In a June 14 message to the UN Security Council, Pope Francis called for peace and spoke of a “famine of fraternity.” Archbishop Paul Richard Gallagher, the Holy See’s Secretary for Relations with States and International Organizations, read out the message for the hospitalized Pope.
“In order to make peace a reality, we must move away from the logic of the legitimacy of war: if this were valid in earlier times, when wars were more limited in scope, in our own day, with nuclear weapons and those of mass destruction, the battlefield has become practically unlimited, and the effects potentially catastrophic,” Pope Francis wrote.
“The time has come to say an emphatic ‘no’ to war, to state that wars are not just, but only peace is just: a stable and lasting peace, built not on the precarious balance of deterrence, but on the fraternity that unites us,” he continued.
Ahmed al-Tayeb, the Grand Imam of Al-Azhar, also addressed the Security Council and called for peace. The Pope and the Grand Imam signed the Document on Human Fraternity in the United Arab Emirates in 2019.