Challenges for The Challenge of Peace

Is the 1983 peace pastoral still relevant in today’s globalized, terrorized, ecologically threatened world? How do we build peace when the WTO is arguably the strongest global authority? The Challenge of Peace: God’s Promise and Our Response was written toward the end of the Cold War, six years before the fall of the Berlin Wall (NCCB 1983). Its focus is definitely the contest between the two “superpowers, ” the United States and the Soviet Union. These states were then poised to destroy each other (or their allies) with massive arsenals of nuclear weaponry (no. 125). The Challenge of Peace is probably best remembered for its somewhat uneasy combination of a biblical call to the peace of God’s kingdom, and the use of just war theory to justify what it termed “a strictly conditioned moral acceptance of nuclear deter-rence ” (no. 186). The bishops ruled out nuclear war absolutely (nos. 138–88). One of the document’s more neglected features is that it foresaw that emerging new structures of global interdependence (“globalization”) would demand new forms of international cooperation, and especially a commitment to peacemaking in cooperation with other peoples, religions, and cultures (nos. 200–201). A second important marker in developing Catholic tradition on war and peace i