Nonviolence and Just Peace, April 2016 | Pax Christi
The Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace and Pax Christi International will convene an international conference on Nonviolence and Just Peace: Contributing to the Catholic Understanding of and Commitment to Nonviolence, to be held in Rome, Italy, 11-13 April, 2016.
In recognition of the Year of Mercy declared by the Holy Father, this carefully planned Catholic conference on nonviolence and just peace will take place in Rome -- the invited participants represent a broad spectrum of Church experiences in peacebuilding and creative nonviolence in the face of violence and war. Read the concept note for the conference here.
The conference will initiate a conversation about Catholic teaching on war and peace, including explicit rejection of “just war” language in favor of an alternative ethical framework for engaging acute conflict and atrocities by developing the themes and practices of nonviolent conflict transformation and just peace. It will develop clearer Scripture-based Catholic teaching and an action plan to promote such teachings in seminaries, Catholic educational institutions, Catholic media, Catholic dioceses and parishes.
A call for prayer and solidarity
We ask for your prayerful support before and during this unique conference. Following is a prayer written especially for the conference by Austrian nonviolence activist and theologian Hildegard Goss-Mayr. Prayers from Archbishop Stephen Fumio Hamao and Pope St. John Paul II are also included. Also in francais, italiano, español, Croatian and Deutsche. A PDF flyer of the prayer (in English) is available here.
Holy Spirit, our source of light and strength, we thank you for having inspired the call to peace-makers from all over the world to meet in the dramatic situation of humanity to reconsider our responsibility, to deepen and promote the liberating and healing nonviolence of Jesus.
Merciful God, our Father and Mother, you sent your Son Jesus, our Brother, to reveal through his life and teaching your divine, self-giving Love and so incarnate in our world the power of nonviolence, able to overcome ALL forms of violence and to reconcile humanity in justice and peace.
We confess that for centuries our Church, people of God, has betrayed this central message of the Gospel many times and participated in wars, persecution, oppression, exploitation and discrimination.
Holy Spirit, as we meet as peacemakers, we count on your light and your strength to help revive in the Theology of Peace the nonviolent message of Jesus in which there is no place for violence and to offer to all Christians the arms of peacemaking, pardon and reconciliation.
Holy Spirit, we trust in your light and strength that this Conference may mark a new step for our Church, on its way to becoming a Church of Peace, in the spirit of our Brother Jesus and so respond to the cry of humanity for life in dignity and peace.
- See more at: http://www.paxchristi.net/news/nonviolence-and-just-peace-april-2016#concept-note