peace, is the task of all. Thus, after the First World War, the League of Nations was
developed as a fruit of the Paris Conference which ended that war. It was the first
international organization whose principal mission was to maintain world peace. It
sought, as stated in its Covenant, to prevent wars through collective security and
disarmament, and to settle international disputes through political means: negotiation and
arbitration.
Though the League?s initiative reflected humanity?s sense of brotherhood and its desire
for peace, it failed to safeguard the peace or prevent W orld War II. But the shared desire
for peace and human flourishing once again recovered, as the world community found the
energy from within itself to step over its betrayal to form the United Nations (1945).
Inheriting most of the ideals and values of the League of Nations, the United Nations
aimed to stop wars between countries, and to provide a platform for dialogue,
cooperation in international law, security, economic development, social progress and
human rights.
But the building-block of nation has persistently been a stumbling-block. The humanly
established order does not inherently promote peace, because nations compete. Even
when these nations resolve to seek peace via an arrangement like the League of Nations
or the United Nations, the starting point of nation scuttles the enterprise: ultimately, a
nation will pursue its interests above those of any set of nations, let alone of all nations.
The sovereign nation considers the particular good of its own constituent citizenry – or
rather, of its elite – to be a higher value than the common good of all. Nations are prone
to the faults that the Apostle James identified when he asked: “What causes fights and
quarrels among you? Don?t they come from your desires that battle within you? You
desire but do not have, so you kill. You covet but you cannot get what you want, so you
quarrel and fight. You do not have because you do not ask God. When you ask, you do
not receive, because you ask with wrong motives, that you may spend what you get on
your pleasures” (Jm 4, 1-3).
And so the Encyclical Pacem in Terris was issued at a moment when another and a more
devastating war – that is, a nuclear disaster – loomed ominously overhead. For in the
1960s, not yet two decades after the conclusion of the Second World War, and despite the
pledged commitments of Nations to stop wars and to maintain world peace, the human
family stood again at the brink of international war. Rival political ideologies had more
or less forced the nations of the world into opposed political blocks that competed
desperately for supremacy.