Achieving a Peaceful Society
Fratelli Tutti, Pope Francis’ 2020 encyclical on fraternity and social friendship, builds in stepwise fashion to its conclusion on peace. In the last article we explored the section on a culture of encounter, which is needed to foster peace. We live in a world that is good, but also fallen, so peace requires constant effort.
Peace has a specific meaning in Christian thought, and we have many false ideas about peace in our cultures. Peace and war have always been concerns for humanity, as we see in ancient writings in the Old Testament and in other faith traditions. Peace is more than the absence of war. Peace cannot be imposed at the tip of a spear – that is subjugation. Any lasting peace requires justice, which is giving each person what is due to them. Justice and peace are always linked to each other. Without justice, there can be no lasting peace. Injustice inevitably leads to conflict and violence.
The Pope begins with the fact that truth is required for peace and justice.
Truth, in fact, is an inseparable companion of justice and mercy. All three together are essential to building peace; each, moreover, prevents the other from being altered… Truth should not lead to revenge, but rather to reconciliation and forgiveness. Truth means telling families torn apart by pain what happened to their missing relatives. Truth means confessing what happened to minors recruited by cruel and violent people. Truth means recognizing the pain of women who are victims of violence and abuse. (227)
In this context, truth means facing the reality of past injustices, not hiding them or forgetting about them. This is a fundamental requirement for forgiveness and reconciliation. In the last article we saw the importance of objective truth, and that relativism is an obstacle to truth. In this setting, both sides of a conflict must see the objective truth of what happened, so that they can both develop a shared understanding. This requires courageous dialogue between them. As long as people are denying reality, making up their own version of the truth, or creating fantastical ideas not grounded in reality at all, reconciliation is impossible. This why, for Christians, truth is such an important concept. Truth is a prerequisite for peace, and it can be a gritty exercise to find it.
Pope Francis is addressing peace in this encyclical in terms of a peaceful society, rather than some form of personal peace. Societal peace is achieved and maintained through a process.
The path to peace does not mean making society blandly uniform, but getting people to work together, side-by-side, in pursuing goals that benefit everyone. (228)
Peace is something we must work toward – it does not appear out of thin air. Peace is not achieved by making everyone “uniform”, all thinking and acting in the same way. We respect diversity of culture, belief, and opinion. We work for peace as peers, not as the mighty and the weak, even if there are socioeconomic or power differences between people. This requires the powerful to act with humility and lift up the weaker members of society. Divisiveness and partisanship are obstacles to peace and foment conflict. The goals of peace that we pursue benefit everyone, or put another way, are for the common good. Goals that benefit one segment of society at the expense of another are not sufficient to achieve true peace. The Pope’s simple statement contains a great deal of wisdom to reflect upon!
Individual action is essential to achieving peace. “…Everyone has a fundamental role to play in a single great creative project: to write a new page of history, a page full of hope, peace and reconciliation.” (231) We each contribute to the process of establishing a peaceful society by the way we behave, how we vote, what we purchase, and how we interact with others. This exercise is an “open-ended endeavor”, an ongoing civic activity.
Peace requires a focus on the poor, and on them having equal opportunities to flourish.
Those who work for tranquil social coexistence should never forget that inequality and lack of integral human development make peace impossible. Indeed, without equal opportunities, different forms of aggression and conflict will find a fertile terrain for growth and eventually explode. (235)
We see this explosiveness every day, arising from oppression, domination, and neglect of some social group. Eventually they rebel against a system that treats them unjustly. Lasting peace requires justice for all members of society. Either we work for that justice and equality, or we are sowing the seeds of future conflict.
This is a fundamental concept that the Church has pressed continually throughout its history. It is a path of nonviolence, which Jesus preached. The opposite path is unfortunately very familiar to us: the path of violence, of might makes right, the law of the jungle, of peace through the destruction of our foes. This is why the Pope states that war has no winners – it is always a loss for humanity.
The world wants peace but doesn’t know how to get it. This reflection in Fratelli Tutti shows the path to lasting peace in society. It is built on the methods that we’ve been discussing: respect for human dignity, fraternity and friendship, dialogue, and a culture of encounter. It is possible to achieve peace in society.