"Will Pope Francis dump the just war doctrine?"

theweek.com

"Pope Francis gives every indication of wanting to go down as one of the great reformers in the history of the Roman Catholic Church.

With the recent publication of the apostolic exhortation Amoris Laetitia (or The Joy of Love), he finally pronounced on whether the church would begin allowing divorced and remarried Catholics (whose first marriages haven't been annulled) to receive the sacrament of communion. Answer: Official doctrine says no, but priests can say yes.

So what's next?

If a landmark three-day conference held at the Vatican last week is any indication, it may well be the church's position on matters of war and peace.

Participants in the conference, which was co-hosted by the Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace and the Catholic peace organization Pax Christi, called on the pope to issue an encyclical or other authoritative teaching document in which he would advise Catholics to stop using the church's long tradition of just war theorizing to analyze international relations. The just war tradition has been used too often to justify violence, conference participants maintained. As an alternative, the church should place Jesus Christ's ethic of nonviolence at the core of deliberations about military conflict.

This is a fascinating development and yet another sign of how dramatically things have shifted at the Vatican since Pope Francis ascended to the throne of St. Peter."