Number 214 - December 2002

Church, what are you doing for peace?

Cardinal Roger ETCHEGARAY

First and foremost the Church mobilizes (that's truly the word) all its children for the battle of peace, a battle even harder than that of war. It calls above all the young people. The New Year message of the Pope in 1985 bore the slogan: "Peace and the young march together". That was neither to flatter them, nor in view of a marathon. Simply because the desire for peace sticks to them closer than the soles of their shoes, because peace and the young march together to the point of marching to death together; the military cemeteries are fields of wheat mown down whilst still green.

The Church calls on men of science. I can still hear the objurgation whom I accompanied to UNESCO (2nd June 1980): "I, a son of humanity and bishop of Rome, I address myself directly to you the highest authorities in all the fields of modern science... Let us deploy our efforts to preserve the human family from the terrible perspective of nuclear war". And it was then that he hurled out the pathetic cry: "We must mobilize consciences", a cry which has been considered as a call to a kind of objection of conscience, for the scientists of the world to block the meshes of death.

The Church confides the duty of peace to the nations themselves and not only to individuals. That is why it deploys an intense and omnipresent activity, too little known, within the international organizations and conferences where it makes itself the spokesman of the moral conscience of humanity in its pure state, if one may say that, transcending all private interests. That is why, whilst being quite aware of the reforms necessary, it never ceases encouraging the United Nations and its "specialized" institutions.

The Church never tires in exploring all dimensions of peace which have been given new names in order to resist better: development, social justice, international solidarity, defence of the rights of man. Everything holds together: the slightest tear in the tunic of humanity is a damage to peace. There is no true peace but that which verifies and respects at the same time all the dimensions of man.

On the path of an elusive peace, the Church dares to call on public opinion, a well advised and informed opinion, demanding for itself, neither anaesthetized nor manipulated, for there is nothing more vulnerable, nothing more exposed to sectarian instrumentalizations than popular aspirations to peace. Without a public opinion, the totalitarian walls would not begin to tremble and then to collapse. The Vatican Council II (Gaudium et Spes 82, 3), dared to declare: "The heads of state are very dependent on the opinions and feelings of the multitude".

We touch, doubtlessly, here, the knot of the problem of peace: that of education. A particular but not exclusive domain of the Church. The first act of the education to peace is to inform: faced with a documentation which becomes trite or a load of jargon, to take the care of becoming informed seriously on questions which by their very nature are complex.

Peace is not as simple as the heart imagines, but it is more simple than reason sets it up to be. Before the tangle of problems we are tempted to say to ourselves: peace depends on hands more expert than our own. Certainly, peace needs politicians and economists, but it is also in the hands of all of us, it passes through a thousand little gestures of daily life. Each day, by our way of living with others, we choose for or against peace. How many men and women do we see today who are quick to demonstrate or to sign a manifesto, but whose lives reflect nothing but selfishness or refusal of dialogue? How many of the faithful do we see today who ask their Church to make commitments which they themselves do not dare to risk in their own lives?

Christians are not asked to make apart a Christian peace, but to dynamize the peace of men. And there, irreplaceable, is the task of the Church at the service of all peace. The peace of Christ reveals to us the deepest roots of peace in reminding us of the necessity to struggle against evil. Then, the Christian doesn't mistake the battle on the fields of peace, he nourishes no illusions and is not worn out by any failure: he knows where true peace comes from and how far it must go. The peace of Christ communicates the most solid certitudes to us, in reminding us that all peace is a gift of God received in prayer and in fasting. It is in the silence of cloisters that one finds the best workers for peace outside the walls.

We know that "Shalom", is the most flavoured and juicy word of the Bible, the only one which can fulfil man by putting him in harmony with God, with other men, with nature, with himself. We know that God came to live amongst us to give a new start to "peace on Earth". We know that the peace left in heritage by Christ is not that in the manner of the world (see John 14, 27); much more, that it brings "the sword", as the Gospel says (Math. 10,34), a peace which puts us in a state of war with all false forms of peace. Peace, what a war! the greatest of all! We know that true peace can be obtained only through the stigmata of Christ crucified, on the example of the Poverello (Saint Francis of Assisi), the saint of universal peace. Finally, we know also ­ and there is our great strength ­ that Christ not only gives us peace, but that He is Himself our peace: "Ipse est pax nostra", said Saint Paul (Eph. 2,14). I don't know any word in the Gospel more innovating in favour of peace, for henceforth, in personifying peace the Church makes a life of it even more than a message.