Arena of Peace 2024
This morning, in the Arena of Verona, the Holy Father Francis presided over the meeting “Arena of Peace – Justice and Peace will kiss” during which he answered 5 questions posed to him by some representatives of the various Roundtables Work. Around 12,500 people were present at the meeting with the Pope.
1. PEACE MUST BE ORGANIZED
Pope Francis, I am Mahbouba Seraj, I came here, to Arena 2024, from Kabul, Afghanistan. I have always believed in you, Holy Father: you are a man of peace and you can do a lot. What I advise you is that, to be more successful, you will have to prepare peace institutions, you will have to devote all your efforts to creating peace institutions. In my country, Afghanistan, we had the illusion of democracy, the illusion of peace. My country has been at war for 44 years now and I would like to know what can be done: Father, what do you advise us? But not just for Afghanistan: his enlightened advice is valid for the entire world. How can we make peace work work? And we all stand alongside him in this endeavor.
Response from the Holy Father
The question is what kind of leadership can carry out this task that you have expressed so profoundly. The culture strongly marked by individualism – not by a community – always risks making the community dimension disappear: where there is strong individualism, the community disappears. And this, if we move on to political and demographic terms, is perhaps the root of dictatorships. That’s how it goes. The dimension of the community disappears, the dimension of the vital bonds that support us and make us advance. And it inevitably also produces consequences on the way in which authority is understood. Anyone who holds a role of responsibility in a political institution, or in a company or in a reality of social commitment, risks feeling invested with the task of saving others as if he were a hero. And this hurts a lot, this poisons authority. And this is one of the causes of the loneliness that many people in positions of responsibility confess to experiencing, as well as one of the reasons why we are witnessing a growing disengagement. If the idea we have of the leader is that of a loner, above all others, called to decide and act on their behalf and in their favor, then we are adopting an impoverished and impoverishing vision, which ends up drying up the creative energies of those who are leaders and to make the whole community and society sterile. Psychiatrists say that one of the most subtle aggressions is idealization: it is a way of attacking.
And this is a vision far from that expressed by the Bantu saying: “I am because we are”. The wisdom of this saying lies in the fact that the emphasis is placed on the bond between the members of a community: “We are, I am”. No one exists without others, no one can do everything alone. So the authority we need is the one that is first and foremost able to recognize its own strengths and limitations, and therefore understand who to turn to for help and collaboration. Authority is essentially collaborative; otherwise it will be authoritarianism and many diseases that arise from it. In order to build solid peace processes, the authority knows how to valorise what is good in everyone, knows how to trust, and thus allows people to feel capable of making a significant contribution. This type of authority encourages participation, which is often recognized as insufficient in both quantity and quality. Participation: don’t forget this word. We all work, we all participate in the work we carry out. A good participation that you describe like this: «Expression of questions and proposal of collective responses to critical issues and aspirations, producer of culture and new visions of the world, civil energy that makes individuals and communities protagonists of their own future» (Democracy Document). In a company or in a country or in a city, even in a small business, if there is no participation things don’t work, because we are communities, we are not solitary. Don’t forget this word: participation. It’s important.
And a great challenge today is to reawaken the passion for participation in young people. There is a little word that we forget when we say: “I’ll do it”, “I’ll go”… What is the little word? Together. This strength of the whole, participation is this. We need to invest in young people, in their training, to convey the message that the path to the future cannot pass only through the commitment of an individual, however animated with the best intentions and with the necessary preparation, but passes through the action of a people – the people are the protagonists, let’s not forget this -, in which everyone does their part, each according to their own tasks and according to their own abilities. And I would ask you a question: in a people, is the work of the whole the sum of the work of each one? Only that? No, it’s more! And more. One plus one equals three: this is the miracle of working together.
2. PEACE MUST BE PROMOTED
João Pedro Stédile: Pope Francis, I bring you a huge hug from all the “sem Terra” people of Brazil: we are united and we pray for you. I also bring words from our bishop of the Landless, Bishop Pedro Casaldáliga Plá, who unfortunately is no longer with us. He told us: “Cursed be all fences, cursed be all private property that prevents us from living and loving. Thank you.
Pope Francis, I am Elda Baggio, humanitarian worker for “Doctors Without Borders” and I am here with João Pedro Stédile, who has joined us from Brazil and brings with him all the wisdom and experience of the Landless Movement. We too are obviously interested in peace and peace building and we have experienced that the first step consists in putting ourselves on the side of the migrants, of the victims, listening to them, letting them tell their stories and making their voices heard. However, experiencing all this disarms our hearts, our gazes, our minds and makes the injustices that exist evident. But it is not an easy step to take: how can we experience this conversion of perspective, this change of perspective? What can help us do this?
Response from the Holy Father
It is precisely the Gospel that tells us to place ourselves on the side of the little ones, on the side of the weak, on the side of the forgotten. The Gospel tells us this. And Jesus, with the gesture of foot washing which subverts conventional hierarchies, tells us the same. It is always He who calls the little ones and the excluded and places them at the centre, invites them to be among others, presents them to everyone as witnesses of a necessary and possible change. With his actions, Jesus breaks conventions and prejudices, making visible the people that the society of his time hid or despised. This is very important: don’t hide limitations. There are very limited people, physically, spiritually, socially, economically… Don’t hide the limitations. Jesus did not hide them. And Jesus does it without wanting to replace them, without exploiting them, without depriving them of their voice, their history, their experiences. I like it when I see people with physical limitations participating in meetings, as in this case, because Jesus didn’t hide them, this is the truth. Everyone has their own voice, whether they speak with their language or with their existence. Each of us has our own voice. And many times we don’t know how to listen to it because we each think about our own things or, even worse, we spend the whole day with our cell phones and this prevents us from seeing reality: many times, right?
As you wrote in the document of one of your working groups, to put an end to every form of war and violence we must stand alongside the little ones, respect their dignity, listen to them and ensure that their voice can be heard without being filtered . Always close to the little ones, so that their voice can be heard. Meeting the little ones and sharing their pain. And take a stand alongside them against the violence of which they are victims, emerging from this culture of indifference that is so justified.
A question – I know you know this -: have we thought today about how many boys and girls are forced to work, slave labor, to earn a living? The little ones… That child who perhaps has never had a toy because he has to go here, there, there to earn his living, perhaps in landfills looking for things to sell… There are many children like that, who don’t know how to play because life forced them to live like this. The little ones: the little ones suffer. And do they suffer from bad weather? No, it’s our fault. We are responsible. “No, Father, not me, because I am…”. We are all responsible, we are all responsible for everyone. But today I believe that the “Nobel Prize” that we can give to many, to many of us, is Pontius Pilate’s “Nobel Prize”, because we are masters at washing our hands of it.
Here, this is the conversion that changes our lives, the conversion that changes the world. A conversion that concerns all of us individually, but also as members of the communities, movements, associations to which we belong, and as citizens. And it also concerns the institutions, which are not external or extraneous to this conversion process. The first step is to recognize that we are not at the center… [sees an elderly man walking in the center of the Arena]… at the center is this elderly man: he is as important as any of us. At the center are not our visions, our ideas. And then accept that our lifestyle will inevitably be affected and changed. When we are next to the little ones we are “inconvenient”. The little ones bother us, because they touch, they touch the heart. Walking with little ones forces us to change pace, to review what we carry in our backpack, to relieve ourselves of many weights and ballasts and make room for new things. So it is important to experience all this not as a loss, but as an enrichment, a wise pruning, which removes what is lifeless and enhances what is promising. A pruning is not a loss: it is painful, yes, at the moment it takes something away from you, but it is something that gives you life. We must experience closeness with the little ones like pruning. Let’s look at the list of the little ones, of the many “little ones” that we have. And let’s think about a category that we all have in our families, small in the sense, let’s say, of diminished due to age: let’s think about grandparents. A very beautiful story comes to mind that isn’t something that happened historically, it’s a story. There is a beautiful family – father, mother, children – and the grandfather lived with them: an old man, already, and he ate with them. But my grandfather, as he got older, took the soup like this [he makes the gesture with his shaking hand] and it got all dirty. At a certain point, one day, the father said: “Tomorrow, grandfather will start eating in the kitchen, because he eats badly, and so we can invite people with us.” The next day, grandfather began to eat in the kitchen. The following week, the father comes home, and there is the five year old playing, and playing with sticks, pieces of wood… “What are you doing?” – “Ah, a table, dad!” – “A small table? Why?” – “For you, when you are old.” Let us be careful with the old: the old are wisdom. Let’s not forget this. I say it with pain: this society often hides the old, abandons the old. Thank you.
3. PEACE MUST BE TAKEN CARE
My name is Vanessa Nakate, I am a Ugandan activist, a climate activist. The first time I saw the Pope was when he came to visit my country. I saw him on his Papa mobile, I said: I’m happy, even if we are separated by a window, but at least I saw him. I never imagined that nine years later I would be on the same stage as him… it’s truly an honor, an infinite honor! It is not necessary to prevail as individual subjects, but as humanity, as a community; a livable planet is an optimal solution for all, not for some.
Annamaria Panarotto: Here I reread the verse that Vanessa said now: We don’t need to win as individuals, we have to win together as humanity! A healthy and livable planet is a win for everyone, not just some! Here, dear Pope Francis, I am one of the No-PFAS mothers from Veneto. Mothers always make themselves heard! A group that has been committed for many years against water pollution here in the Veneto region which has sickened our children and I am here with Vanessa Nakate, a young and courageous guardian of the common home from Uganda. Peace is made together. There can be no peace among human beings if men and women do not make peace with Creation. Building relationships of justice among all living things takes time. How to find it in this era marked by speed and immediacy? Afterwards, dear Pope Francis, I wanted to say that today there are many, very many of us here and we are all artisans of peace, we are representatives of groups, movements, associations, Churches, but we are and want to be and remain artisans of peace. But we also feel the urgency of almost forcing politicians to have different visions, to give more immediate responses. So I wanted to ask you if you can help us and understand what steps to take…
Response from the Holy Father
Thank you! I liked it… above all I liked that “but” of yours. Thank you! I’m looking at that sign: “Let’s demilitarize minds and territories”. We are talking about peace, but do you know that the actions that are most profitable in some countries are those of weapons factories? This is bad, this is bad. And so we can’t demilitarize, because it’s a very big deal. You look at the list of countries that manufacture weapons, and you see what a great deal this is. Prepare for death. What a bad thing! And your “but” is pointing your finger at this situation of contradiction.
In our society we experience this tension: on the one hand, everything pushes us to act quickly, we are used to having an immediate response to our requests and we become impatient if there is a delay. For example, the digital revolution of recent years has allowed us to be constantly connected, to be able to communicate easily with people who are very distant, to be able to carry out our work remotely. We should have more time available but instead we realize that we are always in trouble, chasing the last minute urgency. On the other hand, we feel that all this is not natural. This is “warlike”, this is war, it is not natural. In our society there is a tired air, there is tiredness in the air, many cannot find reasons to carry on with their daily activities, weighed down by the feeling of always being out of time, as if trapped in the repetition of what they do, because you don’t have the strength or time to look for harmony. Peace cannot be invented overnight. Peace must be cared for. If we don’t take care of peace there will be war, small wars, big wars. Peace must be cared for, and today in the world there is this serious sin: not caring for peace! The world is on the move, sometimes we need to know how to slow down the race and not let ourselves be overwhelmed by activities and make room within ourselves for the action of God, for the action of brothers, for the action of society that seeks the common good.
“Slow down” may sound like a word out of place, but in reality it is an invitation to recalibrate our expectations and our actions. It’s about making a “revolution” in the astronomical sense: going in search of peace, and how do you do this? Always with dialogue: peace is made in dialogue. Recognize others, respect them wisely. The enormous challenge we face is to go against the current to rediscover and preserve contexts in which it is possible to experience all this with others. And we don’t have to invent everything from scratch, we have to take charge of history.
Many times wars come from the impatience of doing things quickly and not having the patience to build peace, slowly, with dialogue. Patience is the word we must continually repeat: patience to make peace. And if someone – we see it in natural life – if someone insults you, you immediately feel the desire to say double and then quadruple and so the aggression multiplies, the aggressions multiply. We must stop, stop the aggression. Once – it was a very funny scene – there was a person who went to buy something, and you can see that they didn’t give her the right price and so she shouted about everything, she shouted about everything. And the gentleman in the shop was listening to him and when he finished shouting he said to him: “Sir, have you finished?” – “Yes I have finished!” – “Go for a walk.” He didn’t say it with these words, with stronger words, but he sent him for a walk. When we see things starting to get hot, let’s stop, take a walk or say a word, and things will get better. Stop in time, stop in time!
4. PEACE MUST BE EXPERIENCED
[Sergio Paronetto] A few verses from a person very active in our previous Arenas: Giulio Girardello, missionary priest, poet, love of Giulio Battistella, another witness and promoter of the Arenas. However, I would like to preface one thing in 30 seconds, Pope Francis. I would like to say to you, on behalf of many, our thanks for your courage. I would like to tell you that we are close to you, that we want to help you because by helping you we help ourselves, we help the world become human, and we are co-responsible by walking alongside you.
Giulio said: “Peace is born only from hands planted in the feeling of the world. I have just two hands and the feeling of the world to make peace.”
[Andrea Riccardi] I would like to say that being here seems like a dream: a people, with Pope Francis, who believes in peace. However, the world is different, the world is very different because there are wars, and we know it: open wars, and we have placed ourselves on the side of the victims of which there are many. But even in this world there is an absence of thoughts and plans for peace which frustrate the hopes of many peoples for the end of the war. You see, Pope Francis, peace is banished as naivety, indeed, as you say: peace has become a dirty word, and this is extremely sad because peace is everyone’s life, peace is a great blessing. But there is an alternative: we must confess that many, ordinary men and women, feel helpless, they don’t know what to do, and impotence generates indifference and indifference then, in the end, also becomes consent, complicity in wrong decisions , to war trails, which is truly dramatic. So, what we wanted to ask you is: how can we be, in this complex moment, artisans of peace, mediators even in the face of conflicts near and far? Thank you.
Response from the Holy Father
Thank you. Thanks for your reflections. If there is life, if there is an active community, if there is a positive dynamism in society, then there are also conflicts and tensions. It is a fact: the absence of conflict does not mean that there is peace, but that we have stopped living, thinking, spending ourselves for what we believe in. There is a Spanish saying that says: “Still water is the first to rot, to decompose”. The people who are still are the first to get sick.
In our lives, in our realities, in our territories we will always be called to deal with tensions and conflicts. You can’t stand still in front of this: you have to make an option, you have to be creative. A conflict is precisely a challenge to creativity. First of all, you can never get out of a conflict alone: you will never get out of a conflict alone, you need the community, you need the help of both family and friends, but you can never get out of a conflict alone. And, secondly, a conflict can only be exited “from above”. Otherwise you will go down. The conflict has something labyrinthine about it: you can’t get out of a labyrinth alone, you need at least the thread, Arianna’s, which will then help you get out. And we emerge from a conflict to be better, “from above”. You can’t get out of a conflict with anesthesia, no, you need to get out of a conflict with realism: I’m in the labyrinth; we must be able to give a name to conflicts, take them in hand and exit, exit from above and exit accompanied, at least with the wire. In our lives we will always be called to make progress with conflicts, to dialogue with conflicts.
We are often tempted to think that the solution to getting out of conflicts and tensions is to remove them. No! I ignore them, hide them, marginalize them. No. This is a ticking time bomb. In doing so I amputate the reality of an uncomfortable but also important piece. We know that the final outcome of this way of experiencing conflicts is to increase injustices and generate reactions of discomfort and frustration, which can also translate into violent gestures. And we also see this in politics, in society. When conflicts are hidden in politics, any politics, they erupt later, and they erupt badly. There is no harmony. Neither in the family nor in society can conflicts be hidden. For this reason, when there are problems in the family, we must talk about them to clarify them. And when there are problems in society, we must share them to solve them. But you can’t go out alone.
Another short-lived response is to try to resolve tensions by making one of the poles in play prevail, and this is suicide, because it reduces the plurality of positions to a single perspective. Today the Bishop showed me the birth certificate of a great man, Romano Guardini, who was born here in Verona. He said that conflicts are always resolved on a higher level, because in this way conflicts are transformed into the leaven of a new culture, of new things to move forward. Uniformity is a dead end: instead of moving forward we go down; uniformity is not useful, unity is needed, and to achieve unity you need to work with conflicts. When we are afraid of plurality, we can say that that family, that society psychologically and culturally commits suicide.
The first step to take to live tensions and conflicts in a healthy way is to recognize that they are part of our life, they are physiological, when they do not cross the threshold of violence. So don’t be afraid of them: welcome, to solve them. Don’t be afraid of it. Don’t be afraid if there are different ideas that compare and perhaps clash. In these situations we are called to a different exercise. Let ourselves be challenged by conflict, let ourselves be provoked by tensions, to start searching: how to resolve, how to go in search of harmony. This is a job that we are not used to doing: yet it is wealth, it is social wealth, both of the family and of society. Are there any conflicts? Let’s go, let’s talk about conflicts, let’s meet to resolve them. Please don’t be afraid of conflicts, be they family conflicts or social ones. And it is clear that if I am not afraid of conflict, I am inclined to engage in dialogue. And dialogue helps us resolve conflicts, always. But dialogue is not about achieving equality, no, because everyone has their own idea; but it makes us share plurality. The sin of political regimes that have ended up in dictatorships is that they do not allow plurality; and plurality is in the larger society as in the family: the daughter-in-law with the mother-in-law – nice thing to resolve, right? –, but that family conflict must be resolved just as a world conflict must be resolved. We must learn to live with conflicts: when adolescent children begin to ask for things that we are not used to giving them, there is a family conflict: listening to them, dialogue. Dad talking to his children, mom talking to with their children, citizens who dialogue with each other… Dialogue. And conflicts make you progress. A society without conflict is a dead society; a society where conflicts are hidden is a suicidal society; a society where conflicts are taken by the hand and dialogue is held is a society of the future.
5. LA PACE VA PREPARATA
It is a great honor Pope Francis to be here. She is a peace leader. We are here with 12 thousand peace builders. We bring you words of peace from the Holy Land.
Roberto Romano: I will try to make what was said effective, because in Italian it is not the same thing: “I raise my eyes with hope, not through the sights of rifles, sing a song for love, not for war! Don’t say the day will come, bring that day because it is a dream within you; and in all the squares of the city, I think in all of them, they only cheer for peace!”
This was the first poem, song, praise to hope. Now there is a second representation of what we can see step by step: “Tomorrow the lemons will bloom, your eyes will dance, and your children will play again and fathers and children will meet. My city, yes, my city, the city of peace is the city of olive trees.”
Pope Francis my name is Maoz Inon, I come from Israel and my parents were killed by Hamas.
Pope Francis, my name is Aziz Sarah, I come from Palestine and this war and the Israeli soldiers took my brother away from me. Our pain, our suffering have brought us closer, led us to dialogue to create a better future. We are entrepreneurs and we believe that peace is the greatest undertaking to be achieved. We are here with Roberto Romano who shares our ideas. There can be no peace without a peace economy. An economy that does not kill, that does not produce war, an economy based on justice; and we ask: How can young people be entrepreneurs of peace when places of education are often influenced by technocratic paradigms and the culture of profit at any cost?
Response from the Holy Father
I believe that in the face of the suffering of these two brothers, which is the suffering of two peoples, nothing can be said…, nothing can be said. They had the courage to hug each other. And this is not only courage and testimony of wanting peace, but also a project for the future. Hug us. Both have lost family members, the family has been torn apart by this war. What is the point of war? Please, let’s have a small moment of silence, because we cannot talk too much about this, but “feel”. And looking at the embrace of these two, each from your heart pray to the Lord for peace, and make an interior decision to do something to end the wars. In silence, a moment…
And let’s think about the children in this war, in many wars… What future will they have? The Ukrainian children who come to Rome come to mind: they don’t know how to smile. Children in war lose their smile. And we think of the old people who worked all their lives to bring these two countries forward, and now… A defeat, a historic defeat and a defeat of all of us. Let us pray for peace, and tell these two brothers to bring this desire of ours and the will to work for peace to their people. Thanks brothers!
Concluding speech by the Holy Father
We listened to the women. And the world needs to look to women to find peace. They are mothers.
The testimonies of these courageous bridge builders between Israelis and Palestinians confirm this.
I am increasingly convinced that «the future of humanity is not only in the hands of great leaders, great powers and elites. It is above all in the hands of the people – of the people! –; in their ability to organize themselves and also in their hands that irrigate, with humility and conviction, this process of change” (Speech at the Second World Meeting of Popular Movements, Santa Cruz de la Sierra, 9 July 2015). become aware of oneself and act as a people, act with this desire to make peace.
You, however, weavers of dialogue in the Holy Land, ask world leaders to listen to your voice, to involve you in the negotiation processes, so that agreements arise from reality and not from ideologies. Let us remember that ideologies have no feet to walk on, they have no hands to heal wounds, they have no eyes to see the suffering of others. Peace is made with the feet, hands and eyes of the people involved, all together.
Peace will never be the result of mistrust, the result of walls, of weapons pointed at each other. Saint Paul says: “Everyone will reap what he sows” (Gal 6:7). Brothers and sisters, our civilizations at this moment sow death, destruction, fear. Let us sow, brothers and sisters, hope! We are sowers of hope! Everyone is looking for a way to do it, but sowers of hope, always. This is what you too are doing, in this Arena of Peace: sowing hope. Do not stop. Don’t be discouraged. Do not become spectators of the so-called “inevitable” war. No, spectators of a so-called inevitable war, no. As Msgr. said. Tonino Bello: “Everyone stand up, builders of peace!” All together. Thank you.
