The World Day of Peace was an initiative of Pope Paul VI
and it is celebrated on the first day of each year. The Message for the
World Day of Peace is sent to particular churches and chancelleries all
around the world, drawing attention to the essential value of peace and the
need to work tirelessly in order to attain it.
As the theme of his first Message for the World Day of
Peace, Pope Francis has chosen Fraternity. Since the beginning of
his Petrine Ministry, the Pope has stressed the need to combat the throwaway culture and to promote instead
a culture of encounter, in order to
build a more just and peaceful world.
Fraternity is a dowry that every man and every
woman brings with himself or herself as a human being, as a child of the one
Father. In the face of the many tragedies that afflict the family of nations -
poverty, hunger, underdevelopment, conflicts, migrations, pollution,
inequalities, injustice, organized crime, fundamentalisms - fraternity is the foundation
and the pathway to peace.
The culture of personal well-being leads to a loss of the
sense of responsibility and fraternal relationship. Others, rather than
being like us, appear more as
antagonists or enemies and are often treated as objects. Not uncommonly, the poor
and needy are regarded as a burden, a
hindrance to development. At most, they are considered as recipients of aid or
compassionate assistance. They are not seen as brothers and sisters,
called to share the gifts of creation, the goods of progress and culture, to be
partakers at the same table of the fullness of life, to be protagonists
of integral and inclusive development.
Fraternity, a gift and task that comes from God the
Father, urges us to be in solidarity against inequality and poverty that
undermine the social fabric, to take care of every person, especially the
weakest and most defenceless, to love him or her as oneself, with the very
heart of Jesus Christ.
In a world that is constantly growing more
interdependent, the good of fraternity is one that we cannot do without. It
serves to defeat the spread of the globalization of indifference to
which Pope Francis has frequently referred. The globalization of
indifference must give way to a globalization of fraternity.
Fraternity should leave its mark on every aspect of life,
including the economy, finance, civil society, politics, research, development,
public and cultural institutions.
At the start of his ministry, Pope Francis issues a
message in continuity with that of his predecessors, which proposes to everyone
the pathway of fraternity, in order to give the world a more human face.
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