Book review
Christianity’s Missing Peace – Pope Francis, Gospel Nonviolence and the Renewal of the Irish Church by Martin McMullan
Publisher: Wipf & Stock, 2025, Paperback ISBN 979-8-3852-6195-6, 134 pages.
Reviewed by Sylvia Thompson
This book by Martin McMullan, a Dublin-based teacher, has a foreword by Mairead Corrigan Maguire and reached me in February 2026 so a review is long overdue. Martin, the author, was known to me since the Pax Christi Ireland launch of Pax Christi International Catholic Nonviolence initiative on the 14th October 2023 in the Loyola Institute at Trinity College Dublin. This is referenced in the book (p.100).
In her foreword Maguire says “the church is in urgent need of a clear, courageous and prophetic moral stance”. This book is certainly a contribution to that. The preface gives the reader a helpful overview and the Introduction says explicitly that the “book is aimed first and foremost at the church faithful from a Catholic persuasion” and McMullan believes this to be “an urgent task to awaken people to a central but forgotten and misunderstood tenet of Christianity that has the power to truly transform the world”. Although I am personally coming from the Catholic tradition, I believe that the message given in this book applies to all Christians.
The book has six chapters and 134 pages so it’s a short read but there’s a lot condensed in those pages, for example Chapter 1, Jesus and Nonviolence. This shows the scholarly background to this book and here the author concludes that nonviolence lay at the heart of Jesus’ teaching and practice. Indeed Chapter 2 outlines that the practice of active nonviolence for the first three centuries was ”taken as a given for the building of the kingdom of God” until the “Constantinian shift” which took place with the conversion of the Emperor Constantine and the beginning of the Christian Roman Empire which in turn lead to the beginning of the ‘just war’ theory.
This book is calling for a return to Gospel nonviolence and sees a papal encyclical on this as one significant step. This could not be more timely and we can now see from the strong pronouncements of Pope Leo X1V that the church seems to be edging towards this as he follows the lead of Pope Francis.
In Chapter 4 there is an examination of various papal pronouncements on War and Peace since Vatican II and McMullan writes that they have shown a gradual accepting of the centrality of nonviolence to Christian peacemaking in the world…a most interesting chapter.
In the final chapter entitled Gospel Nonviolence and the Renewal of the Irish Church there is a particular reference to Ireland and the gap in the teaching on gospel nonviolence is highlighted. It documents the work of the Peace People as exemplaries of this but does not reference the work of Pax Christi Ireland including its Belfast branch and other peace activists within the Christian tradition e.g. Fellowship of Reconciliation over many years especially in the lead-up to the Good Friday Agreement.
The closing words of the final chapter entitled A New Heaven and a New Earth, “It is time for brave and prophetic leadership to give hope to a very troubled humanity” is McMullan’s call to the Irish Church…is it listening?