- The Catholic Peacebuilding Network closed its final planned conference at the University of Notre Dame April 15, sending writers to complete their work on a book about Catholic theology and peace.
The Conference on the Future of Catholic Peace-building brought together people on the front lines in conflict zones with each other and with academics who want to build a systematic theology of peace-building in the Catholic tradition.
Coming 25 years after 1983 U.S. bishops' pastoral letter, "The Challenge of Peace: God's Promise and Our Response, A Pastoral Letter of War and Peace," the project builds on the call to develop a theology and ethics of peace while facing the new challenges and opportunities that have arisen in the intervening years.
Since the first conference, a small gathering at Notre Dame in 2004, the Catholic Peacebuilding Network, a loose affiliation of like-minded institutions, has held its annual conference in the Philippines; Burundi and Colombia. This year's conference April 13-15 was held at the University of Notre Dame.
The conferences, which bring together people from nearly 25 countries
-- including Sudan, Uganda, Rwanda, Congo and Burundi -- also provide opportunities for theological and ethical reflection on peace-building, as academics interact with those directly engaged in conflict situations.
For example, Catholic leaders in Burundi and Mindanao can compare how they deal with healing people who have suffered trauma, said Gerard Powers, chairman of the network's steering committee.
"In northern Uganda and Colombia, the church is playing a very similar role in the peace process," Powers told Catholic News Service April 11.
"One focus of the conferences is to connect these people," he said, noting there are "different visions," such as a preference for amnesty and alternate means of accountability in northern Uganda, while some in Colombia prefer more formal, legal accountability.
Participants in the conference will produce a book within a year.
Writers who present extensive papers at the conference will do a final rewrite based on responses from participants in preparation for the book's publication.
"We've finished our first stage of five conferences and a book," Powers said. "Part of the purpose of this conference is to think about where we go next."
Since the first conference, a small gathering at Notre Dame in 2004, the network, a loose affiliation of like-minded institutions, has held its annual conference in Mindanao, the Philippines; Burundi; and Colombia.
Powers said the academic work is two-pronged: addressing an increasingly secular society's aversion to religion and developing a coherent theology and ethic of Catholic peace-building.
"The conventional wisdom is that religion is mostly a problem and that the antidote to religious influence is to privatize religion," he said.
"Religion is not just a cause of conflict but is also a cause of justice and peace. We're trying to do a better analysis of the sociology of religion."
A systematically developed theology of peace would be comparable to the just-war tradition. Part of the effort is to deal in new categories, not simply the old debate between pacifism and just war. Beyond limiting war, peace-building has to do with how to prevent conflict, manage conflict when it happens and move beyond it to reconciliation, explained Powers.
"These are different kinds of questions," he said. "They require that you move beyond that and think in new categories."
Powers noted that the network is trying to look at the practice of peace-building.
For example, a Colombian priest might have drug traffickers, rebel forces, government troops and victims of violence all in the same parish.
Careful use of language is crucial as the church, responding to different circumstances in different nations, avoids becoming politicized.
One priest in a conflict area declined an invitation to head a negotiating team, despite his recognized credibility by both sides, because the role seemed too political. Polish bishops who helped bring together Solidarity and the government some 30 years ago considered themselves acting in a "substitute" political role because no other institution could have filled it.
"How do you talk about the church's role?" Powers asked. "A lot of this work sounds political. It sounds like it's the work of laypeople in the church, not of clerics. These are really important, interesting questions."
Scott Appleby, director of the Joan B. Kroc Institute for International Peace Studies and a founder of the network, discussed how the church's search for answers engages theory with practice.
"It's on the ground. It's evolving. It's historical," he said. "The church is very engaged with the world."
The engagement reflects profound changes since the 1983 U.S. bishops'
pastoral letter, "The Challenge of Peace: God's Promise and Our Response, A Pastoral Letter of War and Peace," which addressed the question of nuclear weapons.
"We're in a different world," Appleby said. "The post-Cold War era has elevated other kinds of challenges," including the resurgence of old rivalries and ethnic and religious tensions.
Twenty-five years later, the focus is expanded to questions such as the ethics of nuclear proliferation, sanctions, humanitarian intervention, preventive war and the role of nonviolence. Events in the intervening years, including embargos, genocides, the U.S. invasion of Iraq and the unexpected success of popular and relatively bloodless revolutions in the Philippines, Eastern Europe and South Africa have called attention to the new issues.
In 1983, for example, nonviolence was considered a stance for an individual, but history has shown the possibilities of mass nonviolent action to bring about major social and political change, Powers said.
"We're not a pacifist church, nor are we a functionally pacifist church," he said. "But I think nonviolence has a more prominent role now than it did 25 years ago."
Copyright (c) 2008 Catholic News Service, www.catholicnews.com
Reprinted with permission of CNS
Return
to main conference page |
