I think there's a tradition of regarding "turn the other cheek" and the other seemingly pacifist teachings in the Sermon on the Mount as a special calling for a kind of spiritual elite. And I think the Church has usually held it to be an obligation of priests, in particular, to be scrupulously nonviolent, or at any rate to scrupulously avoid legal violence. This non-violence may have something to do with celibacy, for of course, it's in defense of one's own family, when they're under attack, that the use of violence seems like a particularly urgent moral obligation.
The thing to bear in mind is that there's no particular virtue in being non-violent because you're part of a society where violence is a specialized function and it's not your job. There's nothing wrong with having soldiers and police and leaving the violence to them, at least in most situations. But to give one self moralistic airs because one never personally engages in violence, even as one's taxes pay the soldiers and policemen who use violence on your behalf, is a kind of hypocrisy and an odd kind of cowardice.
I have great respect for the Amish, whose sacrificial and separate lifestyle serves as a kind of warrant of sincerity of their pacifist convictions. They can't help being protected by the US military, but their peculiar way of life sort of proves that they're really reaching for a different social order, and signals that they are willing to pay the price of being non-violent if they had to. But people ought to avoid falling into a kind of lazy-minded pacifism or semi-pacifism which shuns military service and disdains war, and yet plans to go on enjoying the property rights that soldiers and police make possible.
I think there's a tradition of regarding "turn the other cheek" and the other seemingly pacifist teachings in the Sermon on the Mount as a special calling for a kind of spiritual elite. And I think the Church has usually held it to be an obligation of priests, in particular, to be scrupulously nonviolent, or at any rate to scrupulously avoid legal violence. This non-violence may have something to do with celibacy, for of course, it's in defense of one's own family, when they're under attack, that the use of violence seems like a particularly urgent moral obligation.
The thing to bear in mind is that there's no particular virtue in being non-violent because you're part of a society where violence is a specialized function and it's not your job. There's nothing wrong with having soldiers and police and leaving the violence to them, at least in most situations. But to give one self moralistic airs because one never personally engages in violence, even as one's taxes pay the soldiers and policemen who use violence on your behalf, is a kind of hypocrisy and an odd kind of cowardice.
I have great respect for the Amish, whose sacrificial and separate lifestyle serves as a kind of warrant of sincerity of their pacifist convictions. They can't help being protected by the US military, but their peculiar way of life sort of proves that they're really reaching for a different social order, and signals that they are willing to pay the price of being non-violent if they had to. But people ought to avoid falling into a kind of lazy-minded pacifism or semi-pacifism which shuns military service and disdains war, and yet plans to go on enjoying the property rights that soldiers and police make possible.