Pope Leo XIV: Only peaceful hearts can build just and lasting peace
By Pope Leo XIV
Peace is one of the great issues of our time and is both a gift and a commitment: a gift from God built by men and women throughout the ages.
We live in a world wounded by too many conflicts and struck by bloody hostilities. Bitter nationalism tramples on the rights of the weakest. Even before it is crushed on the battlefield, peace is defeated in the human heart when we give in to selfishness and greed and when we allow partisan interests to prevail instead of looking to the common good. Many writers have said that it is when we refuse to listen to other people’s stories that we begin to deprive them of their dignity. Depersonalizing others is the first step in any war. To know others, on the other hand, is a foretaste of peace. But in order to know, one must first know how to love. Saint Augustine said that “no one can be known except through friendship” (Eighty-three Different Questions, 71).
I would like to reflect here on this dual dimension of peace, which is vertical (peace as a gift from Above) and horizontal (peace as the responsibility of each person).
Peace is a gift that God has given to men and women of every age through Jesus’ birth in Bethlehem. The angels announced peace on earth because God became man. He embraced humanity so deeply that with his cross he destroyed the enmity of sin. Saint Augustine writes: “We, too, shall be a source of additional glory to God in the highest when, after the resurrection of our spiritual body, we shall be lifted up in the clouds to meet Christ, on condition, of course, that we work for peace with good will while we are here on earth” (Sermons, 193). The glory of God descended upon the earth to make us participants in his infinite goodness. This gift calls into action the responsibility of our answer, of our “good will”, as the Saint of Hippo writes.
Furthermore, peace is the gift that the Risen One gave to his disciples. It is a peace “injured” by the wounds of the crucifixion, because Jesus’ peace gushes forth from a heart that loves and lets itself be struck by the suffering of every time and place. “The Lord appeared to His disciples after His resurrection, as ye have heard, and saluted them, saying, ‘Peace be unto you.’ This is peace indeed, and the salutation of salvation: for the very word salutation has received its name from salvation” (Saint Augustine, Sermons, 116).
However, peace is also a commitment and responsibility for each one of us. Peace means teaching children to respect others and not to bully others when they play. Peace means overcoming our personal pride and making room for the other, in our family, at work, in sports. Peace is when our heart and our life are inhabited by silence, meditation and listening to God; because God never blesses violence, he never approves of taking advantage of others, or of the frenzied abuse of the one Earth that is disfiguring Creation, a caress of the Creator.
We may feel powerless before the many wars being fought around the world. We can respond in various ways to what I called the ‘globalization of powerlessness’: believers can, first and foremost, give voice to prayer. Prayer is an “unarmed” force that that seeks only the common good, without exclusions. By praying, we disarm our ego and become capable of gratuitousness and sincerity.
Moreover, our heart is the most important battlefield. It is there that we must learn the bloodless but necessary victory over the impulses of death and the tendencies toward domination: only peaceful hearts can build a world of peace. We must practice a culture of reconciliation, by creating non-violent workshops, places where suspicion of others can become an opportunity for encounter. The heart is the source of peace: there we must learn to meet rather than clash with each other, to trust and not of mistrust, to listen and understand instead of closing ourselves to others.
Finally, politics and the international community are responsible for facilitating the mediation of conflicts, utilizing the arts of dialogue and diplomacy. “O Lord God, grant your peace to us…, the peace of rest, the peace of the Sabbath which has no evening”: with these words of Augustine, let us ask the Father to grant our world, all people, especially those who are most forgotten and who suffer the most, the blessing grace of a just and lasting peace.
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