The prophecy of peace for the Pope and loggila, twenty years later

Andrea Tornelli

Twenty years have passed since this afternoon on Saturday, April 2, 2005, when millions of people around the world have cried with the death of San Juan Pablo II. After two decades, it is remembered, as a great defender, human dignity and religious freedom. Above all, his hostility to communism stands out with persistence. Few, however, remember the teachings of the other prophet, especially related to this dark historical situation.

This was the year two thousand, and it is a large part of our world still lives drunk “the end of history” after the fall of the Berlin Wall. While in the countries of the ancient iron curtain, more than the birth of faith, consumerism and secularism began to spread, the Polish ink wanted to carry the statue of the Lady of Fatima to Plaza de San Pedro, and a few words that one understood at the time occurred: “Humanity is at a crossroads. Today, it contains unprecedented power tools: this world can make a garden or reduce it to a lot of debris. ” A year later, the September 11 tragedy fell in the West in fear.

John Paul II had already opposed the first Gulf War in 1991, and Western leaders did not leave it until two years ago before they fill their role against Eastern European countries. The Pope did not to the war more clear in 2003, when some Western countries entered the war against Iraq for the second time. The Pope Westlla, who was already sick and physical illness due to Parkinson’s disease, was forced to warn the “young” rulers who promoted the new military campaign in the Gulf to remind them of the horrors of the recent World War, and that he is an old successor to Pedro, the son of the nation of a martyr, who lived in the first person. He added this call to the text of Angeus: “I belong to this generation in which the Second World War lived and survived. I have the duty to tell all young people, the youngest of me, who did not receive this experience: “Never a war again!” Paul VI said on his first visit to the United Nations. We must do everything possible!

Today more than ever, with the world in the fire and the states that accelerate their arsenal, with propaganda that creates a climate of alert and fear to justify the huge investments in weapons, we must remember those prophetic words of the Bishop of Rome that came from a “distant country”, which is frequented by behind today, which remains only to cry abroad against the madness of war.