The beginning of a new year offers us both an invitation and an opportunity for reflection and renewal.
One such focus offered to all of us is Pope Leo’s message for the 59th World Day of Peace: “Peace Be With You All – Towards an Unarmed and Disarming Peace.”
Pope Leo’s words encourage us to “…open ourselves to peace! Let us welcome it and recognize it, rather than believing it to be impossible and beyond our reach. Peace is more than just a goal; it is a presence and a journey.
Even when it is endangered within us and around us, like a small flame threatened by a storm, we must protect it, never forgetting the names and stories of those who have borne witness to it. Peace is a principle that guides and defines our choices. Even in places where only rubble remains, and despair seems inevitable, we still find people who have not forgotten peace.
Just as on the evening of Easter Jesus entered the place where his disciples were gathered in fear and discouragement, so too the peace of the risen Christ continues to pass through doors and barriers in the voices and faces of his witnesses. This gift enables us to remember goodness, to recognize it as victorious, to choose it again, and to do so together.”
(https://www.vatican.va/content/leo-
xiv/en/messages/peace/documents/20251208-messaggio-pace.html)
How, in this new year, might peace guide and define our choices?
How might we choose peace and goodness, and do so together?
Pope Leo asks us to never forget the names and stories of those who have witnessed to peace. I immediately think of the civil rights leaders, many giving of their lives, but I also think of Diana Ortiz, tortured and after healing worked with victims of torture and for oeace and Dorothy Kazel who gave her life for the Salvadorean people.