Dozens of people gathered March 7 at Loyola University Chicago to focus on building peace in a world increasingly engulfed in conflict.
Participants in the International Encounter for Peace and Reconciliation, part of Loyola’s Building Bridges Initiative, heard a letter from Pope Leo XIV encouraging the project, which aimed to engage students and others in “a day of peace building in the synodal spirit,” according to the event announcement.
In his letter, read to the gathering by Cardinal Cupich, Pope Leo encouraged participants to remember that Jesus walks with them as they work to create peace and harmony in their families, communities, countries and around the world.
“This peace is not like the kind that the world offers to us, which, unfortunately, is often imposed with violence and deception,” Pope Leo wrote.
Rather, building true peace means being open to dialogue across boundaries.
“If we wish to promote concord on a global level, it is necessary to seek the engagement and the commitment of the international community for the sake of the common good, which transcends borders, faith traditions and cultures. It likewise requires systemic, interdisciplinary collaboration, bringing together institutions, organizations, scientists and leaders of various fields to achieve this end,” the pope’s letter said in part. “Your efforts at this meeting are a concrete example of how this is possible, and I hope … will bear great fruit.”
With prayer, the pope said, a world without war “is not unattainable.”
“When people of different religious traditions come together in prayer, it has the power to change the course of history,” he said.
The letter came a week after the United States and Israel began bombing Iran, sparking conflict throughout the Persian Gulf region. He likened it and other international violence to the violence suffered by families and communities in the Ukraine.
In his comments, Cardinal Cupich decried not just the violence in the Persian Gulf, but the way it is being presented to Americans.
“As more than 1,000 Iranian men, women and children lay dead after days of bombardment from U.S. and Israeli missiles, the official White House X account on Thursday evening posted a video of scenes from popular action movies spliced with actual strike footage from their war on Iran,” the cardinal said in a statement that was released publicly later March 7. “The clip was captioned: ‘JUSTICE THE AMERICAN WAY.’
“A real war with real death and real suffering being treated like it’s a video game — it’s sickening. Hundreds of people are dead, mothers and fathers, daughters and sons, including scores of children who made the fatal mistake of going to school that day.” (See full statement)
Following the message from Pope Leo and Cardinal Cupich’s remarks, participants heard from a variety of panelists who addressed topics such as peace, truth and justice in an era of artificial intelligence; peace and migration; the role of art in inspiring peace; and peace and the economy.
Michael Murphy, director of Loyola’s Hank Center for the Catholic Intellectual Heritage, said Catholics must insist on the importance of human dignity in a world where it is possible for AI systems to launch lethal attacks without human intervention.
“The essential role of the church on the basis of hyperactive technological advancement, is to do what it always does so very well — to be agents of communion as opposed the source of division, so that we remain steadfast and are promoting and safeguarding the dignity of all persons,” he said.
The Hank Center hosted the daylong event with Loyola’s Institute of Pastoral Studies, its Division of Mission Integration and its Department of Theology.
Miguel H. Díaz, the John Courtney Murray, SJ, University Chair in Public Service at Loyola and a former U.S. ambassador to the Holy See, said the universal nature of the Catholic Church gives it a unique diplomatic position.
“The Vatican, as is often observed, has ears and eyes in every corner of the world,” Díaz said. “And that is what makes the Vatican such an indispensable diplomatic listening post. Serving as ambassador, I learned that diplomacy succeeds when we listen to others and work with other nations, despite our disagreements, to build bridges of understanding that foster the common good.”
Anita Maddali, a visiting clinical associate professor at Northwestern University’s Pritzker School of Law, spoke about migration, noting that the United States has not comprehensively reformed its immigration law since 1965.
“We have steadily closed off the avenues for the poorest and most vulnerable to come to the United States lawfully, rendering our immigration laws unworkable for all but the educated and wealthy, and even for them, it’s difficult,” she said. “These unworkable laws have led to widespread distrust of our system and the rule of law.”
While other speakers addressed the economy of peace and conflict and the impact of the built and natural environments on peace, Ken Butigan, professor of practice in the Peace, Justice and Conflict Studies Program at DePaul University talked about peacemaking as art.
He invited listeners to imagine Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. as an artist, using his performance — his words, the way he delivered them, the places he went and the demonstrations he was part of — to make people see their society from a new perspective.
“As an artist of peace, as a dramatic artist of nonviolent liberation, [it was] played out in the state of our society, because ultimately, nonviolent change is possible only when a society has decided to make a shift from its old ways of injustice and violence and all the ways we’ve been talking about up here today,” Butigan said.
The afternoon was dedicated to table discussions of the topics covered by the panel, and a message from Emilce Cuda, secretary of the Pontifical Commission for Latin America and an adjunct professor at Loyola.
The day concluded with Mass celebrated by Bishop Oscar Cantú of San Jose, California.
Bishop Cantú thanked everyone who participated in the day, noting that to build peace, people must first build relationships.
“We must be friends first,” Bishop Cantú said. “Friends with the Lord and friends with one another.”
In his homily, he spoke of traveling to the Holy Land in 2015 as the chair of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops Committee on International Justice and Peace. He spoke about the way even the international group of bishops he was traveling with were not able to enter Gaza without obstacles, and about the conversation the bishops had with adolescents who were Catholic school students in Gaza about their experience posting on social media through the Israel-Hamas war in the summer of 2014.
A teenage Muslim student told them that people from Europe and other parts of the world who saw his posts would ask if he was alright, if his family had enough food, and that connection was nice.
“‘But what we need most,’” he said the boy told them, “is our dignity.”