Pope: 'Peace is made with our hands not just by the powerful'

By Salvatore Cernuzio and Lisa Zengarini

“Peace is made with our hands”. It is not only built by the powerful "with their choices and their international treaties,” we too can build peace, "in our homes, in the family, among neighbours, in our workplaces, in the neighbourhoods where we live".

Pope Francis offered that reminder in the preface to a new book collecting texts and reflections on the relationship between justice and peace.

Titled “La pace e la giustizia si baceranno” ("Justice and peace will embrace "), the book, was released on Wednesday by the Vatican Publishing House LEV and L'Arena, ahead of his pastoral visit to the  northern Italian city of Verona , on May 18 , which will have justice and peace as its focus.

The close link between justice and peace

“If justice is lacking, peace is threatened; without peace, justice is compromised”, the Pope writes. “It is more true than ever that justice, understood as the virtue of giving what is owed to God and others, is closely linked to peace, in the most authentic and proper sense of the Hebrew word ‘shalom’”. A term that indicates "not so much the absence of war but the fullness of life and prosperity".

Selfishness engenders conflict

Peace makes justice possible, first among the "victims" of every conflict, just as "peace becomes a precondition for a just society". However, the Pope notes that both of these two dimensions of humanity have "a price" to pay:  "fighting one's own selfishness", that is, "putting what is ‘mine’ before what is ‘ours’".

All selfishness "is unjust"  and "when it becomes a system in our personal and social life, it opens the doors to conflict, because, Pope Franci explains, in order to defend our interests (or those we presume to be such),  “we are ready to do anything, even to oppress our neighbour, who from being a neighbour becomes an adversary and therefore an enemy to be humiliated, knocked down and defeated."

The teachings of Fr. Romano Guardini

In this regard, the Pope cites the unequivocal words of "a great Veronese citizen" who grew up in Germany, Fr. Romano Guardini: "Freedom does not consist in following personal or political will, but what is required by the nature of being".

Fr. Guardini's educational action and philosophical-spiritual reflections were "a beacon in a particularly dark time," that of Germany in the 1930s and 1940s, "subjugated by the terrible yoke of the Nazi regime".

The Pope recalls how some members of the White Rose, the group of young Germans who denounced Nazism in Munich, "were nourished by Guardini's philosophical and religious writings."  “From those readings,”  he notes, ”arose the nonviolent action of those boys and girls who, by writing clandestine leaflets distributed in the city, tried to awaken people's consciences, numbed by Hitler's totalitarianism. And they paid their choice of conscience and freedom with their lives."

The story of Fr. Mercante and the private Dallasega

That dark chapter of the history of Europe brings to the Pope's mind the memory of the sacrifice of the Veronese priest Fr.  Domenico Mercante and of private Leonardo Dallasega, a Wehrmacht soldier native to  Val di Non, in the Trentino region. Their story dating back to April 1945, is worth telling because it joined together justice and peace “in a double personal sacrifice."

In that turbulent time at the end of the Second World War, private Dalla Sega was forcibly incorporated into a group of German paratroopers fleeing towards the north as they entered Val d'Illasi, in the province of Verona and on the border with the Trentino region. Having reached Giazza, the last village in the Val d'Illasi, the soldiers, after a skirmish with Italian partisans, took Fr. Domenico Mercante as a hostage.

The  46 year-old parish priest who had ministered in the village for less than two years was known for his actions to protect the civilian population during the Nazi-fascist occupation. The soldiers wanted to use him as a human shield  to cross the  mountains, reaching Trentino and thus heading towards Brenner, to save themselves from possible reprisals.

Having reached the town of Cerè-San Martino, an officer ordered Dalla Sega to kill the priest. But, according to an eyewitness,  Dalla Sega replied: "I am Catholic, father of four children, they cannot shoot a priest!".

Both the priest and the soldier were executed. Fr.  Domenico's body was brought back to Giazza after a few days. The one from Dallasega was found with a crucifix, a rosary and a picture of his wife in his hand.

Only many years later he was recognized: for decades that conscience-objecting German soldier had remained nameless. The story was investigated, documented and reported by the Veronese priest Fr. Luigi Fraccari, involved in Germany since 1943 alongside the Italian Military Internees (IMI) and with the Apostolic Nuncio of the time Archbishop Cesare Orsenigo.

Giving our lives for others, even at the cost of our own

It was a “tragic incident,” Pope Francis notes in the preface, in which, however, "we find the profound meaning of Christian sacrifice: giving one's life for others, even at the cost of one's own".  It is "the mystery of Christ's Easter: violence and death are defeated by love and the gift of self".

“Maybe,” the Pope continues, “we will not be forced to shed blood to profess our faith, as happens still  today in many parts of the world for many of our Christian brothers, but it is in the small things that we are called to bear witness to the strength peace of the cross of Christ and the new life that is born from it: a gesture of forgiveness towards those who have offended us, putting up with unjust slander, helping a marginalized person".

Choices of peace and justice to build a new world

Peace is built with small gestures words and habits, Pope Francis further explains: “We can build peace by helping a migrant who is begging on the street, by visiting an elderly person who is alone and has no one to talk to, by multiplying gestures of care and respect towards our poor planet Earth, so mistreated by our exploitative selfishness, welcoming every unborn child who comes into the world, a gesture which was an authentic act of peace for Saint Mother Teresa ".

Against the backdrop of a "piecemeal" world war, there are therefore "small pieces of peace" which "if welded together, build a great peace".  “In these daily and easily attainable choices of peace and justice, the Pope concludes. we can sow the beginning of a new world,”, “where death will not have the last word and life will flourish for everyone”.