1.         Today we live in a multi-cultural and multi-religion society, unluckily signed by violence and by a ceaseless manipulation of religions. Peace, wherever it exists, is threatened. They often accuse the Religions of fomenting hatred and causing violence. Our presence here, in Assisi, on the contrary, wants to commit us to prove that the religions, very far from being a problem, are part of the hoped solution to bring peace and harmony to society. Therefore, it pertains to the religious leaders to teach their communities how to discover the deepest reasons, based on the teaching of their respective religious traditions, to the end of living together peacefully. The words of John Paul II, in the historical World Day of Prayer for Peace, which we held here in Assisi in 1986, re-echo forcefully in our ears, because they were prophetic. He invited humanity to follow a common path. He invited the religious leaders to become instruments of peace. He strongly warned the religious heads, “We shall move to the other side, damaging ourselves and the others, unless we learn how to communicate together peacefully and in harmony” ^.

2.         Too long many believers in the different religions have lived far from one another. With Vatican II, the Church invited the Catholics to live their faith fully, exhorting them at the same time, to respect other believers and to build up bonds of friendship with persons of other religious traditions. To deepen our reflection on the faith of the Church, Vatican II promulgated Nostra Aetate, the Declaration of the relations of the Church with non-Christian religions. The Declaration starts saying that the Church “in her duty to promote unity and charity among the peoples, is the first to examine all that men have in common and that urges them to live together their common destiny”.  The declaration   Nostra Aetate underlines the fact that “all peoples form a unique community. They have one single origin, because God has made the entire humankind  to live on the whole earth  and all men and women have the same ultimate end, God” 1. In his message, on the World Day of Peace, Pope Benedict XVI repeated that, “All men belong to one and the same family. The exasperated exaltation of one’s own differences contradicts this fundamental truth. We need to recuperate the awareness that the same destiny makes one community of us, whose ultimate condition is transcendent. This makes us to evaluate better our historical and cultural differences, without being in contraposition, but in co-ordination with those who belong to other cultures.

3.         Today every believer faces the first, great challenge: to go deep into one’s own religious tradition, not in a selective manner, but in full faithfulness to one’s own tradition. In other words, for each religious community it is urgent today to give a solid and integral formation to its members. The second challenge, for him who believes, is to meet the faithful of other religious traditions in a spirit of reciprocal respect, trust and friendship. In meeting other believers, it is not necessary to find the common denominators in the different religions. The end of the inter-religious dialogue is not that of reaching a common agreement on the doctrines of the various religious traditions. In fact, in their meeting with the others, the believers feel invited to understand the fundamental differences among the religions and must learn to respect them. Inter-religious dialogue does not mean ignoring, diminishing the essential or distinctive particularity of each religion. The third challenge is that of promoting close collaboration to create a more peaceful and harmonious community. This concretely means to struggle for the promotion of each person’s dignity through commitment to justice. The Christian religious teaches that each person is created to the image and similitude of God. Therefore, the Church defends and promotes the dignity of human life, from conception to death.  

Because of her experience matured during the past 40 years, the Catholic Church has discovered the reasons other religions have to live together. This experience has generally been positive and constructive. In guiding the faithful on the journey to dialogue, the Church helps them on one side to overcome the temptation of indulging to syncretism and relativism, and on the other side to avoid fundamentalism. The main reason for the Church to dialogue with other religions is her firm and unequivocal adhesion to Jesus Christ, in whom God manifested completely his love for man.  Pope Benedict XVI, in his first encyclical Letter says, Deus caritas est, God is love and this love consists in the fact that I love in God and with God even the person whom I do not like or I do not know. This can be realised only if we start from an intimate encounter with God, an encounter that has become communion of will until it touches the feeling. Thus, I learn to love the other no longer with my eyes and my feelings, but according to the perspective of Jesus. His friend is my friend. Beyond the external appearance of the other, I see his interior expectation of a loving and attentive gesture.

4.         We must cultivate harmony and welcome peace from all persons as a gift from God and built up by each person in each circumstance. Working for the promotion of harmony and peace is a concrete task for all the believers. In fact, old prejudices, insufficient knowledge, lack of understanding the belief and the practices of other religions, the fear of the other, due to the selfish tendencies of man, have often dominated the human relations. For this reason, the inter-religious dialogue is not always an easy objective. Some hesitate to commit themselves to the inter-religious dialogue; other, already committed, experience delusions and get discouraged. It is, however, important never to quit hope and never to wait for the arrival of a crisis to start building friendly relations among believers of other religions. We always need renewal. We must try our utmost to go deep into reciprocal, fraternal relations through religious differences, even when these relations are good.

We must not consider the work of dialogue promotion among believers of different religious as a sign of weakness on behalf of the faithful. The reason of the commitment to the inter-religious dialogue is not ignorance or want of satisfaction of one’s own religious tradition. On the contrary, we go nearer to another believer because we are firmly rooted in our own religious tradition. Believers can become –and experience shows that they actually become such, through an inter-religious collaboration- an important force in promoting social harmony and peace, based on the four pillars mentioned by Pope John XXIII in his encyclical Letter Pacem in terris —I still remember them after 43 years. In fact, I was then a young collaborator of the Pontiff. The four pillars were truth, justice, love and freedom.

5.         Before being politics, peace is a spirit. Therefore, it is the task of the religions to educate the faithful to peace through the purification of memory, reconciliation and forgiveness. The religions launch an invitation to think and a stimulus to seek peace, since they have found again the reason for living together, as they did last July in the world meeting of religious leaders, held in Moscow last July.  It is an invitation to fight courageously against the ideologies, which make men enemies to one another. The ideologies are the revolutionary fundamentalism, class-hatred, nationalistic pride, racism, commercial egoisms, individualism of persons or hedonist groups, which are indifferent to the needs of others.

The obstinate search for peace, like that of any other human good, has its exigencies of thought and action, inspired by the love message of religions for all men. Like a frail and threatened child, peace requires plenty of love. We need, therefore, a constant commitment and a persevering action to transform mentalities and attitudes and to create an authentic culture of peace inspired by love.  We undoubtedly live a dramatic time of the world history. It is necessary, therefore, to put together the intelligence, courage and sensitivity of all men and women to increase  enthusiasm of love and peace in the world. We must re-build reciprocal trust, which we cannot acquire forcefully nor obtain with beautiful declarations. We must deserve trust with gestures and concrete acts flowing from love.

6.         The way to peace, in fact, starts from the heart of man, in the education of overcoming the disorderly impulses of passions. It starts from the patient pedagogy that teaches us how to defeat the interior, anguished and painful struggle against part of ourselves. The religions help man not to quit this interior field of struggle, but to form the conscience. In fact, once the personal conscience disappears, the international peace is seriously threatened. The conquest of fundamental values answers the deepest exigencies of the person and of its growth in humanity. Created to the image and similitude of God, who is love and an inexhaustible source of love for all men who hunger for peace in the dynamism of existence, man must grow according to all the dimensions of his being. He must grow in the drama of his choices, in his restlessness of daily experiences, in the mobility of hope, in the anxious need of communion, in the search for truth and fraternity, in the thirst for justice, the dream of beauty, the desire of coherence in his hunger for love.  

7.         This is my most intimate conviction: peace is surely a gift of God, but at the same time, it is also a fatigued conquest of man created to his image and similitude. Man, worker of peace, needs God to be a man of peace fully, because peace is the fruit of love and God is its source. Thus, here in Assisi, our thought becomes prayer with St. Francis, “Lord, make me an instrument of your peace. Grant that I may bring love wherever there is hatred”.