Peter Costello
Dr Theodora Hawksley in search of peace Peace-building and Catholic Social Teaching
by Theodora Hawksley (University of Notre Dame Press, US$42.00, paperback/US$100.00,hardback; €50.00, paperback/€80.00, hardback)
Dr Theodora Hawksley is associated with the Jesuits in Britain and specialises in peace studies, black theologies and other explorations of the essential connections between Catholic social teaching and the realities of the world we live today.
This massive tome is described as one of the first scholarly monographs dedicated exclusively to theology, ethics and peace-building in the Catholic tradition.
This is a book of enormous relevance to Ireland, and to other largely Catholic communities. All too often what is called peace-making or peace-building are actually attempts to restore peace.
Here the emphasis suggests that peace-building is not an ‘add-on’; it should be a daily conscious activity in the lives of those who call themselves Catholics.
Often in the past it has been too easy to find a theological justification for ‘going to war’. But the problem really is why Catholics let conditions get to the stage where violence by their co-religionists were allowed to get to that stage of open war.
This is a book which every serious religious library and indeed serious library in Ireland should have a copy. But its ideas and insights that Dr Hawksley derives from her studies of Catholic social teaching since the earliest days of Christianity should be ingrained in the minds and emotions of all. It is, of course, aimed at a largely academic audience; but the insights should not be lost on the widest possible readership through the efforts of others to propagate them.
That blessed nature of the peacemakers we have on the highest authority. But St Luke adds what for many – or indeed most people – is a harder saying: “love your enemies, do well to them, and lend to them, expecting nothing in return. Then your reward will be great, and you will be sons of the Most High; for He is kind to the ungrateful and wicked…”
And there is where even the best kind of Catholic will be given pause, and turn away justifying in their hearts their hatred of some others. And even priests accept the need as they see to bless the cannons going to war. Reared to think of themselves as always right, Catholics can find it hard to accept that they are actually in the wrong.