The Pope returns to ask for immediate action for peace.
On the day when Ukraine is heavily attacked by Russia, the pontiff returns to launch an appeal: "We are going through difficult times for humanity, which is in great danger. Therefore I tell you: be artisans of peace around you and within you; ambassadors of peace, so that the world rediscovers the beauty of love, of living together, of fraternity, of solidarity ".
The appeal was addressed by the Pope to a group of young people who had come on pilgrimage to the Vatican from Belgium.
A reminder after the words pronounced yesterday at the Angelus in which Francis recalled the "danger of nuclear war" and asked to "learn from history".
The story is that of sixty years ago when the threat of the atomic bomb loomed over the world.
These were the days in which the Church met in the historical event of the Second Vatican Council, whose beginning was precisely on 11 October 1962. A Council that had as its background the prayer for peace.
Then as today there was an air of nuclear war: on 22 October of that year the American President John Fitzgerald Kennedy denounced in fact that Soviet missiles had arrived in Cuba to be aimed at the United States.
Three days later, on 25 October, Pope John XXIII read on Vatican Radio a heartfelt message that had already been delivered to Kennedy and the Russian President Nikita Khrushchev: "The Church is more concerned than anything else with peace and fraternity between men "and"
today we renew this heartfelt appeal and plead with the Heads of State not to remain insensitive to this cry of humanity.
Let them do everything in their power to save peace: in this way they will save the world from the horrors of a war, the frightening consequences of which no one can foresee. "Words that did not go unheard and that avoided the end of the world." via pacifica ", as Pope Francis recalled yesterday.
The Council and Pope John's historic speech on the moon ("Returning home, you will find the children, give your children a caress and say: this is the Pope's caress") will be remembered with a mass presided over by the Pope, tomorrow afternoon in the Vatican basilica, and also with some gestures, from the procession of the bishops to the lighting of the torches.
In this way, "the year of preparation for the Jubilee 2025" will officially begin, underlines the dicastery for Evangelization.