A few weeks ago, while the Catholic and Evangelical Churches were celebrating Holy Week, Patriarch Kirill declared also Putin's war ‘holy’. Nothing new in terms of substance, nor with respect to history: large sectors of Christianity, for example, have done and said something similar in other circumstances. Of course, this is colourful language. The Ecumenical Council of Churches has asked for clarification: who knows, perhaps, sooner or later, Kirill, in an attempt to explain himself better, will leave the council of his own choice.

Council aside, how can the other Churches react to such tones? At least on one point, in my opinion not irrelevant, one can agree: no symmetrical attitude, no holy war for democracy, for freedom, for rights. War, and politics too, are profane, secular realities; so are democracy, freedom and rights, realised (if, where and when they are), in forms that are always partial and contradictory. The Church of Jesus does not respond to idolatry by sacralising what seems politically desirable, but  rather by recognising the relativity of all that is earthly. This does not mean that democracy, freedom and rights are not important realities worth striving for. Only that, as Pope Francis (along with, moreover, every other inhabitant of the planet, including, I presume, Putin and Kirill), “peace is much better than war”.

This broad but somewhat generic consensus could perhaps be clarified by overcoming, in the discussion on the achievement of peace, the dry alternative between ‘diplomacy’ and ‘weapons’. One does not need a master's degree in geopolitics to know that the military factor is always part of every diplomatic negotiation. Those who rely on diplomacy with a view to peace cannot remove the centrality of the military instrument.

A strand of the Christian tradition is moving in this direction, trying, often with modest success, to elaborate even theologically all the ambiguity that such a viewpoint brings with it. The central element of this project lies precisely in a basic option for the political instrument: peace in this world has a political character and must be pursued politically. Diplomacy is an instrument of politics and military force is part of diplomatic work. The specifically ethical content of this idea is that the partial and precarious peace that is its goal is to be preferred to the arbitrariness of those who reason in terms of the pure deployment of force.

Another major current in the Christian tradition notes that weapons kill even when they are not directly deployed (e.g. because of the resources they take away from otherwise commendable projects) and that in any case, when they are there, they always end up firing. The ‘just war’ theories and their more recent developments have justified all the unjust wars in history and, in any case, no such theory is to be found in the New Testament.

The task of the Church, from this perspective, is to proclaim the message of the unarmed prophet who came from Nazareth, as a great alternative to a logic that inexorably produces war. This is a clear and, in its own way, coherent position: it implies, even if almost all are reluctant to admit it, the renunciation of the political construction of peace; actually, according to some, the Church's task consists in witnessing not so much peace (which never depends on one side), but the renunciation of weapons by those who believe.

This dialectic is part of Christian history and will certainly not be settled now. Indeed, there are those who use in this regard the category of ‘complementarity’, derived from particle physics, which envisages a dualism that is structurally not surmountable, but in its own way fruitful.

A first objective could be to avoid discussing peace in warlike terms, tearing apart already weak Churches. Especially since, regardless of bishops and synods, societies make their own choices anyway.

See, Guerra santa, pace profana

*Fulvio Ferrario. Professor of Dogmatic Theology at the Waldensian Faculty of Theology in Rome