Tranquillitas Ordinis: The Present Failure and Future Promise of American Catholic Thought on War and Peace - Hardcover

Weigel, George

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9780195041934: Tranquillitas Ordinis: The Present Failure and Future Promise of American Catholic Thought on War and Peace

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0195041933 ISBN 13: 9780195041934

Publisher: Oxford University Press, 1987

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In recent years, Roman Catholic bishops and activists have been highly visible in the public debate over issues such as nuclear arms control and U.S. policy in Central America. Until now, however, the evolution of American Catholic thought on these questions has received little attention. This book is the first comprehensive critical analysis of American Catholic thought on war and peace. The author's purpose is to evaluate the post-Vatican II transformation of the Church's approach to war/peace issues and to point a wiser direction for its future development. The book begins with a survey of American Catholicism's rich and sophisticated heritage of moral reasoning on war, peace, and political community. In a major reinterpretation of American Catholic history, Weigel shows how the American Bishops' development of a theology of democracy in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries enriched the Church's classic understanding of peace as political community. Weigel thus challenges the now-prominent idea that the U.S. Catholic bishops were not seriously involved in the war-peace debate until the last decade. A highlight of the book is its detailed intellectual portrait of John Courtney Murray, S.J., whom Weigel calls the finest political theorist ever produced by the American Church. Weigel then demonstrates how, over the past generation, American Catholic intellectuals and publicists began to abandon their heritage, and thereby impoverished the theological and political argument over war and peace, security and freedom. The book analyzes the ideas of seven key figures in the transformation of the American Catholic war/peace debate--Dorothy Day, Gordon Zahn, Thomas Merton, Daniel and Philip Berrigan, James Douglass, and J. Bryan Hehir--and critically explores the U.S. bishops' recent involvement with nuclear and Central American policy. Recovering and developing the classic American Catholic heritage, Weigel argues, is essential to creating a wiser theology and politics whose concern for both peace and freedom challenges realists and idealists alike.

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About the Author:

About the Author:
George Weigel is President of the James Madison Foundation in Washington, D.C. and Editor of American Purpose. He served as Scholar-in-Residence at the World Without War Council of Greater Seattle from 1977-1984 and before that as Assistant Professor of Theology at St. Thomas Seminary from 1975-1977.

From Library Journal:

Weigel, president of the James Madison Foundation, first outlines a sophisticated view of war and peace developed from church tradition by American Catholics, especially John Courtney Murray, and based on the concept of peace as "dynamic, rightly ordered political community." He then shows how, after Vatican Council II, Dorothy Day, Gordon Zahn, the Berrigans, James Douglass, J. Bryan Hehir, and, finally, the American bishops abandoned this view for "personalist/conversionist understandings of peace." The wealth of information makes the survey valuable, but Weigel is disappointingly vague on the precise differences between the "traditional" view and the "failures" of American Catholics since the Council. W. Charles Heiser, S.J., St. Louis Univ. Lib.
Copyright 1987 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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