President Trump’s initiative to establish a worldwide Board of Peace should be seen by Catholics for what it is and, in light of the Gospel itself, what it is likely to accomplish. There is no lasting and true peace without the Prince of Peace. We lose our theological nerve if we believe that President Trump’s wielding of economic sanctions and tariff threats to break up wars throughout the world will achieve a lasting peace. In the meantime, these strategies have worked and might win him the midterms. For now, Pakistan and India are not at war, because neither of them want the 10 50% tariffs placed on them by the United States. President Trump knows how to speak to their hearts! But one should not imagine that tariffs alone can establish true peace. Perhaps, however, a Board of Peace might be enough?
As every father knows, sending your kids to their respective rooms after threatening them with punishment only achieves so much. It doesn’t mean your children will genuinely love each other and respect one another. That is a peace that no Board can achieve on its own without God. That’s more or less the message of the Gospel.
Trump is running himself up against the very promises made to Abraham in Genesis 12. In that chapter, God reveals His plans to reunite the nations and bring them into a genuine peaceful coexistence in and through Abraham’s seed. Christians believe that Jesus of Nazareth is that seed and the fulfillment of that promise. Proposing a Board of Peace that would achieve global peaceful relations among the nations is not entirely different from other attempts at unity which we find at the Tower of Babel or the establishment of the United Nations or Solomon’s strategy of marrying the daughters of foreign emperors. These are human solutions to a human problem.
God’s solution is the Catholic Church under the leadership of His chief ambassador, Pope Leo XIV. I never tire of saying this to my fellow Catholics and so I say it again here: Either this is true or it isn’t. Either this is how the world really works or it’s not.
Part of the purpose of the Cristero Party is to remind Catholic of this, so that through them they might put forward Jesus Himself as the solution to the world’s problems. This short article is just one more warning flare from us here at the Cristero Party that whatever else the Board of Peace might achieve that is good and true and beautiful, if Christ is not the solution then it will not be genuine peace that will be found. In the meantime, much like the discipline of philosophy itself, it might massage an ego here or there as the world seems to be getting along just fine, but that same confidence will be the cause of its demise.
