Peacemakers are those who love, defend and promote
life in its fullness
4. The path to the attainment of the common good
and to peace is above all that of respect for human
life in all its many aspects, beginning with its conception,
through its development and up to its natural
end. True peacemakers, then, are those who love,
defend and promote human life in all its dimensions,
personal, communitarian and transcendent. Life in
its fullness is the height of peace. Anyone who loves
peace cannot tolerate attacks and crimes against life.
Those who insufficiently value human life and,
in consequence, support among other things the
liberalization of abortion, perhaps do not realize
that in this way they are proposing the pursuit of
a false peace. The flight from responsibility, which
degrades human persons, and even more so the killing
of a defenceless and innocent being, will never
be able to produce happiness or peace. Indeed how
could one claim to bring about peace, the integral
development of peoples or even the protection of
the environment without defending the life of those
who are weakest, beginning with the unborn. Every
offence against life, especially at its beginning, inevitably
causes irreparable damage to development,
peace and the environment. Neither is it just to introduce
surreptitiously into legislation false rights
or freedoms which, on the basis of a reductive and
relativistic view of human beings and the clever use
of ambiguous expressions aimed at promoting a
supposed right to abortion and euthanasia, pose a
threat to the fundamental right to life.
There is also a need to acknowledge and promote
the natural structure of marriage as the union of a
man and a woman in the face of attempts to make
it juridically equivalent to radically different types
of union; such attempts actually harm and help to
destabilize marriage, obscuring its specific nature
and its indispensable role in society.
These principles are not truths of faith, nor are
they simply a corollary of the right to religious freedom.
They are inscribed in human nature itself, accessible
to reason and thus common to all humanity.
The Church’s efforts to promote them are not
therefore confessional in character, but addressed to all people, whatever their religious affiliation.
Efforts of this kind are all the more necessary the
more these principles are denied or misunderstood,
since this constitutes an offence against the truth of
the human person, with serious harm to justice and
peace.
Consequently, another important way of helping
to build peace is for legal systems and the administration
of justice to recognize the right to invoke
the principle of conscientious objection in the face
of laws or government measures that offend against
human dignity, such as abortion and euthanasia.
One of the fundamental human rights, also with
reference to international peace, is the right of individuals
and communities to religious freedom.
At this stage in history, it is becoming increasingly
important to promote this right not only from the
negative point of view, as freedom from – for example,
obligations or limitations involving the freedom
to choose one’s religion – but also from the positive
point of view, in its various expressions, as freedom
for – for example, bearing witness to one’s religion,
making its teachings known, engaging in activities
in the educational, benevolent and charitable fields
which permit the practice of religious precepts, and
existing and acting as social bodies structured in accordance
with the proper doctrinal principles and
institutional ends of each.-from the Holy Father's Message for the World Day of Peace
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