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“Women in particular are often leaders of nonviolence, as, for example, was Leymah Gbowee and the thousands of Liberian women who organized pray-ins and nonviolent protest that resulted in high-level peace talks to end the second civil war in Liberia”. Pope Francis pays this tribute to women in his Message for the World Day of Peace in which he cites Mother Teresa and the Liberian activist who was instrumental in reaching the 2013 peace agreements as examples of nonviolence not taken to mean “surrender, lack of involvement and passivity”. “When Mother Teresa received the Nobel Peace Prize in 1979 – Pope Francis recalls -, she clearly stated her own message of active nonviolence: ‘We in our family don’t need bombs and guns, to destroy to bring peace – just get together, love one another… And we will be able to overcome all the evil that is in the world’”. “The force of arms is deceptive”, Pope Francis warns, drawing a distinction between the “weapons traffickers” who spread death and the “peacemakers” who give their lives and hold Mother Teresa as “a symbol, an icon of our times”. “Last September, I had the great joy of proclaiming her a Saint”, Pope Francis recalls, praising again “her readiness to make herself available for everyone through her welcome and defence of human life, those unborn and those abandoned and discarded. She bowed down before those who were spent, left to die on the side of the road, seeing in them their God-given dignity; she made her voice heard before the powers of this world, so that they might recognize their guilt for the crimes – the crimes! – of poverty they created”. “The decisive and consistent practice of nonviolence has produced impressive results”, the Pontiff observes, also mentioning the “achievements of Mahatma Gandhi and Khan Abdul Ghaffar Khan in the liberation of India, and of Dr Martin Luther King Jr in combating racial discrimination” which “will never be forgotten”.

©   http://agensir.it/quotidiano/2016/12/12/