In his homily at a Mass for the World Day of Peace, January 1, the Latin-rite Catholic Patriarch of Jerusalem said: “There is no peace without conversion.”
“Christ is our peace,” said Archbishop Pierbattista Pizzaballa. He went on to observe that since the time of Cain and Abel, fighting and warfare have been the common experience of humanity. The only solution, he said, is the “desire for encounter” shown by Jesus Christ.
In the troubled Holy Land, the patriarch continued, “the main vocation and mission of the small Christian community is precisely this: to cherish the desire for encounter, to cultivate freedom in relation to all, to overcome ethnic, religious and identity boundaries of various kinds.”