The peace challenges of the new millennium

Angelo Scelzo

Sarajevo

The sound, majestic and hollow at the same time, of this name is sufficient. It continues to weigh on everyone's conscience; the name is sufficient to recall to the memory of yesterday and today the tragedy of a humanity which has still not been freed from the slavery of hatred and injustice, still a prisoner of grudges which make it blind.

Sarajevo.

What representation of evil were we spared during the 4 years of the atrocious conflict?

Possibly distracted, and maybe between commercials, in front of our television screens - if not within our screened consciences - crossed the entire horrendous range of man's evil. And we learnt - through the ethnic cleansing, the rapes, the destroyed cemeteries - that the limit went far beyond our imagination.

Beirut.

Here is the name of a peace which was shattered, of cohabitation destroyed by the insanity of weapons and by selfishness. A Land occupied by an endless war.

Beirut.

Here is the other name of a devastated country, the symbol of a Middle East where peace seems unable to find refuge.

But now, after the pilgrimage, we could turn everything upside down. And without cancelling anything that happened, we should note, that before all that evil, a contrasting sign appeared.

Sarajevo - Beirut.

Seen from this other side - from the side of a Pope unbowed with courage and love - the Bosnian and Lebanese capitals now evoke the new heart beat of a peace which returns hope to the old and tired Europe and to the whole of the Middle East, on the eve of a new millennium.

In the same places trampled and violated by hatred, Pope John Paul II went to trace - personally, after having spiritually covered it step by step - the furrow of a new path. He went to assert, challenging protocols of caution and cohabitation, the right which, beyond his own merits, every man deserves: that of knowing that he is loved. That he is not alone.

And John Paul II went to Sarajevo and Beirut to strengthen - and possibly extend to all places - this dramatic cry for peace.

Really, as wrote Mario Agnes on "L'Osservatore Romano", the "beggar of peace" went to take the announcement that "the dawn of God" is already present among you".