News and Events

Statements

Back

Statement from Cardinal Blase J. Cupich on 2017 World Day of Peace Message from Pope Francis

Statement from Cardinal Blase J. Cupich on 2017 World Day of Peace Message from Pope Francis

December 12, 2016

In his message for the 50th World Day of Peace, Pope Francis invites us to build peace through active nonviolence and reminds us that Jesus offers “a manual for this strategy of peacemaking in the Sermon on the Mount.” That profound teaching, the pontiff observes, challenges political and religious leaders, heads of international institutions and business and media executives “to build up society, communities and businesses by acting as peacemakers. It is to show mercy by refusing to discard people, harm the environment, or seek to win at any cost.” Quoting from his earlier writing, The Joy of the Gospel, Pope Francis notes that this program requires “the willingness to face conflict head on, to resolve it and to make it a link in the chain of a new process.”

Peacemaking, the pope notes in this year’s message, “means to choose solidarity as a way of making history and building friendship in society. Active nonviolence is a way of showing that unity is truly more powerful and more fruitful than conflict. Everything in the world is inter-connected. Certainly differences can cause frictions. But let us face them constructively and non-violently, so that tensions and oppositions can achieve a diversified and life-giving unity, preserving,” as he wrote in The Joy of the Gospel, “what is valid and useful on both sides.”

In 2017, the Holy Father calls us to “dedicate ourselves prayerfully and actively to banishing violence from our hearts, words and deeds, and to becoming non-violent communities that care for our common home.” This is my prayer for our home in Chicago.

We know the wrenching pain of violence. We see our neighbors weighed down by grief, parents burying children gunned down in the street, victims of a culture that seems to have forgotten the precious dignity and potential of every human life. In the face of such unimaginable pain, we must not turn away, even as insurmountable as the problem may sometimes seem. We have a responsibility to build the culture we need, a culture of peace founded on an ethic of care for our neighbor. As the pope concludes in his message today, “Nothing is impossible if we turn to God in prayer. Everyone can be an artisan of peace.”