“Pray the rosary every day in honor of Our Lady of the Rosary to obtain peace in the world ... for she alone can save it.”This month of the rosary recalls to us these words of Our Lady, spoken to the shepherd children of Fatima less than a hundred years ago on July 13, 1917.
Calls for peace echo from every corner of the world in our time; here at home, we also seek peace, as school administrators create intellectual and emotional “safe spaces” and suggest that teachers preface potentially traumatic content with “trigger warnings.” Our society’s highest priority is protecting people’s comfort. And yet the result is discomfort: daily, I see my students recoil from any statement that challenges another’s beliefs. But peace does not reign in the classroom. Instead, it is an uneasy self-censorship.
At Fatima on May 13, 1967, Pope Paul VI pleaded, “The world is in danger. This is why we have come to the feet of the Queen of Peace to ask of her as gift that which God alone can give: peace. But it is not always a miraculous gift; it is a gift that requires a free acceptance and a free collaboration. And so our prayer, after having turned to heaven, turns toward the people of the whole world: Men and women, render yourselves worthy of the divine gift of peace. Be human. Be magnanimous. Hear resonating, through our humble and weak voice, the echo of Christ’s word: ‘Blessed are the peacemakers, because they will be called children of God’” (Matt. 5:9).
Ironically, Christ, Prince of Peace, elsewhere stated, “Do not think that I have come to bring peace upon the earth. I have come to bring not peace but the sword. For I have come to set a man ‘against his father, a daughter against her mother, and one’s enemies will be those of his household’” (Matt. 10:34-36). So there is something greater than peace for its own sake: that something is Christ Himself. Sometimes our adherence to Truth results, in the short term, in strife. When a son in pagan Rome converted to Christianity, he risked his father’s career and his own life. When a daughter today refuses an abortion, she may face her parents’ ire and a financially strained future.
So, does the Prince of Peace betray His name? No. When we act in accordance with His word and speak it in love to others, even at the cost of disagreement and suffering, the ultimate result will be peace. In the famous scholastic definition, peace is the “tranquility of order.” Enthroning Christ as King in our hearts and living according to His teachings aligns us with the ordering of creation, lovingly made and guided by Him.
This is the “free collaboration” about which Pope Paul VI spoke. This is the message of Fatima: prayer and penance, a holy life, will bring peace. This is to “be human” in the full sense of our human calling.
Sr. Maria Veritas Marks is a member of the Ann Arbor-based Dominican Sisters of Mary, Mother of the Eucharist.
