Peacemaking is everybody’s business

Dec 26, 2014

By Gerald W. Schlabach
For decades now, popes and episcopal conferences have been insisting that to work for peace is the vocation of all Christians. Too often, however, peacemaking seems the domain of special vocations or technical specialists. This is certainly not the Church’s hope. As Pope John Paul II proclaimed in his World Day of Peace message at the opening of Jubilee Year 2000: “The Church vividly remembers her Lord and intends to confirm her vocation and mission to be in Christ a ‘sacrament’ or sign and instrument of peace in the world and for the world. For the Church, to carry out her evangelizing mission means to work for peace.... For the Catholic faithful, the commitment to build peace and justice is not secondary but essential” (No. 20).

Yet peace often seems an activity only for those who are “into that sort of thing.” Many associate peacemaking mainly with protesting war and injustice. If they know a little more, they may think policymaking. If they know even more, they may think of on-the-ground practitioners in the developing field of peace-building. But even if all these associations are positive, peacemaking can still seem like other people’s business. Protest requires a certain disposition. Policymaking requires expertise. Peace-building practitioners need training in techniques like conflict resolution.

Pope Francis would change this by widening our focus in a way that places every vocation, technique or tactic in the wider context of God’s overarching strategy in history.

For Francis, after all, peace-building means building a people of peace — people-building. In his exhortation, The Joy of the Gospel, he speaks repeatedly of all work for peace and the common good as building or becoming a people. This follows his portrayal of evangelization as the work of the entire Church, which is “first and foremost a people advancing on its pilgrim way towards God,” thus opening out as “a people for everyone” and “a people of many faces.”

People Within a People Within Peoples Once we recognize the work of peace-building as people-building, we start to notice that God’s own peacemaking strategy always places creative people as change agents within communities, within peoples.

That World Day of Peace 2000 message from John Paul II, for example, worked at multiple layers at once. As a sacrament of peace, the Church is to be both a sign — being — and instrument — doing — of a saving reality beyond itself. But even as the nesting pattern moves outward into the world, it also calls inward to an “essential” role for each of the Catholic faithful.

The pattern is really the oldest and most basic in salvation history. In Genesis, even as God called Abraham promising the blessing of descendants who would become a great people, God’s strategic purpose for them was that they be a blessing to all other families or peoples of the earth. The elegant paradox of an Abrahamic community is that it can be true to its vocation as a people only if it is ready to risk that very identity by blessing and living for other peoples.

Francis draws instinctively on this Abrahamic pattern. The Church must live its life on the streets, he insisted as he began his papacy, preferring the risk of getting wounded out there to the prospect of stagnating health from living behind closed doors. Together they aim to transform the social conflict and cultural diversity that are an inevitable part of human life into “a genuine path to peace within each nation and in the entire world.”

Source: America