For when they shall say, Peace and safety;
then sudden destruction cometh upon them, as travail upon a woman with child;
and they shall not escape.
1 Thessalonians 5:3
"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. Though a move away from just war thinking wouldn't necessarily raise dogmatic or doctrinal issues in the church, it would represent a sharp break not only with the
prudential outlook that marked the pontificates of John Paul II and Benedict XVI but also with a powerful and influential strand of thinking in the church stretching all the way back to St. Augustine in the fifth century." TheWeek
