Skip to main content

Shalom aleichem, Salam?

In his introductory Remarks during his meeting with Shimon Peres and Mahmoud Abbas, Pope Francis gave an insightful analysis of why peace has been so evasive in the Holy Land:

“History teaches that our own powers do not suffice. More than once we have been on the verge of peace, but the evil one, employing a variety of means, has succeeded in blocking it. That is why we are here, because we know and we believe that we need the help of God. We do not renounce our responsibilities, but we do call upon God in an act of supreme responsibility before our consciences and before our peoples.”

Here is the text of The Holy Father's Prepared Speech: 
The Pope with P


Distinguished Presidents,
Your Holiness,
Brothers and Sisters,

I greet you with immense joy and I wish to offer you, and the eminent delegations accompanying you, the same warm welcome which you gave to me during my recent pilgrimage to the Holy Land.

I am profoundly grateful to you for accepting my invitation to come here and to join in imploring from God the gift of peace. It is my hope that this meeting will be a path to seeking the things that unite, so as to overcome the things that divide.

I also thank Your Holiness, my venerable Brother Bartholomaios, for joining me in welcoming these illustrious guests. Your presence here is a great gift, a much-appreciated sign of support, and a testimony to the pilgrimage which we Christians are making towards full unity.

Your presence, dear Presidents, is a great sign of brotherhood which you offer as children of Abraham. It is also a concrete expression of trust in God, the Lord of history, who today looks upon all of us as brothers and who desires to guide us in his ways.

This meeting of prayer for peace in the Holy Land, in the Middle East and in the entire world is accompanied by the prayers of countless people of different cultures, nations, languages and religions: they have prayed for this meeting and even now they are united with us in the same supplication. It is a meeting which responds to the fervent desire of all who long for peace and dream of a world in which men and women can live as brothers and sisters and no longer as adversaries and enemies.

Dear Presidents, our world is a legacy bequeathed to us from past generations, but it is also on loan to us from our children: our children who are weary, worn out by conflicts and yearning for the dawn of peace, our children who plead with us to tear down the walls of enmity and to set out on the path of dialogue and peace, so that love and friendship will prevail.

Many, all too many, of those children have been innocent victims of war and violence, saplings cut down at the height of their promise. It is our duty to ensure that their sacrifice is not in vain. The memory of these children instils in us the courage of peace, the strength to persevere undaunted in dialogue, the patience to weave, day by day, an ever more robust fabric of respectful and peaceful coexistence, for the glory of God and the good of all.

Peacemaking calls for courage, much more so than warfare. It calls for the courage to say yes to encounter and no to conflict: yes to dialogue and no to violence; yes to negotiations and no to hostilities; yes to respect for agreements and no to acts of provocation; yes to sincerity and no to duplicity. All of this takes courage, it takes strength and tenacity.


History teaches that our own powers do not suffice. More than once we have been on the verge of peace, but the evil one, employing a variety of means, has succeeded in blocking it. That is why we are here, because we know and we believe that we need the help of God. We do not renounce our responsibilities, but we do call upon God in an act of supreme responsibility before our consciences and before our peoples. We have heard a summons, and we must respond. It is the summons to break the spiral of hatred and violence, and to break it by one word alone: the word “brother.” But to be able to utter this word we have to lift our eyes to heaven and acknowledge one another as children of one Father.

To him, the Father, in the Spirit of Jesus Christ, I now turn, begging the intercession of the Virgin Mary, a daughter of the Holy Land and our Mother.

Lord God of peace, hear our prayer!

We have tried so many times and over so many years to resolve our conflicts by our own powers and by the force of our arms. How many moments of hostility and darkness have we experienced; how much blood has been shed; how many lives have been shattered; how many hopes have been buried… But our efforts have been in vain.

Now, Lord, come to our aid! Grant us peace, teach us peace; guide our steps in the way of peace. Open our eyes and our hearts, and give us the courage to say: “Never again war!”; “With war everything is lost.” Instil in our hearts the courage to take concrete steps to achieve peace.


Lord, God of Abraham, God of the Prophets, God of Love, you created us and you call us to live as brothers and sisters. Give us the strength daily to be instruments of peace; enable us to see everyone who crosses our path as our brother or sister. Make us sensitive to the plea of our citizens who entreat us to turn our weapons of war into implements of peace, our trepidation into confident trust, and our quarreling into forgiveness.

Keep alive within us the flame of hope, so that with patience and perseverance we may opt for dialogue and reconciliation. In this way may peace triumph at last, and may the words “division,” “hatred” and “war” be banished from the heart of every man and woman. Lord, defuse the violence of our tongues and our hands. Renew our hearts and minds, so that the word which always brings us together will be “brother,” and our way of life will always be that of: Shalom, Peace, Salaam!

Amen.


I

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Dancing With Mr. D: Grooming the Little Children

A former pro-transgender activist said she regretted her previous work in pro-transgender activism, adding she felt she was "indoctrinated" on gender ideology in an interview with  Fox News Digital.  "I started to realize that what I had been doing at my job at the LGBT Center, it was grooming," Kay Yang, a former employee of a location in New York, said. Grooming in this context means "to get into readiness for a specific objective." Kay works as a 'deprogrammer' to help parents and children who have been 'indoctrinated' by the 'cult-like' transgender agenda. Yang herself previously went by they/them and worked as a 'trans educator' in schools for years.  Listen to her testimony.    

Homosexual Marriage

The urgency of the issue of gay marriage at this time and the compelling arguments raised against it here, make this paper an important resource: Answering Advocates of Gay Marriage KATHERINE YOUNG AND PAUL NATHANSON Claim 1 : Marriage is an institution designed to foster the love between two people. Gay people can love each other just as straight people can. Ergo, marriage should be open to gay people. Claim 2 : Not all straight couples have children, but no one argues that their marriages are unacceptable Claim 3 : Some gay couples do have children and therefore need marriage to provide the appropriate context. Claim 4 : Marriage and the family are always changing anyway, so why not allow this change? Claim 5 : Marriage and the family have already changed, so why not acknowledge the reality? Claim 6 : Children would be no worse off with happily married gay parents than they are with unhappily married straight ones. Claim 7 : Given global overpopulation, why w...

This video of a young boy twerking at Pride has homophobes outraged | Gay Star News

DANCING WITH MR. D:   This video of a young boy twerking at Pride has homophobes outraged | Gay Star News : 'via Blog this'

On the Contemporary U.S. Scene

M ichael Flynn made a lot of enemies inside the government during his career. When he exposed himself as vulnerable these pounced. How?? Anonymous and possibly illegal leaks of private conversations with a foreign national. Now, we aren't supposed to spy on Americans without probable cause, nor disclose the results of our spying in the pages of the  Washington Post   because it suits a partisan or personal agenda (overturning the results of an election). Current and former national security officials used their position, their sources, and their methods to destroy a political enemy. Why aren’t all Americans upset by this? Mr. Flynn is not the only recent occurrence of such. The  New York Times reports that civil servants at the EPA lobbied Congress to reject Donald Trump's nominee to run the agency because Pruitt was critical of the way the EPA was run during the Obama years.  Traditionally, civil servants follow the direction of the political ap...

Oremus

Catholic World News  - October 23, 2015  The Synod of Bishops spent Friday, October 23, discussing a proposed final statement, which will come up for a vote, paragraph by paragraph, on Saturday. The statement was presented to the bishops on Thursday evening, with Cardinal Peter Erdo, the relator general of the Synod, introducing the text. Because the statement was available only in Italian, some Synod participant were unable to read it, and there was an angry outcry when they were told-- by Cardinal Lorenzo Baldisseri, the secretary-general of the Synod-- that no copies of the sensitive document could be taken out of the Synod Hall. Eventually Cardinal Baldiserri relented, and allowed bishops to take the text home, but insisted that they could not show the document to outside translators. For a summary:

The Body of Christ and the City of Men

      The “Statement of Principles” issued by select Democratic members of the U.S. House of Representatives on June 18, disapproving of Bishops in the United States for allegedly “politicizing the Eucharist” is an example of deceitful equivocation. Essentially, the Statement maintains that the Bishops should not “politicize” the Eucharist. On this the insight of Flannery O’Connor proves enlightening: Those whose lives are not ordered by, around, and toward the Eucharist, therefore, are those whose lives are defined by some love other than love of the Christ who is present there. Rather, their lives are ordered by the earthly city, manifest in this case, by, variously, partisan political identity or individual, radially sovereign conscience. This applies across the American political spectrum, to those who deny human dignity of the unborn, the immigrant, and the person on death row. In Catholic teaching the Eucharist creates St. Augustine’s City of God, the definit...

Enlightenment thinking and "the Spirit of Vatican II"

Present in an analysis of the Enlightenment are the three themes which played an integral part in the disintegration of the liturgy: the denial of the transcendent, the resulting apostasy, and the exaltation of the community. That the movement was hostile to revealed Christianity is beyond debate. At bottom, the Enlightenment was hostile to Christian revelation for its teaching that salvation comes through Jesus Christ alone. In its stead, the Philosophes substituted a rational religion which emphasized the universal moral law shared by all men by virtue of their reason, not what they regarded as the untrustworthy historicity of the life message of Jesus. They saw this rational religion as a refining of, not a repudiation of Christian moral teaching. For example, the Mass, which celebrates the revelation that Christ’s sacrificial death reconciles us to the Father and each other, making present to the believer the same sacrifice of the Cross, was reduced to the mere celebration ...

Bishop Barron on Martin Luther

Bishop Robert Barron, in his June 13   article   titled "Looking at Luther With Fresh Eyes," describes Martin Luther as "a mystic of grace, someone who had fallen completely in love." Fr. describes Luther as the "undisputed father of the Reformation" and as "cantankerous, pious, very funny, shockingly anti-Semitic, deeply insightful and utterly exasperating." While admiring of Luther, Fr. adds: "I disagree with lots and lots of his ideas," without clarifications. Barron summarizes: "For at the core of Luther's life and theology was an overwhelming experience of grace. After years of trying in vain to please God through heroic moral and spiritual effort, Luther realized that, despite his unworthiness, he was loved by a God who had died to save him," adding, "Luther was an ecstatic, and the religious movement he launched [Protestantism] was 'a love affair.'" Was Dr. Luther in love with God...

Libido Redux: The Pill Circa 2014

If I were a female, and I am not, but if I were, and were Catholic, I would take seriously this read  concerning what happens when the rights of God are violated. I have written of these violations before, here . Let us pray that this snare of the prince of this world may not celebrate the 60th birthday of "the pill."

Libido Redux: California's Proposition 60

T he Catholic Church, founded by Jesus Christ, remains the great exception to the sexual revolution.  Facilitated technologically by the oral contraceptive and culturally by rapid secularization, this revolution successfully separated sex from babies, and, in short order, sex from marriage, sex from love, and even love from marriage, if love is understood to have a sacrificial, enduring character (think “no –fault” divorce). The sexual revolution has crushed everything in its path, including most, (not ALL) Christian churches in the West, which it rendered both impotent and sterile.  The Catholic Church has been the lone institutional holdout, earning for itself puzzlement from her friends and ferocious hostility from enemies.  Catholic teaching has insisted that both natural reason and biblical revelation teach that sex, love, marriage and children all belong together in the complementarity of men and women made in the image and likeness of God.  For both h...