Not resigning ourselves to war and hatred. Blessed are the peacemakers

On 26 June 1945, the Charter of the United Nations was approved in San Francisco. In it, people stated their commitment to preserve the coming generations from the scourge of war that had inflicted suffering beyond words on humanity.

After eighty years, millions of people are still suffering from war: Palestine, Ukraine, Yemen, the Sahel and Iran are a few examples of what snub to human dignity can achieve. Fear and a lack of hope paralyse the reaction of the majority of developed world citizens, who feel both cowardly and stupefied as structures that had provided safety to their societies over the years collapse. The scene of a new global conflagration is getting more plausible, while the United Nations General Secretary and Pope Francis and Pope Leo repeated appeals for Peace have nowhere to go.

People responsible for war have a name and a last name as well as their accomplices: the big arms companies, media spreading fake news and hate speeches, political groups and platforms supporting the division and confrontation, citizens not involved and looking the other way.

In the presence of such discouraging scene, led by the Gospel of Jesus Christ, encouraging us to strive for Peace (Mt 5,9) inspired by the social doctrine of the Church (GS 38, 82; PT 74) from the Spanish Commission for Justice and Peace, we urge citizens, political class, institutions and people of God to explicitly be against wars and those who promote them, as well as not to stop seeking Peace based on justice which remedies the victim's damage, restores the human rights of destroyed people and leads the responsible ones to take accountability.

We encourage citizens to take responsibility for the current situation by:

• Making visible their disagreement with war by any available legal methods: from gatherings and demonstrations to the use of social media, letters to the media…
• Refuting any speech that justifies or legalises war by defending the nonviolence and solving conflicts peacefully.
• Demanding political parties and leaders' accountability who justify wars and promote them by responsibly exercising the right to vote in the elections.
• Not investing and disinvesting in those banking institutions that fund armament firms.
• Educating in human rights and playing the role of citizens aware of the defence of the most vulnerable ones.
• Not frustrating and losing faith and hope in the presence of the entity and gravity of the current situation.
• Providing economic support to those entities and organizations that defend and act in favour of Peace.
• Supporting as far as possible those people who are escaping from armed conflicts and are seeking shelter in Spain and in other countries of the European Union.

Finally, from the Spanish Commission for Justice and Peace, we want to remind the importance of gestures in favour of peace, even if they are small, such as sacraments of hope for a humanity free from fear and misery, as the Preamble of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights established.

Spanish Commission for Justice and Peace