by Antonio Salvati
These days – thanks to the merit and initiative of the Community of Sant’Egidio – leaders and believers of various religions have gathered in Rome with lay humanists, not in the confines of a laboratory, but in front of the scenarios of the world, in the face of war. The war has returned to European soil with the Russian invasion of the battered Ukraine and there is still no way out. This global world of ours continues to produce conflicts and, for a series of reasons, for the plurality of actors and the power of armaments, dramatically favors that wars are eternalized without ending, as it is today in Syria, where – rightly remembered Andrea Riccardi – they are boys whose young life has only seen wartime.
The meeting of these days, significantly entitled The cry of peace – comes from afar. From the experience and work of the Community of Sant’Egidio, born in 1968 among young people, the poor and the suburbs. An encounter that springs from the great century that was the twentieth century, but also a time of terrible conflicts. A Meeting aimed at facing the excited forgetfulness of the present. Hannah Arendt wrote: «memory and depth are the same thing, or rather, man can reach depth only through memory“. Depth – Riccardi explains – is a resource of freedom in the face of the overbearing simplifying elements of our time, but in itself so complex, indeed inexplicable with simplifications.
Religions are not fossils, which modernity and scientific thinking will eventually bury, as so much Western public thought believed. John Paul II clearly understood this when he proposed the memorable meeting in 1986 in Assisi, the homeland of St. Francis. Then there, John Paul II proposed a vision: religions, not against each other, but together and praying for peace. A vision that overcame mutual ignorance and conflicts between believers. It was still the time of the cold war. John Paul II looked beyond and sensed that every religion, when it tends towards peace, gives its best.
Sant’Egidio tenaciously wanted to collect and carry on the “spirit of Assisi”. For thirty-five years, he has promoted encounters, creating a network of friendship and exchange, making stops in various parts of the world, bringing together wise spiritual figures, peace seekers, restless souls, thoughtful lay people. Always in comparison with the historical, human and political reality of the moment. Dialogue, even when it happens about the Eternal, happens in concrete history, Riccardi argued. In this vein, words are important, but so are facts: for example, peace was born in Mozambique, after a war that caused a million deaths, negotiated thirty years ago, in 1992, in Rome, in Sant’Egidio .
The fall of the Wall and globalization seemed to open a season in which to realize the hopes of the twentieth century. Everything – from the economy, to finance, to the media – was unified, ushering in a beautiful global era. However, much neglected to negotiate with the winning globalization, which was often assigned the role of providence. Religions are “the original globalizers” – wrote Miroslav Volf-; they profess universal values and believe in one human family. Globalization remains a great opportunity for those who focus on dialogue. But it is necessary to commit! Not surprisingly, President Macron is convinced that “There is nothing more urgent today than to increase mutual knowledge of peoples, cultures and religions“.
Undoubtedly, the global world has brought peace, but it has also produced a lot of war. We relentlessly witness the disappearance of the generation of the Second World War and the Shoah in a world that is easy to forget. At the same time, over the years, the addiction to the idea that war is a natural companion of history has grown. That patrimony of tensions inherited from the twentieth century which tended to unite destinies beyond borders has been attenuated. Giorgio La Pira, the “holy mayor” of Florence, the initiator of the Mediterranean dialogues, called them “unitive tensions”: tensions towards peace, ecumenism, responsibility towards the poorest worlds, cooperation for a planetary justice. This is happening today, just as the earth crisis reveals, with indisputable evidence, that we have only one destiny: “all in the same boatPope Francis said during the pandemic.
Mattarella underlined the belief that there are “wide spaces in which civil and religious leaders, each in the context and respecting their own prerogatives, can join their efforts for the universal collective good“. Evidently, “it is the task of the institutions and political leaders to collaborate in the definition of an international order that will avoid the temptation of war”. The condition of peoples is characterized by strong inequalities. The North-South relationship, in particular – burdened by inheritance and contemporary conditions of great suffering – “it is far from having reached an acceptable balance that recognizes the dignity of every human being. The issue of emigration and immigration, which are a consequence of it, calls the conscience of each one to question itself on the effective, authentic application of the International Charter of Human Rights“.
Faced with the evocation of such terrible scenarios, our consciences invoke the defense of that right to peace. In this sense, multilateralism must be reinvigorated, a dream, imagined in the cauldron of the First World War, which then gave rise to the League of Nations and finally to the UN. The dream of a square where there is room for all 193 countries of the world. Today, unfortunately, we are witnessing this plan gradually unraveling under the blows of everyone for themselves, of saving yourself. Yet we are all in the same boat, even if we don’t realize it. Without multilateralism, that is, dialogue between everyone, globalization stops. In fact, the war in Ukraine has stopped globalization, already slowed by the pandemic.
Mario Giro pointedly observed that globalization has left behind it a great disappointment or disillusionment: It has not kept its promises and everyone has something to reproach him: the unequal distribution of wealth; a return of unemployment; an injustice in profits; too strong a diversification between politics and economics; a cultural and / or religious aggression; the affirmation of one model over another and the struggle between models and so on. Even the advanced technologies themselves have been disappointing: they have not brought the general prosperity that was expected to be those positive effects of such prosperity. Everyone is a bit disappointed “because we have bet all our cards on prosperity which has proved to be deceptive or particularly demanding“.
Our world is fluid and dangerous, not easy for anyone to manage, not even for authoritarian systems that are too rigid. For this – underlines Giro – «it is the right time for democracies and for policies like the common European one: more flexible, progressive, shared. It is true that democracy always brings a bit of disorder but it is the only way to involve the majority and try to listen to everyone. Here we see the essentiality, the cruciality of multilateralism. If there were no EU (or UN) we would certainly be worse off. We argue but in the end we help each other“.
In recent years, when a war breaks out, thinking is paralyzed and everyone argues about who is wrong and who is right. It is the mimetic method of war: to divert attention from oneself to bring it to the fighters and their reasons. There follow – as in the Ukrainian conflict – interminable conjectures and arguments (which often lead to conspiracies), bending reality on the basis of one’s own convictions. In the meantime – camouflaged – the war goes on and tries to create the conditions (material and psychological) for its continuation, until it becomes permanent. The more the conflict lasts, the more the conditions are set for the next one, that is, the infinite cycle of revenge. Each prolonged war – explains Giro, a connoisseur of African issues like few others with countless experiences in the field for the resolution of conflicts – creates the conditions for the next one: “a little human psychology is enough to understand this. This is why it must be shortened and terminated as soon as possible. Of course it must end well, with a good agreement, not just frozen“.
War is too serious a question that requires a lucid, albeit alarmed and urgent reflection on what we must do, as Europeans and as Italians, to get out of it, to recreate that multilateral framework that will save us. As Italians we have – remembers Giro – “our republican tradition of seeking channels even when the battle rages, without questioning our affiliations and alliances: it is the daughter of a democratic and transversal political culture. This is the noble art of dialogue which is not naivety but a realism that already imagines tomorrow today. An active realism that owes a lot to the Italic humanism built over the centuries and that aims at elective tactics to save blood“. We need to have faith in the realism of diplomacy. Thinking about a peaceful tomorrow is the characteristic of democracies: they do not live off war like authoritarian regimes. While everything threatens to burn around us, it is necessary to gather the best energies and intelligence to find a way out of this war by restoring confidence in dialogue and negotiation, without this effort being considered scandalous.
To achieve peace we must heal from the pathology of the memory of wrongs and reasons and heal from superficiality, from polarization, from ideological schemes, Cardinal Zuppi argued in harmony with the Pope’s Magisterium. Pope Francis notes that “we quickly forget the lessons of history“. His hope remains that in the end there will no longer be “the others”, but only an “us” and that it was not “yet another serious historical event from which we have not been able to learn“. After World War II, everyone was clear that the third would be the last. Some poets like Guccini wondered: “when will man be able to learn to live without killing“.
Only after the millions of deaths of the Second World War was there a clear decision to give life to the United Nations, to put a stop to all totalitarian ideologies and to defend the rights of every person. At the entrance to the United Nations Building in New York there is still a statue depicting a gun whose barrel is closed by a knot. Today we hear too much about rearmament. In this sense, Pope Francis’ request for reform must be taken seriously because the United Nations Organization “can give real concreteness to the concept of the family of nations” for “to ensure the undisputed rule of law and the indefatigable recourse to negotiation, good offices and arbitration“. And for this to happen “it is necessary to avoid that this Organization is de-legitimized», In order not to place the particular interests of a country or group above the world common good. Let’s fight the pandemic of war as we have fought that of Covid.
Some awareness for each. We cannot say that we do not know and we do not want to accept the bitter law of nothing can be done. We understood in the pandemic that everything actually concerns us, that it is really true that – as has been argued several times – we are all in the same boat!
The cry of Peace against the excited forgetfulness of the present: the Sant’Egidio meeting