page_title: Catholic peace traditions
section_title: Europe
hierarchical_section_title: Catholic peace traditions / Contemporary Catholicism (c.1963 – ) / Europe
context_page_description: Catholic peace traditions begin with its biblical and classical origins to the current practice in the 21st century. Because of its long history and breadth of geographical and cultural diversity, this Catholic tradition encompasses many strains and influences of both religious and secular peacemaking and many aspects of Christian pacifism, just war and nonviolence.
  Catholic tradition as a whole supports and favors peacemaking efforts. Peacemaking is an integral part of Catholic Social Teaching.
context_section_description: Pope John XXIII (1958–63) set off a revolution in Roman Catholic thought and life that harkened back to an earlier period for its models and inspiration and brought the church into a new age. Through his policy of aggiornamento the pope opened the church to the modern world. Russell Hittinger describes the encyclical Pacem in Terris "as a kind of magna charta of the Catholic Church’s position on human rights and natural law". John's successors Paul VI and John Paul II furthered this agenda while maintaining traditional church teachings in many areas of individual and social morality.
  In the 1980s the Polish Solidarity movement grew out of labor strikes in the shipyard at Gdańsk. It was the first non-Communist Party-controlled trade union in a Warsaw Pact country, and became a broad social movement, using civil resistance to advance the causes of workers' rights and social change.
  British historian Timothy Garton Ash, observed shortly after Pope John Paul II's death, " ...without the Polish Pope, no Solidarity revolution in Poland in 1980; without Solidarity, no dramatic change in Soviet policy towards eastern Europe under Gorbachev; without that change, no velvet revolutions in 1989.
caption: The Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo with Néstor Kirchner, president of Argentina, in 2005.
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