Rome (Italy). On 1 January 2020, the 53rd World Day of Peace is celebrated on the theme, “Peace as a Journey of Hope: Dialogue, Reconciliation, and Ecological Conversion”.
Instituted by Pope Paul VI, it was celebrated for the first time on January 1, 1968 as an appeal to Dialogue and remained over the years as an invitation to reflection and prayer for Peace in the world. “The time has come for our fraternal and paternal greeting and our wish for peace, with all that peace should bring: order, serenity, joy, fraternity, freedom, hope, energy, and the security of good work, the proposal to being again and to progress, healthy and common well-being, and that mysterious capacity to enjoy life, discovering the rapport with its intimate principle and with its supreme end: the God of peace”.
Beginning the new year with a day dedicated to Peace means recalling the world’s attention to that which is “a precious good, object of our hope, to which all of humanity aspires.” This is the beginning of the message of Pope Francis who speaks of peace as a journey of hope to follow as the human community, opening itself to relationships of reciprocal trust.
A journey of listening based on memory to avoid committing the same errors of the past and to remember the small gestures of solidarity received that give new energy and rekindle hope.
A journey of reconciliation, following the way of respect and of forgiveness, to recognize that we are brothers and sisters. And also to listen to and contemplate the world given to us by God, as our Common Home, on a journey of ecological conversion that leads us to discover a new way of inhabiting it.
Peace seen as “a building to be constructed continually,” requires “convinced witnesses, artisans of peace open to dialogue without exclusions and without manipulations.”
Pope Francis reminds us that, “Without hope, peace cannot be attained. It deals first of all with believing in the possibility of peace, of believing that the other has our same need of peace”.
The Mother General of the Daughters of Mary Help of Christians, Sr. Yvonne Reungoat, in Circular 993, taking up Strenna 2020 of the Rector Major of the Salesians Fr. Ángel Fernández Artime, “Good Christians and Honest Citizens,” and wishing everyone a 2020 fruitful in the good, invites all the FMA to be attentive “to the empty jars of many young people that need to be filled with the new wine of love, of trust, of the certainty that in everyone there is a small seed that can make ‘the good Christian and the honest citizen’ bloom in a marvelous way where we least expect it. Everyone, especially the poor, can give an innovative contribution to the building of a world that is more open to fraternity and to peace”.
