In this, my first Message for the World Day of Peace, I
wish to offer to everyone, individuals and peoples, my
best wishes for a life filled with joy and hope. In the heart
of every man and woman is the desire for a full life,
including that irrepressible longing for fraternity which
draws us to fellowship with others and enables us to see
them not as enemies or rivals, but as brothers and sisters
to be accepted and embraced.
Fraternity is an essential human quality, for we are
relational beings. A lively awareness of our relatedness
helps us to look upon and to treat each person as a true
sister or brother; without fraternity it is impossible to build
a just society and a solid and lasting peace. We should
remember that fraternity is generally first learned in the
family, thanks above all to the responsible and
complementary roles of each of its members, particularly
the father and the mother. The family is the wellspring of
all fraternity, and as such it is the foundation and the first
pathway to peace, since, by its vocation, it is meant to
spread its love to the world around it.
The ever-increasing number of interconnections and
communications in today’s world makes us powerfully
aware of the unity and common destiny of the nations. In
the dynamics of history, and in the diversity of ethnic
groups, societies and cultures, we see the seeds of a
vocation to form a community composed of brothers and
sisters who accept and care for one another. But this
vocation is still frequently denied and ignored in a world
marked by a “globalization of indifference” which makes
us slowly inured to the suffering of others and closed in
on ourselves.
In many parts of the world, there seems to be no end to
grave offences against fundamental human rights,
especially the right to life and the right to religious
freedom. The tragic phenomenon of human trafficking, in
which the unscrupulous prey on the lives and the
desperation of others, is but one unsettling example of
this. Alongside overt armed conflicts are the less visible
but no less cruel wars fought in the economic and
financial sectors with means which are equally destructive
of lives, families and businesses. For the complete
document by Pope Francis you may go to the Vatican website.