“The Human Family: Community of Peace”

Pope Benedict XVI has chosen "The Human Family: Community of Peace" as the theme for the World Peace Day message for 2008.

The Holy Father insisted that, “Every person, every population is called to experience and feel themselves part of the human family conceived by God as a community of peace”.  He also quoting from the council's Pastoral Constitution on the Church in the Modern World “Gaudium et Spes" said that, "Every group must take into account the needs and legitimate aspirations of every other group, and still more of the human family as a whole”.  Just as the dignity of the person created in the image of God is affirmed in the Old Testament, the idea of the unity of the family is also one of the original truths of Christianity.

In his message the Holy Father clearly explains the relation between family and peace by saying that, in a healthy family life we experience some of the fundamental elements of peace: justice and love between brothers and sisters, the role of authority expressed by parents, loving concern for the members who are weaker because of youth, sickness or old age, mutual help in the necessities of life, readiness to accept others and, if necessary, to forgive them. For this reason he insists that, the family is the first and indispensable teacher of peace.

The family is the foundation of society for this reason too: because it enables its members in decisive ways to experience peace. It follows that the human community cannot do without the service provided by the family. Where can young people gradually learn to savour the genuine “taste” of peace better than in the original “nest” which nature prepares for them? The language of the family is a language of peace; we must always draw from it, lest we lose the “vocabulary” of peace. In the inflation of its speech, society cannot cease to refer to that “grammar” which all children learn from the looks and the actions of their mothers and fathers, even before they learn from their words.

Through this message of peace the Holy Father invites every man and woman to have a more lively sense of belonging to the one human family, and to strive to make human coexistence increasingly reflect this conviction, which is essential for the establishment of true and lasting peace in this world.