Priests, in order to become mayors, had to be viewed as lovers. So, the mayor-priest is a ‘lover’ in multiple senses. He has to embody God’s love. He has to perform paternal love. He has to signal to society that he is also, very likely – albeit in secret – to be a good sexual lover as well.
Two authors remember Pope Francis’s thoughts, words, and actions.
The language of ‘right to defense’ has been consistently deployed to legitimate Israel’s general military strategy and ongoing U.S. provision of weapons as its policy. Meanwhile, Pope Francis consistently calls for an end to the mass atrocity of war… Something drastically needs to change.
It turns out that when weighing warfare’s costs, benefits, and odds of success, its overall record is surprisingly weak.
It is imperative to respect the claims of conscience behind the pacifist convictions often associated with the rejection of the modern state. But if Catholic social teaching is going to incorporate nonviolence more fully, it also must develop the connection between nonviolence and modern politics.
The notion of quality of life, an extended conception of common good, and the solidarity with the victims can move nonviolence from the margins of Catholic Social Teaching to its center.
The virtues and practices include confronting the issue rather than the person, practicing forgiveness, tolerance, and reconciliation, embracing the enemy as a child of God, and protecting human dignity and the common good. It explores how the combination of CST and nonviolence can address human actions that sustain marginalization, racism, conflicts, oppression, domination, and diverse forms of social exclusion.
In turning away from more abstract debates about liturgy to those that center on its lived and material dimensions, we hope to enliven a conversation about ‘lived liturgy’ to consider what practices uphold, challenge, or fail to account for the global political order.
[P]romoting justice and defending human dignity need not only hinge on grand self-sacrificial gestures…. That social structures are sustained by social practices suggests that the everyday is consequential too and dispels the notion that smaller or more mundane acts are too paltry and thus powerless to effect the kind of structural change justice requires.
Nonviolence presses us to face and points us toward the challenge of integrating charity and respect for human dignity into our practice of addressing entrenched social injustice.
This essay is a storied and theological proposal for non-violent, disruptive anti-fascism.
Jean-Luc Marion waded into political discourse with his 2017 book Brève apologie pour un moment catholique (Brief Apology for a Catholic Moment) which uses aspects of his phenomenological and theological project to argue for a model of non-political politics: one based exclusively on the perfect will of the Triune God.