Winds of
War: the Pope’s war
«Peace is the dramatic
outcome of the search for Truth and for God»
“Never as at the start of this millennium has man perceived how precarious is the world he has shaped. I am struck by the feeling of fear often dwelling in our contemporaries.” This is what the Pope said in his address to the Diplomatic Corps accredited to the Holy See. He then made a long list of situations of injustice, of war, of poverty that characterise our world.
“But everything can change. It depends on each one of us”. And here John Paul II listed what are the positive “imperatives” (yes to life; respect for law; the duty of solidarity; no to death, to selfishness, to war) that sustain man’s life and his need for happiness: the prosecution of these imperatives is the factor for building the peace the Pope wants so much, with Christian passion for the destiny of peoples, because in this is realised the destiny of the individual concrete person.
The Pope is for peace, he is not a pacifist. We feel reminded by him of the fact that peace is not the result of political strategies that win over others (even Bush says he is going to war so as to make peace); peace is the dramatic outcome of the search for Truth and for God, who alone can defeat what seems to be an inevitable enmity between men. From this point of view the Pope, in fighting for peace, is more at war than others – “peace is not the virtue of the unwarlike”, as Mounier said – and we are with John Paul II, because he untiringly offers his faith and his witness before a world in which the majority do not want war, but do not work for peace, because they do not know what to want and what to do. Meanwhile, in this confusion, men go on fighting and spreading that death and that incapacity to hope that are the true objects of the Pope’s attack.
