Southern cross. (Savannah, Ga.) 1963-2021, December 23, 1976, Image 2
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PAGE 2—The Southern Cross, December 23, 1976
SECRETARY OF STATE
Selection Pleases Church Leaders
PROBLEM PLAGUED PRESIDENCY--Jose Lopez President Luis Echeverria. The new president takes
Portillo (wearing sash) waves to crowds after becoming control of the country during a time of grave social
Mexico’s 60th president recently. At right is outgoing and economic troubles. (NC Photo)
Text Of Pope Paul Vi’s Day Of Peace Message
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WASHINGTON (NC) - Top Catholic
foreign policy experts have lauded
President-elect Jimmy Carter’s
appointment of Cyrus Vance as
Secretary of State, expressing
confidence that Vance will be sensitive
to human rights and the needs of the
developing nations in foreign policy.
“People with religious and Catholic
concerns for the issues should be very
much encouraged and boistered by his
appointment,” according to Msgr.
Joseph Gremillion, secretary of the
Pontifical Commission for Justice and
Peace from 1967-74.
Msgr. Gremillion, now a fellow at the
University of Notre Dame, said he has
worked with Vance for the past three
years in launching the International
Peace Colloquium, an organization of
Christian, Jewish, Moslem, Hindu and
Buddhist academics, businessmen and
others concerned with peace issues.
Vance, an Episcopalian, is
vice-president of the 50-member group,
according to Msgr. Gremillion, who is
executive secretary.
Vance was “at the top of my list” of
choices for the State Department post,
Holy Cross Father Thedore Hesburgh,
Notre Dame’s president, said. Father
Hesburgh is one of a number of people
asked by Carter to suggest names for
top level administration appointments.
VATICAN CITY (NC) - Following is
the text of Pope Paul Vi’s message for
the Day of Peace, Jan. 1, 1977, entitled
“If You Want Peace, Defend Life.”
Leaders and people in post of
responsibility!
Periple uncountable and unknown!
Friends!
Here we are again, for the 10th time,
speaking to you, with you!
At the dawn of the new year, 1977,
we stand at your door and knock (cf.
Rev. 3:20). Please open to us. We are
the usual pilgrim, travelling the roads of
the world, without ever growing weary,
without losing the way. We are sent to
bring you the usual proclamation; we
are a prophet of peace! Yes, “peace,
peace,” we cry as we go along, as a
messenger of a fixed idea, an ancient
idea, but an idea ever new through the
recurring necessity that demands it, like
a discovery, like a duty, like a blessing!
The idea of peace seems to have taken
hold, as an expression that equals and
perfects civilization. There is no
civilization without peace. But in reality
peace is never complete, never secure.
You have seen how the very
achievements of progress can be the
cause of conflicts, and what conflicts!
Do not think our annual message on
behalf of peace superfluous and
therefore boring.
After the last World War, on the
clockface of the human mind there
struck an hour of good fortune. Upon
the vast ruins — widely differing, it is
true, in the different countries, but
universal — peace alone was seen to be
victorious, at long last. And
immediately there sprang up the works
and institutions proper to peace, like
fresh spring leaves. Many of them still
persist and flourish; they are the
conquests of the new world, and the
world does well to be proud of them
and to preserve their efficiency and
development. They are the works and
institutions that mark a step up in the
progress of humanity. Let us listen for a
moment, at this point, to a voice both
authoritative, paternal and prophetic,
the voice of our revered predecessor,
Pope John XXIII:
“And so, venerable brothers and dear
sons and daughters, we must think of
human society as being primarily a
spiritual reality. Through it enlightened
men can share their knowledge of the
truth, can claim their rights and fulfil
their duties, receive encouragement in
their aspirations for moral goodness,
share their enjoyment of all the
wholesome pleasures of the world, strive
continually to pass on to others all that
is best in themselves, and make their
own the spiritual riches of others. These
are the values which exert a guiding
influence on culture, economics, social
institutions, political movements and
forms, laws, and all the other
components which go to make up the
external community of people and its
continual evolution” (Encyclical letter
Pacem in Terris, April 11, 1963: Acta
Apostolicae Sedis 55, 1963, p. 266).
Vance’s appointment also drew praise
from two officials of the U.S. Catholic
Conference (USCC) — Bishop James
Rausch, general secretary, and Father J.
Bryan Hehir, associate secretary for
international justice and peace.
Vance, a former Deputy Secretary of
Defense and diplomatic trouble-shooter
for the Johnson Administration, was
one of Carter’s top foreign policy
advisors during the campaign.
At a press conference when his
appointment was announced, Vance
said morality in foreign policy was “a
fundamental precept that must be borne
in mind.”
“I think that one has to deal with the
practicalities of the situation as they
exist,” he said, “but the guiding
principle must be a concern, and a deep
concern, for human rights and the
problems of human rights, and that
certainly would be a factor in
determining how we deal with other
nations.”
Msgr. Gremillion said Vance had
participated in nine of 10 committee
meetings in the formation of the
International Peace Colloquium over a
15-month period.
Vance is “not a flashy personality,
but a very good man, a very good
listener,” Msgr. Gremillion said.
He said Vance is “a forward-looking
But this healing phase of peace gives
way to new challenges, whether as the
aftermath of reawakening contests, only
provisionally settled, or as new
historical phenomena stemming from
social structures in continual evolution.
Peace once more begins to suffer, first
in people’s feelings, then in partial and
localized disputes, and then in
frightening programs of armament,
which coldly calculate the potential for
terrifying destruction - destruction
greater than our capacity to imagine it.
Here and there most praiseworthy
attempts to ward off such
conflagrations appear; and we hope that
these attempts will prevail over the
measureless dangers which they are
seeking to remedy in advance.
Brethren, this is not enough. The
concept of peace as the ideal that gives
direction to the concrete activity of
human society seems destined to
succumb to an inevitable victory of the
world’s incapacity to govern itself in
and through peace. Peace does not
generate itself, even though the deepest
impulses of human nature tend toward
peace. Peace is order, and order is what
everything, every reality, aspires to as its
destiny and the justification for its
existence. Order is a pre-established
destiny and justification for existence,
but it is brought about together with
and in collaboration with many factors.
Thus peace is a pinnacle that
presupposes a complex inner supporting
framework. Peace is like a flexible body
that needs a stout skeleton to give it
strength. The stability and beauty of the
structure of peace depend on the
support of various causes and
conditions. These are often absent. Even
when they exist, they are not always
strong enough for their function of
ensuring that the pyramid of peace
should have a solid base and a lofty
summit.
In this analysis of peace we have seen
again its beauty and its necessity, but
we have also noted its instability and
fragility. We conclude it by reaffirming
our conviction that peace is a duty,
peace is possible. This is the message we
keep repeating, a message that makes its
own the ideal of civilization, echoes the
aspirations of peoples, strengthens the
hope of the lowly and weak, and
ennobles with justice the security of the
strong. It is a message of optimism, a
presage of the future. Peace is no dream,
no utopia, no illusion. Nor is it a labor
of Sisyphus. No, peace can be prolonged
and strengthened. Peace can write the
finest pages of history, inscribing them
not only with the magnificence of
power and glory but also with the
greater magnificence of human virtue,
people’s goodness, collective prosperity,
and true civilization: the civilization of
love.
Is peace possible? Yes, it is. It must
be. But let us be sincere: peace, as we
have already said, is a duty and is
possible, but it is so only with the
concourse of many and not easy
conditions. We are aware that to discuss
the conditions for peace is a very long
and very difficult task. We shall not
make bold to undertake it here. We
leave it to the experts. But we will not
man” in the sense of the Church’s
teachings on international relations.
“To what extent he and the
President-elect and others bring this to
concrete cases is always the test of
ideals,” he said.
Bishop James Rausch, who has a
foreign affairs background, said he had
met Vance at an international
conference on world hunger in Italy two
years ago and was “very impressed.”
Vance is “very knowledgable” on the
hunger issue, Bishop Rausch said.
Father Hehir also said he was
“impressed” by Vance’s performance in
office.
Vance is “a more traditional style of
diplomat” than outgoing Secretary of
State Henry Kissinger, Father Hehir
said. “He’ll work through the State
Department structures much more than
Kissinger.”
“I don’t know his defined positions,”
Father Hehir said, “because he hasn’t
written much and most of his jobs
didn’t involve a lot of speaking. He was
much more involved in a negotiations
process working under a mandate from
someone else.”
Father Hehir said he was “pleased”
that Vance was chosen out of the
people mentioned for the post.
“I don’t mean that I agree with him
on everything. Inevitably, there will be
disagreement. But I’m pleased,” he said.
be silent on one aspect, one which is
clearly of basic importance. We shall
merely remind you of it and
recommend it to the reflection of good
and intelligent people. This aspect is the
relationship between peace and the
concept that the world has of human
life. '
Peace and life. They are supreme
values in the civil order. They are also
values that are interdependent.
Do we want peace? Then let us
defend life!
The phrase “peace and life” may
seem almost tautological, a rhetorical
slogan. It is not so. The combination of
the two terms in the phrase represents a
hard-won conquest in the onward march
of human progress — a march still short
of its final goal. How many times in the
drama of human history the phrase
“peace and life” has involved a fierce
struggle of the two terms, not a
fraternal embrace. Peace is sought and
won through conflict, like a sad doom
necessary for self-defence.
The close relationship between peace
and life seems to spring from the nature
of things, but not always, not yet from
the logic of people’s thought and
conduct. This close relationship is the
paradoxical novelty that we must
proclaim for this year of grace 1977 and
henceforth for ever, if we are to
understand the dynamics of progress.
To succeed in doing so is no easy and
simple task: we shall meet the
opposition of too many formidable
objections, which are stored in the
immense arsenal of pseudo-convictions,
empirical and utilitarian prejudices,
so-called reasons of state, and habits
drawn from history and tradition. Even
today, these objections seem to
constitute insurmountable obstacles.
The tragic conclusion is that if, in
defiance of logic, peace and life can in
practice be dissociated, there looms on
the horizon of the future a catastrophe
that in our days could be immeasurable
and irreparable both for peace and life.
Hiroshima is a terribly eloquent proof
and a frighteningly prophetic example
of this. In the reprehensible hypothesis
that peace were thought of in unnatural
separation from its relationship with
life, peace could be imposed as the sad
triumph of death. The words of Tacitus
come to mind: “They make a desert and
call it peace” (“ubi solitudinem faciunt,
pacem appellant.” Agricola, 30). Again,
in the same hypothesis, the privileged
life of some can be exalted, can be
selfishly and almost idolatrously
preferred, at the expense of the
oppression or suppression of others. Is
that peace?
This conflict is thus seen to be not
merely theoretical and moral but
tragically real. Even today it continues
to desecrate and stain with blood many
a page of human society. The key to
truth in the matter can be found only
by recognizing the primacy of life as a
value and as a condition for peace. The
formula is: “If you want peace, defend
life.” Life is the crown of peace. If we
base the logic of our activity on the
sacredness of life, war is virtually
disqualified as a normal and habitual
means of asserting rights and so of
ensuring peace. Peace is but the
incontestable ascendancy of right and,
in the final analysis, the joyful
celebration of life.
Here the number of examples is
endless, as is the case history of the
adventures, or rather the misadventures,
in which life is put at peril in the face Of
peace. We make our own the
classification which, in this regard, has
been presented according to “three
essential imperatives.” According to
these imperatives, in order to have
authentic and happy peace, it is
necessary “to defend life, to heal life, to
promote life.”
The policy of massive armaments is
immediately called into question. The
ancient saying, which has taught politics
and still does so — “if you want peace,
prepare for war” (“si vis pacem, para
bellum”) — is not acceptable without
radical reservation (cf. Lk 14-31). With
the forthright boldness of our
principles, we thus denounce the false
and dangerous program of the “arms
race,” of the secret rivalry between
peoples for military superiority. Even if
through a surviving remnant of happy
wisdom, or through a silent yet
tremendous contest in the balance of
hostile deadly powers, war (and what a
war it would be!) does not break out,
how can we fail to lament the
incalculable outpouring of economic
resources and human energies expended
in order to preserve for each individual
state its shield of ever more costly, ever
more efficient weapons, and this to the
detriment of resources for schools,
culture, agriculture, health and civic
welfare. Peace and life support
enormous and incalculable burdens in
order to maintain a Peace founded on a
perpetual threat to life, as also to
defend life by means of a constant
threat to peace.
People will say: it is inevitable. This
can be true within a concept of
civilization that is still so imperfect. But
let us at least recognize that this
constitutional challenges which the arms
race sets up between life and peace is a
formula that is fallacious in itself and
which must be corrected and
superseded. We therefore praise the
effort already begun to reduce and
finally to eliminate this senseless cold
war resulting from the progressive
increase of the military potential of the
various nations, as if these nations
should necessarily be enemies of each
other, and as if they were incapable of
realizing that such a concept of
international relations must one day be
resolved in the ruination of peace and of
countless human lives.
But it is not only war that kills peace.
Every crime against life is a blow to
peace, especially if it strikes at the
moral conduct of the people, as often
happens today, with horrible and often
legal ease, as in the case of the
suppression of incipient life by
abortion. Reasons such as the following
are brought forward to justify abortion:
abortion seeks to slow down the
troublesome increase of the population,
to eliminate beings condemned to
malformation, social dishonor,
proletarian misery, and so on; it seems
rather to favor peace than to harm it.
But it is not so. The suppression of an
incipient life, or one that is already
born, violates above all the sacrosanct
moral principle to which the concept of
human existence must always have
reference; human life is sacred from the
first moment of its conception and until
the last instant of its natural survival in
time.
It is sacred; what does this mean? It
means that life must be exempt from
any arbitrary power to suppress it; it
must not be touched; it is worthy of all
respect, all care, all dutiful sacrifice. For
those who believe in God, it is
spontaneous and instinctive and indeed
a duty through the law of religion. And
even for those who do not have this
good fortune of admitting the
protecting and vindicating hand of God
upon all human beings, this same sense
of the sacred — that is, the untouchable
and inviolable element proper to a living
human existence — is and must be
something sensed by virtue of human
dignity. Those who have had the
misfortune, the implacable guilt, the
ever renewed remorse at having
deliberately suppressed a life know this
and feel this. The voice of innocent
blood cries out with heartrending
insistence in the heart of the person
who killed it.
Inner peace is not possible through
selfish sophistries! And even if it is, a
blow at peace — that is, at the general
system that protects order, safe living in
society, in a word, at peace — has been
perpetrated: the individual life and
peace in general are always linked by an
unbreakable relationship. If we wish
progressive social order to be based
upon intangible principles, let us not
offend against it in the heart of its
essential system: respect for human life.
Even under this aspect peace and life are
closely bound together at the basis of
order and civilization.
The discussion can continue by
reviewing the hundred forms in which
offences against life seem to be
becoming normal behavior: where
individual crime is organized to become
collective; to ensure the silence and
complicity of whole groups of citizens;
to make private vendetta a vile
collective duty, terrorism a
phenomenon of legitimate political or
social affirmation, police torture an
effective means of public power no
longer directed toward restoring order
but towards imposing ignoble
repression. It is impossible for peace to
flourish where the safety of life is
compromised in this way. Where
violence rages, true peace ends. But
where human rights are truly professed
and publicly recognized and defended,
peace becomes the joyful and operative
atmosphere of life in society.
The texts of international
commitment for the protection of
human rights, for the defence of
children and for the safeguarding of
fundamental human freedoms are
proofs of our civil progress. They are
the epic of peace, in so far as they are
the shield of life. Are they complete?
Are they observed? We all note that
civilization is expressed in such
declarations, and finds in them the
guarantee of its own reality. This reality
is full and glorious if these declarations
are transfused into consciences and
moral conduct; it is mocked and
violated if they remain a dead letter.
Men and women, men and women of
the last part of the 20th century, you
have signed the glorious charters of the
human fullness you have achieved,
provided such charters are true. You
have sealed for history your moral
condemnation, if they are documents of
empty rhetorical wishes or juridical
hypocrisy. The measure is there: in the
equation between true peace and the
dignity of life.
Accept our suppliant plea: that this
equation should be fulfilled and that
over it be raised a new pinnacle on the
horizon of our civilization of life and
peace — the civilization, we say again, of
love.
Has everything been said?
No. There remains an unresolved
question: how can such a program of
civilization be realized? How do we
truly unite life and peace?
We answer in terms that may be
inaccessible to those who have closed
the horizon of reality to natural vision
alone. Recourse must be had to that
religious world which we call
“supernatural.” Faith is needed to
discover the system of forces working
within the whole human situation, into
which the transcendent work of God is
inserted and makes it capable of higher
effects which humanly speaking are
impossible. We need the help of the
“God of peace” (Phil 4:9).
Happy are we if we acknowledge and
believe this, and if in accordance with
this faith we succeed in discovering and
putting into practice the relationship
between life and peace.
For there is an important exception
to the above reasoning that places life
before peace, and makes peace depend
on the inviolability of life. The
exception occurs in the cases where a
good higher than life itself comes into
play. It is a question of a good whose
value surpasses that of life itself, such as
truth, justice, civil freedom, love of
neighbor, faith . . . There then
intervenes the word of Christ: “Anyone
who loves his life (more than these
higher goods) loses it” (Jn 12:25). This
shows us that as peace must be thought
of in relation to life, and as from the
ordered well-being ensured for life peace
must itself become the harmony that
makes human existence ordered and
happy, both interiorly and socially, so
this human existence, that is to say life,
cannot and must not be separated from
the higher ends which confer on it its
primary raison d’etre: why does one
live? What gives to life — over and above
the ordered tranquillity of peace - its
dignity, its spiritual fullness, its moral
greatness, and, we would also say, its
religious finality? Will peace, true peace,
perhaps be lost, if in the area of our life
citizenship is granted to love, in its
highest expression, which is sacrifice?
And if sacrifice really forms part of a
plan of redemption and of meritorious
title for an existence transcending the
temporal form and measure, will it not
regain — on a higher and eternal level —
peace, its true, hundredfold peace of
eternal Life (cf. Mt 19:29)? Those who
are pupils in the school of Christ can
understand these transcendent words
(cf. Mt 19:11). And why can we not be
these pupils? He — Christ - “is our
peace” (Eph 2:11).
We wish this peace to all those who
with our blessing receive this our
message of peace and life!
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