The Challenge of Peace: God's Promise and Our Response is a 1983 pastoral letter of the American Catholic bishops addressing the issue of war and peace in a nuclear age. It reviewed the Catholic Church's teachings about peace and war, reaffirmed the “just war” theory as the main principles for evaluating the use of military force, acknowledged the legitimacy of nonviolence as an alternative moral framework for individuals, evaluated the current issues in US defense policy, and proposed a series of actions that individuals could undertake.