ROME — Pope Francis urged Christians to “disarm” their hearts Tuesday, asserting that this is the only way to become peacemakers.
In his special Angelus message for the feast of All Saints, the pontiff reflected on one of Jesus’s Beatitudes, namely: “Blessed are the peacemakers.”
“We all desire peace, but often what we want is not really peace, but to be at peace, to be left in peace, not to have problems but tranquility,” the pope declared.
The peace of Jesus “is very different from what we imagine,” he said, because Jesus “does not call blessed the tranquil, those who are at peace, but those who work for peace and struggle to bring about peace, the builders and makers of peace.”
“Like any construction, peace must be built and it requires commitment, collaboration, and patience,” he insisted. We would like peace “to rain from above,” but instead it grows in silence, day after day, through works of justice and mercy.
“Again, we are led to believe that peace comes by force and power, but for Jesus it is the opposite,” the pope reflected, adding that peace “is not achieved by conquering or defeating someone, since it is never violent, never armed.”
To become peacemakers, “it is necessary to first disarm the heart,” he proposed, because “we are all armed with aggressive thoughts, one against the other, with sharp words, and we think we defend ourselves with the barbed wire of complaint and the concrete walls of indifference.”
“But this is not peace, this is war,” Francis asserted. “The seed of peace calls for demilitarization of the field of the heart.”
“How do we demilitarize our hearts? By opening ourselves to Jesus, who is ‘our peace,’” he said, because “to be peacemakers, to be saints, is not up to us alone; it is his gift, it is grace.”
The pope went on to urge his hearers to examine their own hearts, asking themselves whether they are truly builders of peace or rather sowers of division and discord.
“Do we bring tension, words that hurt, gossip that poisons, polemics that divide?” he asked. “Or do we open the way to peace: do we forgive those who have offended us, do we take care of those on the margins, do we heal some injustice by helping those who have less?”
Remember, he concluded, Jesus promises that the peacemakers “will be called children of God.”
“In the world they seem out of place, because they do not yield to the logic of power and triumph, but in Heaven they will be the closest to God, the most like Him,” he declared.