THE global forces of the United States and the Russian Federation are again at war, together with their regional stakeholders, purportedly against terrorist forces, in Syria. I am no expert on this complex and frightening spectacle of human barbarism but the lines are blurred.
Pope Francis called on Christians to pray for peace. To this end he has met at an interreligious peace gathering in Assisi.
“We never tire of repeating that the name of God cannot be used to justify violence. Peace alone, and not war, is holy,” said the Pope.
Following a prayer service with Christian leaders, including Orthodox Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew of Constantinople and Anglican Archbishop Justin Welby of Canterbury, the Pope joined religious leaders from around the world to appeal for peace and unity.
The religious leaders also heard the experience of a victim of war from the Syrian city of Aleppo and prayed for those who had died in conflicts around the world.
In his speech, the Pope called on believers of every faith “to confront the great sickness of our time: indifference.”
“It is a virus that paralyses, rendering us lethargic and insensitive, a disease that eats away at the very heart of religious fervour, giving rise to a new and deeply sad paganism: the paganism of indifference,” said the Pope.
Recalling the look on the face of the refugees he and Patriarch Bartholomew met on the Greek island of Lesbos in April, the Pope called on religious believers not to remain indifferent to the suffering of others but to be instead a voice to the unheard.
“I am thinking of the families, whose lives have been shattered; of the children who have only known violence in their lives; of the elderly, forced to leave their homeland. All of them have a great thirst for peace”, he said.
“We do not want these tragedies to be forgotten.” True peace is not a result of “negotiations, political compromises, or economic bargaining but the result of prayer.”
One can only hope that this is true in Syria. What is left standing and breathing in that derelict terrain cries out for international mercy no guns. Savages and butchers have been let loose and it is proving beyond the too feeble efforts of self-interest and national aggression to rope them back into their cells – where they belong.