January 8, 2024 / 06:52 AM
At the end of the liturgical season of Christmas, Pope Francis received the Diplomatic Corps accredited to the Holy See with whom he shared some reflections on peace, a word that “resonates in a particular way in the two main Christian festivals,” mouth of the angels before the Birth of God and “in the voice of the risen Jesus.”
“Peace,” the Pontiff noted, “is first of all a gift from God (…), but at the same time it is our responsibility.” In the Pope’s opinion, it is “a word so fragile and at the same time so compromising and dense with meaning” that, in his understanding, “it is increasingly threatened, weakened and partly lost.”
The Holy Father, who has reiterated as on other occasions throughout his pontificate that the world is experiencing a “third world war in pieces,” has stopped first of all to denounce the situation in Israel and Palestine, to condemn “the terrorist attack against the population of Israel” by the Hamas terrorist group on October 7 and denounce “the strong Israeli military response” that has resulted in “the death of tens of thousands of Palestinians” and has caused “a very serious humanitarian situation with unimaginable suffering.”