Educating for peace and non-violence

Archbishop Corrado Loreficen is Metropolitan Archbishop of Palermo. On March 29, 2025, he gave this lecture to the youth of MED 25 at the Faculty of Theology of Sicily. 

Dear young people of the MED 25 Project, dear friends gathered here,

I greet you with friendship and fraternal affection in the name of a common humanity that brings us together here today, as women and men eager for communion and a future. Communion and a future. Because without the experience of our gathering in a koinonia, in a life and a destiny that concern us all, we are not men and women, we are not human. Without the expectation of the future, without this immediate, bodily opening towards a tomorrow that is one with our desire to live, humanity does not exist, the human is not given. We are here today challenged by that which, in our existence, is the furthest from this constitutive horizon, namely war. We look at the world shaken by long, dramatic, often silent and poisonous wars. I have seen with my own eyes and heard with my own ears the scourges of war in the Congo and Syria.

Our common home, ever smaller and more interconnected, today risks betraying its intrinsic vocation as a harmonious garden of life and fraternal and peaceful relationships, a space of communion and a future. A common home that is on the verge of transforming into a battlefield where all are against all.

You, dear young people of the Med25 Project, are the expression and sign of the certain hope of this desire for communion and a future. You are of different nationalities, languages, cultures, and religions. Your sailboat Bel Espoir—which has begun to ply the waters of the Mediterranean—will dock and unite the five shores that border it: North Africa, the Middle East, the Aegean Sea, the Balkans, and Latin Europe. You are the sign of a fertile diversity, generating communion and a future of peace.

On October 27, 1986, in the context of the Cold War and a threatening climate, a World Day of Prayer for Peace was convened by John Paul II in Assisi, in the presence of representatives of all the world's major religions: 50 representatives of the Christian Churches and 60 representatives of other world religions. This meeting saw believers of all the world's religions pray for peace in the city of Saint Francis, side by side, in the face of the horror of war. On October 29, before a group of representatives of non-Christian religions, the Pope declared: “Let us continue to spread the message of peace. Let us continue to live the spirit of Assisi.”

The current events of the Common House testify to the desire of the "great ones of this world" to return to the last century - at the mercy of the thirst for power according to the "spirit of Babel" (cf. Gen 11:1-9) - with its logic that led to two harmful world wars. I would like above all, looking at the last century, to underline the paradigmatic value of the event that took place in Assisi in 1986, almost forty years ago. The "spirit of Assisi" does not presuppose the logic of the "lowest common denominator", that is, " an agreement on a common starting point. […] praying together did not mean that […] the gesture of Assisi does not primarily imply openness, dialogue, or anything else, but communication in difference. In Assisi, Christians and members of other religions communicated in what is most intimate in religious experience, prayer, while leaving intact the difference of their prayers. The common gestures, the common pilgrimage, the common fast, the common conclusion were there to show that what was specific to each, prayer, was not done without the other or alongside the other, but with the other. Religious difference was celebrated in common as a practice of peace. (G. Ruggieri, Christianity, Churches and the Gospel, 167.169).

If we are here today, it is because it has grown within us "the conviction that war is a great folly and that dialogue is the medicine for conflict. Even more than yesterday, we are convinced that peace is a great ideal that can inspire policies and personal lives. Peace is an ideal flouted in too many regions of the world: it must be resurrected! Peace is the great ideal of empty societies without ideals." (A. Riccardi, Le parole della pace, 258-259). Let us keep firmly in our hearts the determination of a “communication in difference,” of a dialogue between different people as a “praxis of peace.”

Giorgio La Pira, Mayor of Florence, born in the charming seaside town of Pozzallo, in that great floating raft that is Sicily – as Pope Francis reminded us in Marseille on September 23, 2023 – "He read in the Mediterranean not a question of conflict, but a response of peace, indeed 'the beginning and foundation of peace among all the nations of the world' (G. La Pira, Parole a conclusione del primo Colloquio Mediterraneo, October 6, 1958). LThe answer […] is possible if we consider the common and, so to speak, permanent historical vocation that Providence has assigned in the past, assigns in the present and, in a certain sense, will assign in the future to the peoples and nations who live on the shores of this mysterious, enlarged Lake Tiberias that is the Mediterranean. (Opening speech of the first Mediterranean Colloquium, October 3, 1958).

The Sea of Galilee, the Sea of Tiberias, a place where, at the time of Christ, a great variety of peoples, cults and traditions were concentrated. It was there, in the "Galilee of the nations" (cf. Mt 4:15), crossed by the sea road, that the greater part of Jesus' public life took place. It was in a multifaceted and in many ways unstable context that the universal proclamation of the Beatitudes took place, in the name of a God the Father of all, who “makes his sun rise on the evil and on the good, and sends rain on the just and on the unjust” (Mt 5:45). It is also an invitation to broaden the boundaries of the heart, transcending ethnic and cultural barriers. Here, then, is the response that comes from the Mediterranean: this perennial Sea of Galilee invites us to oppose the division of conflicts with the "conviviality of differences" (T. Bello, Benedette inquietudini, Milano 2001, 73). The mare nostrum, at the crossroads of North and South, East and West, concentrates the challenges of the entire world, as its "five shores" testify.

Before being a mystery, war is a choice. The blindness that leads to it has a deep motive, a hidden source. To understand it and draw the right energy to counter it, we must return to the body, to bodies. Return to bodies. The body—the Romans already knew this, Paul knew it—does not want splits. It only functions thanks to synapses that unite. And if Alzheimer's disease is the splitting, the bursting of synapses, then those who decide on war have a form of Alzheimer's. In its mind, the areas of care and love have flattened. And they have separated from the areas of strength, which degenerates into violence. It must be said: war is born of a mind sick with a particular form of Alzheimer's, an Alzheimer's that makes us forget the faces of children, the beauty of women, the vigor of men, the wise tenderness of the elderly. It makes us forget the scent of a communal canteen. The freshness of a smile.

Bodies are also marked by the seal of "lack" that generates violence, that makes war permissible, practicable. But only bodies can resist. Only bodies can we call upon, for it is in bodies that reside the deepest and most healing energies of the wounds of creation. Our task as peacemakers, our path as women and men of peace, ultimately consists of not allowing the sweet song of bodies that love and are loved to disappear from the earth. In the hell in which we live, we must remind everyone that in the human heart there is the desire to love and to be loved. Perhaps our task is to say to every mother and father: love your child, love them truly, fully, love them so much that their body becomes a body of love. Remember that where bodies come together to act on society, to represent the demands of others, to build "intermediate bodies," there are planted the seeds of a logic of mediation opposed to the logic of war. Remember that where bodies recognize each other and dialogue, based on their truth, their myths, their stories, listened to and respected, there war is impossible. Maternal and paternal caresses, the flavor of a friend's gaze, human intermediary structures, dialogue between peoples, dialogue between religions build the premises of a new world that we continue to hope for, to hope against hope, and that we continue to recall. The high mountain of Isaiah, the city of peace is our homeland, not the battlefields. The sound of birds and the songs of love belong to us, not the sound of sirens, not the roar, the din of weapons.

The peace project needs bold weavers of dialogue, builders of bridges of reconciliation. We need international dialogue and weekday dialogue. The invocation that we can still address today to the "leaders of the belligerent peoples" is perhaps the one launched by Giorgio La Pira in his article published in December 1967 and entitled Per la pace in Medio Oriente, in "Note di cultura", 1968, pp. 55-60. This same article was reprinted under the title Abbattere i muri e costruire ponti in the volume Unità, disarmo e pace, Cultura editrice, Florence 1971, pp. 83-89. These words are highly relevant, not only because they refer to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, but also because of the current situation of disintegration of the international community: " For what, writes La Pira, not to give to the present world proof of the great fact that defines the current historical epoch: that war, even "local", does not resolve, but aggravates human problems; that it is now an instrument forever obsolete; and that only agreement, negotiation, common construction, common action and the common mission for the common elevation of all peoples, are the instruments that Providence places in the hands of men to build a new history and a new civilization...

I would like to conclude by quoting the Gospel according to Matthew: “Many false prophets will arise and deceive many; and because of the spread of lawlessness, the love of many will grow cold. But he who endures to the end will be saved.” (Matthew 24:11-13).

Your veil, dear young people of Med25, is a fragrance of salvation, of the future, of communion. Thank you for your perseverance, for your resilience. By coming to Palermo, you are helping to keep love warm in the hearts of many. Other persevering and resilient hearts. Arise, builders of peace, blessed, marching forward, evangelizers of peace!