Cardinal Cupich: Peace is not absence of war but work of justice

Cardinal Blase J. Cupich, Archbishop of Chicago, has been awarded the Catholic Theological Union’s ‘Blessed are the Peacemakers' award.

In a speech at the prize ceremony on Wednesday evening, the Cardinal quoted Pope Leo XIV’s homily for Palm Sunday this year, in which he said that Jesus “does not listen to the prayers of those who wage war, but rejects them."

It is unfortunate, the Cardinal noted, that many had responded to the Pope’s remarks by insisting on the importance of just war theory—a response which he said is beginning “to sound less like moral discernment and more like an anxious effort to prove that what is happening might still be just.”

While there is a place for the just war theory, Cardinal Cupich said, such an approach is “the wrong starting point”. The first question we should ask, he stressed, is not “Can this war be justified?” but rather “What does the Gospel demand of us now? What does it mean, concretely, to be peacemakers?”.

With this in mind, the Cardinal turned to consider four conditions for peacebuilding, drawn from Pope Francis’ Apostolic Exhortation Gaudete et Exsultate: Serenity, creativity, sensitivity, and skill.  

Serenity is important, he said, “not because peace ignores conflict, but because it refuses to be ruled by it … Instead of responding within the logic of domination and humiliation, the disciple steps outside that logic altogether.”

Creativity, on the other hand, is required because “conflict cannot simply be absorbed; it must be transformed.” In practice, this means the “hard, patient work of dialogue and negotiation—not as tactics of compromise at any cost, but as moral processes ordered toward justice."