Pope Francis proposes 3 concrete actions to achieve peace

The Vatican presented this Thursday the Message of Pope Francis for the 58th World Day of Peace, which will be celebrated on January 1, 2025 with the title Forgive us our offenses, grant us your peace.

With a view to the upcoming Jubilee of Hope, Pope Francis makes a forceful call to listen to the “desperate cry for help” of the poorest countries, urging the international community to take concrete action.

It also expresses its firm hope that 2025 will be a year in which “real and lasting” peace grows and calls for a firm commitment to promote respect for the dignity of human life, “from conception to natural death.”

“Each of us must feel responsible”

At the beginning of his message, the Holy Father expresses his wishes for hope and peace to all those who “cannot see any perspective for their own lives.”

In this sense, he appeals to “extended complicity,” stating that “each of us must feel responsible” for the oppression of others, environmental degradation, or the confusion generated by misinformation.

Pope Francis insists that “we are all debtors” and therefore proposes a cultural change. Likewise, he remembers that the goods of the earth are intended for everyone, not just a few privileged people, and he emphasizes that, “when gratitude is lacking, man stops recognizing the gifts of God.”

However, he adds, “the Lord, in his infinite mercy, does not abandon men who sin against Him; rather it confirms the gift of life with the forgiveness of salvation, offered to all through Jesus Christ. Therefore, by teaching us the ‘Our Father’, Jesus invites us to ask: ‘Forgive us our trespasses.’”

Three concrete actions to achieve real peace

A few days before the Jubilee Year begins, Pope Francis specifies that “hope is born from the experience of God’s mercy, which is always unlimited,” while affirming that “God does not calculate the evil committed by man.” . Next, the Holy Father proposes three concrete actions to achieve peace.

Firstly, he insists that the external debt “has become an instrument of control” and therefore calls for solidarity and justice, urging the development of a new financial architecture and the creation of a global financial document, “founded on solidarity and harmony among peoples.”

It also advocates a “firm commitment to promote respect for the dignity of human life, from conception to natural death, so that every person can love their own life and look to the future with hope, desiring development and happiness for all.” herself and for her own children.” In particular, it calls for the elimination of the death penalty “in all nations.”

It also sets its sights on wars and invites us to use at least “a fixed percentage of the money used in armaments for the constitution of a World Fund that definitively eliminates hunger and facilitates educational activities in the poorest countries also aimed at promoting development.” sustainable, contrasting climate change.”

“An unarmed heart”

The Holy Father expresses his desire that 2025 be a year in which true peace grows, “which is given by God to an unarmed heart: a heart that does not insist on calculating what is mine and what is yours; a heart that dissipates selfishness in the readiness to go out to meet others.”

A heart, the Pontiff continues, “that does not hesitate to recognize itself as a debtor to God and that is why it is willing to forgive the debts that oppress its neighbor; a heart that overcomes discouragement about the future with the hope that every person is a good for this world.”

Finally, he specifies that “peace is not achieved only with the end of the war, but with the beginning of a new world, a world in which we discover ourselves different, more united and more brothers than we had imagined.”

Presentation of the message in Rome

The message was presented this morning at the Press Office of the Holy See, by Cardinal Michael Czerny, prefect of the Dicastery for the Service of Integral Human Development; Krisanne Vaillancourt Murphy, CEO of Catholic Mobilizing Network; and Vito Alfieri Fontana, engineer and former weapons manufacturer.

Cardinal Czerny stressed that Pope Francis “invites each of us to strengthen and consolidate our faith; to renew our commitment to conversion; and to disarmament.”

For his part, Vito Alfieri shared his personal story and confessed that he left his job as a landmine manufacturer after his children asked him what he did.

“I have changed my life by trying to fix the ‘before’. “What was normal for me had become a burden,” he told journalists gathered in Rome. In this sense, he stated that “we must think like the Holy Father and feel that we are in debt.”