by Michael Griffin of the Catholic Peace Fellowship The election of Benedict XVI as pope brings hope for the continuation of peacemaking as central to the papacy. Just as John Paul II cried out again and again to the world, “War never again!” the new pope has taken the name of the one who first… continue reading

Fr. McCarthy is a priest of the Eastern Rite (Byzantine) of the Catholic Church. Formerly a lawyer and university educator, he is the founder and the original director of The Program for the Study and Practice of Nonviolent Conflict Resolution at the University of Notre Dame and is also co-founder of Pax Christi-USA. Fr. McCarthy… continue reading

Gil Bailie, teacher, lecturer, and writer, is the foremost interpreter of the work of René Girard and the author of Violence Unveiled: Humanity at the Crossroads. A few have asked if I have any thoughts on Mel Gibson’s film “The Passion of the Christ.” Not only have wiser observers than I have opined at great… continue reading

Having been asked to speak from a pacifist perspective, I should state right away that I have misgivings about the word “pacifism.” Not only does it have connotations of an unreasonable refusal to take up arms to defend the innocent, like your wife or daughter or grandmother who is being raped. It also implies a… continue reading

Michael Latsch, a Catholic Worker in Houston, is an archeology graduate of Northwestern University. Around 9 in the evening on November 22, I started walking home. I ambled southeast along Victory Drive in Columbus, GA, heading away from downtown and toward the apartment I was staying in for the weekend, which sat a few hundred… continue reading

The Christian appraisal of armed hostility is sometime reduced to a set of doctrinal criteria purporting to sum up the morally significant aspects of war. An alternative and equally hallowed approach is the appeal to a pervasive human sinfulness so toxic as irremediably to infect the structure of human existence with bloodshed and killing. But… continue reading

The most consistent and frequent promoter of peace and human rights for the last two decades has been Pope John Paul II. From Iraqi War I to Iraqi War II, he has echoed the voice of Paul VI, crying out before the United Nations in 1965: War No More, War Never Again! John Paul II… continue reading

Fr. Hugo published a seven-page article entitled “The Immorality of Conscription” in the November 1944 issue of The Catholic Worker. According to Patrick Coy, the article was so popular and the demand for it ran so high, that less than six months later the CW included it again, this time as a supplement to the… continue reading

That they may now understand that this is a new kind of warfare and not the usual custom of joining in battle, when he sent them forth with nothing He said: “And so, marching on, show forth the meekness of lambs, although you are to go to wolves. . . for so will I best… continue reading

I have just read a review of the Kinsey report, which appeared in the spring number of Politics. . .. Here are some of the things I was thinking about the book. In the first place, I remembered how I came across Havelock Ellis’s Sexual Pathology at the age of seventeen, in the home of a… continue reading