In his message for the 47th World Day of Peace, Pope Francis calls every man and woman to the universal vocation of fraternity.
In Fraternity as the foundation of peace and as the pathway to peace, the
pope speaks about the harmful effects of poverty, war, corruption, organized
crime and environmental degradation on our ability to live peacefully with one
another. While the obstacles to
world peace are communal in nature and difficult to overcome, the message is
personal and social, realistic and hopeful.
The biblical foundations of fraternity
Francis refers to the biblical
story of two brothers, Cain and Abel, to explain the concept of fraternity. In
the story, Cain murders Abel, and God holds Cain accountable for his failure to
care for and protect his brother.
The pope writes that the story of Cain and Abel illustrates our
“profound identity and vocation” to live as brothers and sisters, even as it
demonstrates our “tragic capacity to betray that calling.” Despite this
capacity to ignore our identity and to deny our vocation, we have an
“irrepressible longing for fraternity” which forms us into communities and
peoples, and enables us to overcome differences and embrace one another.
Francis explains that the
fraternal imperative to live in peace with one another resides in the
transcendent fatherhood of God and in the cross of Christ. God’s “extraordinarily concrete and
personal love” for every man and woman is a powerful transformative force that
leads to conversion and makes fraternity possible.
Fraternity is difficult
Still, fraternity as the pathway
to peace is difficult. As Francis realistically notes, fraternity requires “a
perennial exercise of empathy, of listening to the hopes and sufferings of
others, even those furthest away from me, and walking the demanding path of
that love which knows how to give and spend itself freely for the good of all
our brothers and sisters.”
While the basic idea of
fraternity (do good to everyone) is pretty simple, I consider its
implementation rather challenging. In a similar way as God called to Cain,
“Where is your brother?”, fraternity calls us to take responsibility for the
well being of others whether we know them, or not; like them, or not; agree
with them, or not. Fraternity
makes us answerable for our brothers and sisters around the world. To Cain’s retort to God, “Am I my
brother’s keeper?”, our answer
must be “yes” if we are serious about building peace.
Our vocation to live in harmony makes
demands of us that we would perhaps prefer to ignore. It requires that we step
out of our comfortable lives, reassess our attitudes, and then actually do
something to help overcome obstacles to peace. We may find it difficult to relate to the realities that
threaten the lives of so many people around the world, or we may become indifferent
to the plight of those whom we do not know. Alternatively, if we want to help,
the sheer magnitude of the problems may overwhelm us with feelings of
helplessness and prevent us from taking action that will help build those
pathways to peace.
Pope Francis’s message for the 47th
World Day of Peace reminds us that without a “lively awareness of relatedness”
(and I believe relatedness implies action), peace will remain an unattainable
dream. We begin to build pathways to peace, in our hearts, in our homes and in
the world, when we act upon our vocation to cherish one another as brothers and
sisters of the same human family.
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