Witnesses of peace

A man steals because he has less than another and deep down he feels right.
Today many European and non-European countries refuse to welcome immigrants because there are now "too many of them", there is fear for one's safety and, ultimately, one thinks that this is right. In the name of justice, dozens of people are still sentenced to capital punishment in many states: they made a mistake and it was right that they paid with their lives...

Every war is fought for a “just” cause. Biased, but certainly "right" for a group, for a nation. And for this reason we have never achieved true peace, the kind that leaves no traces of resentment, of claims that have never been heard and are therefore eternally present.
Even those who carried out the holocaust did so in the name of their own "justice", achieved by the eradication of the "irregulars" and therefore harmful to the moral health of the State. The reasons to silence your conscience and all in all feel good are endless.

How can we say, then, that peace is the fruit of justice?
Objective parameters are needed. One, the most normal for civilized men, is certainly not doing to others what I would not want done to me. It's simple, the key to justice towards others is placed in the heart of each of us.
But it is not yet enough, because in the human heart there is room for everything and the opposite of everything. And often it is precisely the heart that he can betray!

True justice surpasses the heart of man, because it is God's thought on our life, on history. A thought born in love: "You love all existing things [...] because they are all yours, Lord, lover of life" (Wis11, 24-26). It is from the search for justice for all carried out by each that peace is born.

We need to understand that the parameter is not me, but others. Peace does not arise from our "reasons" nor from our convenience, but from an upside-down logic, the one that sees the other in first place. Because if it is true that man needs peace, it is equally true that peace needs witnesses.

Ernesto Olivero
Editorial
NP January 2024