In May 2025, the newly elected Pope Leo XIV greeted the world with the words of the resurrected Jesus: “Peace be with you all!” Addressing “all people, wherever they may be,” Leo spoke of the peace of the risen Christ as “unarmed and disarming, humble and persevering.”
With his first words as pope, Leo made clear he would continue his predecessor’s commitment to a culture of nonviolence. During his 12-year papacy, Pope Francis urged the church to practice this culture “both in daily life and in international relations.”
Today, especially for American Catholics, nonviolence is pressingly relevant. At the time of this article’s writing (March 2026), the United States and Israel are waging a deadly war against Iran. U.S. leaders have hinted at more violence to come in Cuba. And Israel’s U.S.-funded attacks on Gaza continue.
Key Catholic leaders call the church and the culture to nonviolence, but how can they be sure that practice is creative, inclusive, and oriented toward justice? How can Catholics implement nonviolence in a way that avoids the problematic practices associated with some nonviolent movements?
The broader conversation
Leo and Francis are not the only Catholic leaders to promote nonviolence, and Catholicism’s engagement with the concept will likely continue, thanks in part to work such as Pax Christi International’s Catholic Nonviolence Initiative (CNI), which seeks to “place nonviolence at the heart of the church’s mission.” Meanwhile, theories of nonviolence are diverse. Some anarchists dismiss it as a failed strategy that upholds systems of oppression, while absolute pacifists reject any violence, even acts of personal self-defense.
Catholic pacifists often identify with the early church’s noncompliance with violent systems. However, the Catholic Church’s institutional commitment to nonviolence is relatively recent. It also swims upstream against the church’s deeply violent history, its centuries of promoting imperial war and violent colonial displacement. For Malinda Berry, a professor of peace theology at Anabaptist Mennonite Biblical Seminary, this points to the contradiction present within all traditions. All religions, she says, “have the capacity to become imperialist, colonialist, and fundamentalist,” but they also contain the possibility of being nonviolent, “contemplative, and mystical.”
The global conversation about nonviolence is multifaith, but the Catholic Church’s commitment to nonviolence is distinctly Christian, finding its roots in scripture, tradition, and church history. It emerges in a broader Christian context that already contains Orthodox, Protestant, and Catholic practitioners, scholars, and critics of nonviolence.
Pax Christi International’s copresident, Sister Wamũyũ Wachira, argues that Jesus’ example should be the central model for Catholic nonviolence. She also believes the stories guiding nonviolence must be connected to the lived experience and local practices of peacemakers on the ground, from Kenya to Ireland.
Nicolás Paz, director of the Catholic Nonviolence Initiative, also stresses the importance of local realities, urging activists to ask hard questions about “how nonviolence looks in Ukraine, what can nonviolence do with a genocide, like in Gaza?”
Christian nonviolence advocates share a Christ-centered framework, but they interpret Christian teaching in many ways. So what can the Catholic Church learn about nonviolence from the diverse Christian advocates who practice it—especially advocates at the margins of church and society?
Lessons from the Palestinian people
Palestinian pastor and theologian Rev. Dr. Munther Isaac is an outspoken voice in Christian movements opposing Israel’s oppression of the Palestinian people. He says that many people in his theological and activist circles “don’t use the term nonviolence, because it conveys passivity.” Isaac sees Palestinian Christians articulating, by contrast, a theology of “creative resistance.” Pointing to the Kairos Palestine documents of 2009 and 2025, Isaac speaks about creative resistance as “resistance in the logic of love, resistance that sees the image of God even in the oppressor, and resistance that seeks to correct the oppressor.”
Isaac sees such creative resistance lived out when indigenous Palestinians resist the violence of displacement and erasure. When Israel’s “colonial forces uproot trees, [Palestinians] plant trees. When they seek to erase us, remove us, displace us, we insist on our belonging to the land,” he says. He names global nonviolent movements such as BDS—the campaign to boycott, divest from, and sanction Israel—as an “important manifestation of creative resistance.”
For Isaac, Christian statements on Palestine often reflect a “toothless Christianity,” because they refuse to support the full BDS movement. “Statements without calling for sanctions and boycotting are meaningless, in our opinion. . . . They will even empower the oppressor.”
Other advocates for Palestinian freedom want Catholic leaders, particularly those in the United States, to see Palestinian life itself as nonviolent resistance. For Badreddine Rachidi and Jessica Sun, organizers with Christians for a Free Palestine’s Catholic Caucus, Palestinians simply “staying in the land is a form of resistance.” Similarly, Pierre Shantz, an organizer with Community Peacemaker Teams, points out that millions of Palestinians practice nonviolent resistance by choosing to “wake up every day [and] live a normal life, without taking up a weapon to shoot,” even though armed resistance against an illegal occupation “is, under international law, their full right.”
This connection between community resilience and international advocacy is echoed by Flora X. Tang’s analysis of violence and nonviolence. A doctoral candidate in peace studies and theology at the University of Notre Dame, Tang also sees the Palestinian-led BDS movement as a key practice of nonviolent resistance. She describes BDS as a bold, “principled stance,” especially in places where the movement has been demonized and outright criminalized. Consumer boycotts, including BDS, she points out, can be “micro-forms of choosing where to direct our money as consumers [and] an often-surprising way of practicing nonviolence.”
Beyond “good optics”
For Tang, these “micro-forms” exist alongside the daily practices of community care that women often carry out in social movements: the “grunt work” of global nonviolence. Yet the popular imagination often envisions nonviolence in terms of public heroism or public martyrdom, not the daily work of building community that will “never make the news.”
While Tang acknowledges that a South Bend statue of former University of Notre Dame president Congregation of the Holy Cross Father Theodore Hesburgh linking arms with Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. portrays a “beautiful moment in history,” she insists that nonviolence must be more than photo-op moments—and much more than “peaceful, praying people being brutalized by the police.” Within white progressive church spaces, Tang says she often sees a desire to “be the hero” by emulating these moments.
“That’s great, [but] we can’t all be that, right? We can’t all only go to protests as our commitment to nonviolence,” she says.
In contrast to this tendency to link nonviolence to individual, snapshot heroism or public martyrdom, she would rather nonviolent activists ask: “What does it mean to show up for our neighbors in ways that they actually want and not just in ways that make you look heroic?”
Media culture contributes to this heroic perspective on nonviolence. U.S. media, Tang says, “cultivates an imagination that nonviolence can only look like protest” or “heroic resistance in the face of direct violence.” She wants to claim less visually dramatic practices as nonviolent resistance, such as Palestinian women feeding their communities while the Israeli siege restricts the availability of food or friends helping one another navigate the “terrifying amounts of bureaucracy” imposed by the U.S. immigration system. These are two of many nonviolent practices of “mutuality and reciprocity” that demand no compensation or credit in return.
Learning from Indigenous advocates
Tang is not alone in recognizing uncelebrated examples of nonviolence. Melissa Chapman Skinner, an enrolled member of the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe, has worked with many Catholic and Episcopal peace movements, as well as Indigenous efforts for justice like the #NoDAPL movement against the Dakota Access Pipeline and organizing against ICE’s racial profiling within Indigenous communities,
Reflecting on her connection to these movements, Chapman Skinner names two troubling, connected dynamics: a refusal to recognize Indigenous resistance as nonviolent and a reluctance to name state repression of Indigenous communities as a form of structural violence.
When Chapman Skinner and other activists in her tribal community bring attention to Indigenous issues on social media, non-Indigenous social media users often stereotype them as angry and violent. Friends in the movement have even received death threats for speaking on social media about their efforts to promote justice in Indigenous communities.
The stereotype of an inherently violent Indigenous activist, she says, is one with deep historical roots. It is grounded in colonial ideologies, a “manifest destiny mindset” that views Indigenous people as “merciless Indian savages” (a racist phrase included in the U.S. Declaration of Independence).
Chapman Skinner has also seen both the wider media and the government downplay, ignore, or hide structural violence against Indigenous communities, even as it persists. Pipeline protestors were injured, shot, and physically attacked; ICE has detained Indigenous community members; and in 2025, the Department of Justice removed a key report on missing and murdered Indigenous people.
Just distribution of resources
Chapman Skinner has also seen Christian movements refuse to invest in Indigenous participation and leadership. Frequently, Indigenous people are not even in the room when progressive Christian peace movements discuss peace, justice, and antiracism. And when Indigenous people are included, their ministries encounter additional scrutiny from church leaders, a lack of communication, and insufficient financial support, all of which prevent Indigenous activists from being fully present.
This unjust distribution of resources also extends to the “attention economy.” Maryknoll sister Susan Nchubiri sees troubling dynamics in the church’s analysis of nonviolent movements. U.S. Catholic leadership, she argues, is not paying close enough attention to the power of accompaniment movements, where citizens go with undocumented community members to ICE appointments and walk with immigrant children to school.
This misdirected attention economy thrives, Nchubiri points out, because “violence sells,” but creative nonviolence does not. When ICE agents violently attack communities, the media is more likely to cover moments of intense repression. But longer-standing resistance to ICE—accompaniment where advocates “stand in the rain, in the heat, every day”—does not attract the same attention. This further contributes to church leaders’ lack of support for these movements.
Gender inequality also negatively affects the church’s engagement with social movements. While Nchubiri is inspired by nonviolent movements begun and sustained by Kenyan and Liberian women and Gen Z activists in Kenya, she is less impressed by the global church’s response. When asked why the church has not honored these movements as it has other nonviolent struggles, her diagnosis is clear: “The sin of patriarchy” prevents male church leaders from celebrating women-led initiatives.
Nchubiri names a third problem as well: overreliance on particular strategies. While Christian advocates in the United States are comfortable with “letters, going to visit their representatives, calling, releasing statements,” they are often reluctant to embrace confrontational direct action.
“[In the United States,] we are used to things happening quickly . . . instant coffee, instant noodles. Nonviolence campaigns are long. You have to spend a lot of time and sacrifice a lot,” she says. In place of a quick nonviolence that expects instant results, Nchubiri would like to see the U.S. church practice “courageous resistance” and “sustained commitment.” While many Catholic advocacy institutions rely on actions that stay within the nonprofit-friendly boundaries of letter-writing, Congressional phone calls, and lobbying, Nchubiri wants to see a widespread embrace of nonviolent strategies like sit-ins, strikes, and workplace organizing.
Engaging realistically with nonviolence
Some Christian advocates of nonviolence also recognize instances in which violent or armed self-defense can be necessary, consistent with international law, and aligned with Christian morality. Nicolás Paz, director of the Catholic Nonviolence Initiative, stresses the importance of local realities, urging activists to ask hard questions about “nonviolence and legitimate self-defense.”
Josiah R. Daniels, the senior associate opinion editor for Sojourners magazine’s website, sojo.net, grapples with how violent struggles against oppression complicate one-dimensional claims that only nonviolence can succeed or be moral. Among other examples, he cites the Haitian revolution against enslavement and French colonialism, as well as the antislavery revolts of Nat Turner and John Brown.
Daniels, who stresses he is speaking only in a personal capacity and not on behalf of his employer, “was previously very deeply invested in the nonviolent tradition,” he says. However, in 2015, he became conflicted about a totalizing commitment to absolute nonviolence after he saw the state violence that police inflicted on racial justice protestors in Ferguson, Missouri.
Daniels says that when he “encountered the brutal reality that police officers in Ferguson were killing people wantonly,” he realized that some of his views on nonviolence were not resonating with people who were experiencing the “most brutal forms of violence.” He recognizes that his advantageous position in society makes it easy to tell “someone in Ferguson who’s getting their ass beat for no other reason than they’re poor, or no other reason than they’re Black,” to “turn the other cheek.”
Today, Daniels works with and respects various activists and thinkers who have a complete commitment to nonviolence, but ultimately, he sees the world differently. “There are a lot of people who are really convinced that nonviolence is the most moral way to operate and [that] nonviolence is also the thing we have to commit to as Christians,” he says. “I’m just not convinced about either of those things.”
Daniels isn’t flippant about the possibility of oppressed groups resorting to violent self-defense. He grieves that structural violence has made the question of violent self-defense a relevant one for activists. “I think that people have a right to defend themselves,” he says. “But this is not something that should pump us up. This is something that should break our hearts and keep us up at night.” And he hopes for a future beyond violence in which all people can “live in peace and harmony with one another, and that people can have free health care, people can go to school for free, that we can have universal basic income.”
Notre Dame doctoral student Joryán Hernández says that if scholars and church leaders want to accurately discuss the history of social justice movements, they need go beyond focusing exclusively on nonviolent strategies and ideas. Hernández deeply believes in nonviolence and describes it as the “most authentically Christian path.” He especially uplifts nonviolent movements like anti-ICE organizing, which he often sees incorrectly named as violent due to racist stereotyping. But he is also clear: Movements for change are complex, and they frequently involve various forms of resistance.
Hernández points to the Black freedom struggle in the United States and to Latin American movements against repressive right-wing regimes. Both involved factions that used a diversity of tactics, but, he notes, when Catholics tell these movements’ stories, they tend to celebrate only pacifist activism, papering over more complex stories. They don’t talk much, for example, about Catholic activists such as priest Camilo Torres, who took up arms in Colombia after state repression made nonviolent resistance untenable.
While Hernández is not a critic of nonviolent movements, he says he is “skeptical of a particular moral posture that sometimes accompanies nonviolent advocacy: the tendency, often from a place of privilege, to declare violent resistance categorically and universally immoral, regardless of context.”
The path forward
Although each individual interviewed for this article draws on a Christian framework, Christianity does not have a sole claim on nonviolence. Various religious and nonreligious traditions, across historical and national contexts, have rejected violence and promoted nonviolent strategies.
The question for today’s church is not if religious leaders will continue to engage with nonviolence, but how they will do so. Pope Francis’ 2020 encyclical Fratelli Tutti (On Fraternity and Social Friendship) may offer a framework. In that encyclical, Francis called societies “to be open to new experiences through their encounters with other realities.” Perhaps Catholic leaders can model this openness alongside scholars, advocates, and everyday people committed to the work of nonviolence.
And perhaps, as the United States escalates its acts of violence globally, Catholic leaders here can engage with the question of nonviolence in new, creative ways that will play some small role in building a better future for all of us.
This article also appears in the June 2026 issue of U.S. Catholic (Vol. 91, No. 6, pages 30-33). Click here to subscribe to the magazine.
Image: Adobe Stock
