PEACE can’t be achieved without prayer, which ends up in reconciliation, the Archbishop of Canterbury told a gathering of world leaders on Sunday.
Archbishop Welby was delivering a speech, in French, to the International Meeting for Peace within the Palais des Congrès in Paris.
The annual event is hosted by the Community of Sant’Egidio and the Archdiocese of Paris, and was attended by the President of France, Emmanuel Macron, who also gave a mirrored image on the designated theme: imagining peace.
Archbishop Welby referred to the estimated 56 world conflicts, including the “precarious” situation in Ukraine and the “sins and horrors” within the occupied territories. “The one common feature is the death of the innocent and the rise of fear, insecurity, and hatred.”
Climate change, he said, was “one war which is camouflaged behind the more obvious ones. It is the human war against the creation. It is undeclared, but lively, in every sense a hot war. And it’s a war that breeds other wars.
“The easiest method of missing the goal of a maximum global average temperature increase of 1.5 [degrees] celsius is to have conventional wars.”
He continued: “Ask the soldier on the battlefield about climate change. The soldier will answer ‘The climate in 2050? I will likely be glad to survive 20 minutes.’”
Prayer could help, Archbishop Welby suggested, because “God is neither threatened nor perturbed, neither anxious nor confused.”
Prayer, he said, “puts us in tune with the need of God . . . to peace, to the common good, to like and hope”, and “inspires imagination to tackle our human propensity to ask chaos and destruction into God’s ordered creation.
“Created within the image of God, we possess the need of God to be curious, to be present in suffering, and to gloriously reimagine a greater world within the realms of climate control, political breakdown, community hostility, and racial and ethnic prejudice.”
Reconciliation was not an event but a process that spanned generations, he said. It required human participation, leadership, “healing past hurts and admitting wrongs”.
“Reconciliation just isn’t only agreement, although agreement is mandatory; reconciliation is the transformation of destructive conflict into creative rivalry, underpinned by mutual acceptance and love. It is a cycle of peace, justice, and mercy, build up a structure shining within the love of God. A moment of peace opens the technique to truth-telling. Truth-telling sows the seeds of relationships.”
The foundation of all of this, he concluded, was prayer.
Other speakers on the gathering included the Chief Rabbi of France, Haïm Korsia; the Rector of the Great Mosque of Paris, Chems-Eddine Hafiz (delivered in absentia); the founding father of the Community of Sant-Egidio, Andrea Riccardi; and the Archbishop of Paris, the Most Revd Laurent Ulrich. Lina Hassani, a young Afghan refugee who has been supported by Sant’Egidio, also addressed the gathering.
The Archbishop began his speech by praising the peacebuilding work of Sant’Egidio “decade after decade” and their “remarkable success” in Mozambique. “It is a moment of ecumenical and interfaith hospitality which encourage all who observe, including me, with the understanding that there’s hope and courage in a world that’s ‘becoming unhinged’, to cite the Secretary General of the United Nations (UN) in his extraordinary and prophetic opening address to the General Assembly a 12 months ago.”
