PRAISED BE JESUS, MARY, AND JOSEPH!
The beginning of the civil year is
to us the World Day of Peace. For this year, the Holy Father has chosen the
theme: Blessed are the Peacemakers for they will be called children of God. We
all know that this theme is one of the Beatitudes of the Lord Jesus.
According to the Holy Father, “The beatitudes are not only moral exhortations whose
observance foresees in due time – ordinarily in the next life – a reward or a
situation of future happiness. Rather, the blessedness
of which the beatitudes speak consists in the fulfillment of a promise made to
all those who allow themselves to be guided by the requirements of truth,
justice and love. In the eyes of the world, those who trust in God and his
promises often appear naïve or far from reality. Yet Jesus tells them that not
only in the next life, but already in this life, they will discover that they
are children of God, and that God has always been, and ever will be, completely
on their side. They will understand that they are not alone, because he is on
the side of those committed to truth, justice and love. Jesus, the revelation
of the Father’s love, does not hesitate to offer himself in self-sacrifice.
Once we accept Jesus Christ, God and man, we have the joyful experience of an
immense gift: the sharing of God’s own life, the life of grace, the pledge of a
fully blessed existence. Jesus Christ, in particular, grants us true peace,
which is born of the trusting encounter of man with God.”
“Jesus’
beatitude tells us that peace is both a messianic gift and the fruit of human
effort. In effect, peace presupposes a humanism open to transcendence. It is
the fruit of the reciprocal gift, of a mutual enrichment, thanks to the gift
which has its source in God and enables us to live with others and for others.
The ethics of peace is an ethics of fellowship and sharing. It is
indispensable, then, that the various cultures in our day overcome forms of
anthropology and ethics based on technical and practical suppositions which are
merely subjectivistic and pragmatic, in virtue of which relationships of
coexistence are inspired by criteria of power or profit, means become ends and
vice versa, and culture and education are centered on instruments, technique
and efficiency alone. The precondition
for peace is the dismantling of the dictatorship of relativism and of the
supposition of a completely autonomous morality which precludes acknowledgment
of the ineluctable natural moral law inscribed by God upon the conscience of
every man and woman. Peace is the building up of coexistence in rational
and moral terms, based on a foundation whose measure is not created by man, but
rather by God. As Psalm 29 puts it: ‘May the Lord give strength to his people;
may the Lord bless his people with peace’ (v. 11).”
“Peace
concerns the human person as a whole, and it involves complete commitment. It
is peace with God through a life lived according to his will. It is interior
peace with oneself, and exterior peace with our neighbours and all creation.
Above all, (as Blessed
John XXIII wrote in his Encyclical
Pacem in Terris,) it entails the building up of
a coexistence based on truth, freedom, love and justice.
The denial of what makes up the true
nature of human beings in its essential dimensions, its intrinsic capacity to
know the true and the good and, ultimately, to know God himself, jeopardizes
peacemaking.
Without the truth about man
inscribed by the Creator in the human heart, freedom and love become debased,
and justice loses the ground of its exercise.
To become
authentic peacemakers, it is fundamental to
keep in mind our transcendent dimension and to enter into constant dialogue
with God, the Father of mercy, whereby we implore the redemption achieved for
us by his only-begotten Son. In this way mankind can overcome that progressive
dimming and rejection of peace which is sin in all its forms: selfishness and
violence, greed and the will to power and dominion, intolerance, hatred and
unjust structures.
(“The
attainment of peace depends above all on recognizing that we are, in God, one
human family. This family is structured, as the Encyclical
Pacem in Terris taught, by interpersonal relations and institutions
supported and animated by a communitarian “we”, which entails an internal and
external moral order in which, in accordance with truth and justice, reciprocal
rights and mutual duties are sincerely recognized. Peace is an order enlivened
and integrated by love, in such a way that we feel the needs of others as our
own, share our goods with others and work throughout the world for greater
communion in spiritual values.
It is an
order achieved in freedom, that is, in a way consistent with the dignity of
persons who, by their very nature as rational beings, take responsibility for
their own actions.”)
“The path
to the attainment of the common good and to peace is above all that of respect
for human life in all its many aspects, beginning with its conception, through
its development and up to its natural end. True
peacemakers, then, are those who love, defend and promote human life in all its
dimensions, personal, communitarian and transcendent. Life in its fullness is
the height of peace. Anyone who loves peace cannot tolerate attacks and crimes
against life.
Those who
insufficiently value human life and, in consequence, support among other things
the liberalization of abortion, perhaps do not realize that in this way they
are proposing the pursuit of a false peace. The flight from responsibility, which degrades human persons, and even
more so the killing of a defenceless and innocent being, will never be able to
produce happiness or peace. Indeed how could one claim to bring about
peace, the integral development of peoples or even the protection of the
environment without defending the life of those who are weakest, beginning with
the unborn. Every offence against life, especially at its beginning, inevitably
causes irreparable damage to development, peace and the environment. Neither is it just to introduce
surreptitiously into legislation false rights or freedoms which, on the basis
of a reductive and relativistic view of human beings and the clever use of
ambiguous expressions aimed at promoting a supposed right to abortion and
euthanasia, pose a threat to the fundamental right to life.
There is
also a need to acknowledge and promote the natural structure of marriage as the
union of a man and a woman in the face of attempts to make it juridically
equivalent to radically different types of union; such attempts actually harm
and help to destabilize marriage, obscuring its specific nature and its
indispensable role in society.
These
principles are not truths of faith, nor are they simply a corollary of the
right to religious freedom. They are
inscribed in human nature itself, accessible to reason and thus common to all
humanity. The Church’s efforts to promote them are not therefore
confessional in character, but addressed to all people, whatever their
religious affiliation. Efforts of this kind are all the more necessary the more
these principles are denied or misunderstood, since this constitutes an offence
against the truth of the human person, with serious harm to justice and peace.
Consequently,
another important way of helping to build peace is for legal systems and the
administration of justice to recognize the right to invoke the principle of
conscientious objection in the face of laws or government measures that offend
against human dignity, such as abortion and euthanasia.”
The Holy
Father pointed out that true peace is attained when the most basic right to
life of everyone, particularly the weakest amongst us, is safeguarded. This is
why we should continue to stand up for the cause of life. Let us continue to
struggle against all attempts to cheapen life and make it expendable. May Mary,
Mother of Life and Queen of peace help us always in our struggle against the
culture of death.
Jesus, I
trust in you! O Mary conceived without sin, pray for us who have recourse to
thee!
