COMMENTARY: The pursuit of peace in the Middle East reminded me of words I wrote 24 years ago.
Repetition, it’s said, can be the mother of learning. So, in light of recent Catholic debates about the pursuit of peace in the Middle East and elsewhere, permit me to reprise, with slight adjustments, parts of a column from 24 years ago. The points I made then seem to me as salient today as when I first made them:
“In his [2002] World Day of Peace message, John Paul II taught a truth many Catholics have seemingly forgotten: that “peace,” in the classic Catholic sense of the term, is a matter of order, the order that is built through law and politics.
“After citing Vatican II’s teaching that peace is ‘the fruit of the right ordering of things with which the divine founder has invested human society,’ John Paul reminded us that the ‘peace of order’ has been the normative Catholic concept of peace for a very long time. As the pope put it, more than fifteen hundred years ago St. Augustine argued that ‘the peace that can and must be built in this world is the peace of right order
