Social Doctrine and Personal Practice: Practicing Nonviolence as the Missing Link

“We refuse to be your enemy.” So reads a motto inscribed in stone at the Tent of Nations, a center for international cooperation on a hilltop near Bethlehem. The site has been the home of the Nassar family, Palestinian Christians, since the Ottoman empire. The land is now surrounded by Israeli settlements, illegal under international law, and settlers have repeatedly burnt the olive trees and beaten community members in an attempt to force them to leave. They do not have access to running water, and since the Hamas attack of October 7, 2023, the main entrance to their property has been blocked. Court proceedings are delayed and legal protection postponed, as day after day, they risk their safety. Yet, the Nassar family stays. As they put it, they refuse to be either enemies or victims. They persist, rather, as neighbors to those who live around them, the very neighbors who, according to the Torah, are to be loved.

The Nassar family embodies a Christian participation in Jesus’s life, loving enemies and speaking truth, even at terrible cost to themselves. Yet there is little in the standard presentations of Catholic moral tradition, neither in social doctrine nor in moral theology, that names what they are doing or prepares others to share in their work. They occupy a gap in Catholic thought. What does their witness illustrate about the relationship of social doctrine and personal moral formation, between engagement with social systems and prayerful growth toward holiness?

It is a historical peculiarity that the Church’s social doctrine and moral theology are distinct genres connected to distinct practices, although both are authoritative moral teaching. Modern Catholic social doctrine developed as a way for the Church to continue to speak its message to leaders in secular states when other paths for the Church’s guidance of the social order had been dismantled. It is articulated in writings by bishops and popes that are often addressed to “all people of good will” but are more commonly read by scholars, Church leaders, and perhaps professionals in NGOs or government offices. They focus on matters of ecclesial and state policy, rather than specific actions or actors. They are rich in critique and point in broad terms toward humanity’s common good. By contrast, Catholic moral theology developed as the field of study that prepared priests to hear confessions, and it focuses on cases that are or might be matters of individual moral failure,  to guide believers toward appropriate contrition, penance, and reformation of life. Because of this history, Catholic moral theology typically  concerns the individual, their will, their specific actions, and their growth in holiness through particular practices situated in a devotional context. Since Vatican II, scholars have attempted to move the discipline beyond what had become narrow and legalistic framing.  Nevertheless, the division between teaching on social matters and personal action persists.

The resulting division is to the detriment of Catholic tradition, both the moral and social teaching sides. I will not here attempt to address the malaise around the sacrament of reconciliation, which merits a lengthy separate discussion. Catholic social doctrine, meanwhile, remains “the best kept secret” of the Catholic church. Few Catholics know much about it and fewer are personally engaged by it. Catholic social doctrine provides a rich source of reflection on political philosophy, international systems, and public policy, but we can hardly be surprised that many believers find it intimidating and extrinsic to their personal devotion. This is particularly the case if those believers do not already understand their own lives as fundamentally shaped by political systems, and many believers do not encounter the elements of Catholic tradition that would promote such an awareness for them. 

Both social doctrine and moral theology include recognition that this separation is artificial and damaging. Catholic social doctrine itself calls for a holistic approach to the political and the spiritual. From its beginnings in the late nineteenth century, Catholic teaching on modern political orders argued for recognition that the spiritual and the political cannot be isolated from each other. Leo XIII in Rerum novarum argued that the ultimate solution to the social disorders he wrote about was in a return to Christian faith. John XXIII taught in Pacem in terris that we must recognize that society is first a spiritual reality. Pius XI in Quadragesimo anno called for “social charity,” a category that both Benedict XVI and Francis have renewed. Indeed, Francis’ emphasis on encounter, dialogue, and synodality have highlighted the importance of personal practice for social change. Meanwhile since Vatican II, scholars have worked to enrich moral theology with a deeper connection to scripture and to spiritual formation. 

But integrating the social and the personal sides of moral teaching has proven particularly challenging. Sacramental confession and reconciliation focus on the will of the individual in a way that reduces the social systems to ‘circumstance,’ a category that is by definition not central. When social teaching calls for personal conversion, as in the sixth chapter of Laudato si’, it also notes that “self-improvement on the part of individuals will not by itself remedy the extremely complex situation facing our world today.” (#219)

More, the practice of nonviolence addresses matters that usually belong to social doctrine, but it does so through means we might associate more with Catholic moral theology. Embodied and present nonviolent struggles have to be practical, and their practicality is informed by the paschal mystery. In this way, the too-common presumption that social doctrine requires strategic engagement with secular partners while moral theology focuses only on the ecclesial family is not adequate to the reality of nonviolent practice. A community of nonviolent action can be formed in a disciplined spiritual life that challenges the unjust systems they live in, by living already in the truth of our communion with one another. Such a community must also develop patterns for practicing the dialogue and encounter that Pope Francis advocates in addressing social injustice rooted in imbalance of political power. That is, 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. 

Similarly, the category “occasions of sin” typically arises in Catholic moral theology but could usefully be integrated in Catholic social doctrine, particularly in treatment of just war tradition. Since sinful social structures are built up by constellations of personal sins that become systems in which further sin is made more likely, we may think of them as a particular type of occasion of sin. That opens up a rather large field of moral questions. How should believers resist the occasion of sin posed by structures that encourage complicity, resignation, or even embrace of injustice?  More, how should believers participate in dismantling such sinful structures and building up settings that encourage them to practice the love of God? What formation can Catholics participate in to improve their ability to recognize social injustice and to develop creative ways to address it without being captured by its violence? In particular, how might we see just war tradition and the social structures around it as a kind of occasion of sin, inclining us to imagine that we can build justice through violence? Augustine argued that the danger in war is not death but “love of violence, revengeful cruelty, fierce and implacable enmity, wild resistance, and the lust of power, and such like.” (Reply to Faustus the Manichaean XXII. 74) Just war tradition, far from eliminating these dangers, serves as an occasion for them. To overcome the inclination to enmity, arrogance, and vengeance, it is not enough to condemn those qualities. We have to practice their inverse and develop patterns for avoiding situations that promote them. 

Finally, centering nonviolence as a topic for social doctrine and moral theology changes the conversation partners. Nonviolent movements, as Erica Chenoweth has noted, create paths of agency for the old and young, for manual laborers and professionals and students and caregivers alike. Lay people often fail to connect with Catholic social doctrine because it is usually written from a position of influence to a position of influence, from ecclesial power toward those with political power. Addressing nonviolence as a topic, however, means addressing ordinary people about their calling to witness to justice and peace, and because already it is practiced by the laity and by people facing oppression, it creates an opportunity for wisdom to arise from among the laity.

This idea of a movement that is both ecclesial, spiritual, and social may remind us of the way Quadragesimo anno called for and produced “Catholic Action.” In that case, a papal encyclical initiated a program of action in parishes to transform secular social orders from within, under the guidance of clergy, emphasizing “going out” from the parish as leaven in the loaf. We can learn from the shortcomings of that effort, particularly the way it set the laity up as working outside the church and only as individuals, not as themselves building up the church or as a body. In our era, a call for nonviolence to be at the center of social teaching would have to mean an increased sensitivity to the prevalence of violence within ecclesial structures, as well as in domestic, economic, political, and cultural structures. 

Throughout the history of Catholic social doctrine, major advances have often originated in the courageous and creative action of the faithful. The witness of Christians like the Nassar family points us toward a path that integrates the personal and social, the spiritual and political, by showing that the means of confronting social injustice can be consistent with the end and can be practiced by people in many walks of life. The theological disciplines of Catholic social doctrine and Catholic moral theology may find in centering nonviolence a path to renew their role in the lives of the faithful. Moral theology can enrich its sense of the person as inherently social when it is situated in the realities of struggle against social injustice. Social doctrine can land in the lives of the faithful if it is more closely linked to the spiritual and ecclesial struggle to bear witness to God’s kingdom even now. Calling both social teaching and moral theology into support for nonviolent action provides an occasion to fulfill the call of Vatican II’s Optatam Totius #16 that moral theology, “drawing more fully on the teaching of holy scripture, should highlight the lofty vocation of the Christian faithful and their obligation to bring forth fruit in charity for the life of the world.”