492. January 24, Our Lady Of Peace

Meditations no. 422 (unofficial computer-aided translation)

The true peace and order installed by God in the world.

Today we celebrate the liturgical memorial of Our Lady of Peace, the title of the Church of the Prelature. In this Marian advocation, the Most Holy Virgin is presented to us as the dispenser of this lasting interior peace promised by Christ to his disciples.

The yearning for peace is universal, because God himself has sown it in human hearts. Glory to God in the Highest and peace on earth to men of good will, proclaimed the angels on the first Christmas night. Pax in coelo, peace in heaven, commented our Father. But let’s take a look at the world. Why is there no peace on earth? No; there is no peace; only the appearance of peace, an equilibrium based on fear, on precarious compromises. There is no peace in the Church either, marked as it is with tensions which fray the white robe of the Spouse of Christ. In many hearts there is no peace, as they try vainly to compensate for their intranquillity of soul with a continuous boisterousness, with the small satisfaction of goods that do not satisfy, because they always leave behind the bitter aftertaste of sadness.

We hear a lot about the harmony between nations and the evils of war; nevertheless the tensions and violence in the world persist. And the reason is that the desire for peace on the earth is sterile if it is limited to avoiding external disorders. Peace is not the mere absence of war - teaches the Second Vatican Council - it cannot be reduced to the simple equilibrium of adversarial forces, nor does it arise from a despotic hegemony, but with all exactitude and propriety it is called “the work of justice” (Is 32: 7). It is the fruit of the order placed in human society by its divine founder, and that men, always thirsting for a more perfect justice, have to bring about.

As our Father used to affirm, the world is good; it was the sin of Adam which broke the divine harmony of created things, but God the Father has sent his only begotten Son to re-establish that peace. Only Christ, the Prince of peace, can give true tranquillity to peoples, because he has overcome sin on the Cross.

Peace is a great gift of God, and, on the other hand, war… is an enormous punishment, a scourge that makes people forget all the commandments, that justifies every evil. Let us ask for peace, our founder exhorted us. Many times, at the end of the day, in the depths of your heart, in order to conserve that presence of God wherever you are, seek out God and tell him: Cor Iesu Sacratissimum, dona nobis pacem!: grant us peace, Lord.

Christians have to make a special effort in the task of spreading peace.

Peace is constructed day by day, with the effort to install the order wanted by God, which brings with it a more perfect justice amongst men. Nobody can slink away from this duty, because to spread peace amongst men is a task which belongs to everybody. That is why the Church, in the Second Vatican Council, has made an ardent call to Christians so that, with the help of Christ, the author of peace, they might cooperate with all men to give a solid basis to justice and love, and to contribute to the means to peace.

It is the mission of the children of God to bring peace to the earth: Faced with evil, we do not respond with another evil, but with clear doctrine and good actions: drowning evil in an abundance of good (cf. Rom 12: 21). And so Christ will reign in our soul and in the souls of those who are around us. Each one of us can have an influence on the people whom we have at our side, in the families and social groups we move in, in the information nodes and the cultural milieu which surrounds us… , and contribute, with divine grace, so that discord and rancour cease and the peace of Christ flourishes everywhere.

More especially, the children of God in Opus Dei have to use all the means within their grasp, to bring this message of peace and happiness which our Lord has wanted to renew through the Work to the whole world. All we have to do is to be faithful to the spirit that our founder has taught us; a spirit which is joyful and positive, and which leads us to look for what unites people and not what separates them. Ours is a sowing of peace, of understanding and of love, our Father explained. We forgive everybody, we understand everybody, and we don’t feel offended by anything, although at times some people might wound and insult us. It’s all by-the-by. We, on the other hand are the ones who are permanent; because we are involved in a divine Work Your only concern has to be this: to be saints, audacious and valiant.

Be faithful to your vocation, all of you children of God in this Work of God. Together with the supernatural virtues, practise the natural virtues too. Bring the charity of Jesus Christ to all the paths of the earth, the divine paths of the earth.

And spread throughout the world the hidden yet fruitful influence of your work as apostles, quasi fluvium pacis, like a river of peace (Is 66: 12).

Peace is a product of interior life.

In the church of the Prelature there is a glass cabinet full of swords and sabres, which our Father wanted to have put there to remind us that peace is something very much related to war. Peace is a consequence of victory. Peace demands of me a continuous struggle; this struggle which each one of us has to keep up against our bad inclinations, so that Christ might reign in our souls.

Every day, our Father once said, I say many times as an aspiration to our Lord that he grant us his peace: peace in our souls, peace in families, peace in society, peace in the Church, the peace in the world. I love peace above everything. But I know - based on my own personal experience and that of so many souls - that we will only have this peace if we know how to win in this personal war which each one of us carries out on his own battle-front, usually in small things. I don’t believe in the pacifists who don’t struggle against themselves interiorly. Because, whether we like it or not, we have to face up to this internal, personal, continuous war.

This is the doctrine of the Church, too, when it says that to achieve this peace on earth we all have to change our hearts. There is no peace amongst men if there is no peace within each one of them, that is, if each one does not restore in his interior the order which God has wanted. “Does your soul want to conquer its passions?” asks St Augustine. “If it submits to the One Who is above, it will conquer what is below. And you will have peace within you: a true peace, secure and ordered. What is this order associated with this peace? What God commands in your soul and your soul commands in your body; there is nothing more ordered than this” (St Augustine, Sermones post Maur. reperti).

Union with God, built up daily by means of the refined fulfilment of the Norms, is the best guarantee of victory in the fight, though at times there are small defeats, which we can remedy with an act of love-sorrow. This struggle brings us that gaudium cum pace. To really love we have to be strong, loyal, with our hearts firmly anchored in faith, in hope and in charity. Only an insubstantial flightiness capriciously changes the object of its love, and then this love is not love but an egotistical compensation. When there is love, there’s a certain wholeness: a capacity for self-giving, for sacrifice, for renunciation. And in the middle of this self-giving, of this sacrifice and this renunciation, along with contradictions, happiness and joy. A joy which nothing and nobody can take away from us.

Also in the Prelatic Church, under the sanctuary, our Father had placed some relics of St Jucundianus and St Felicity, names which remind us that the gaudium cum pace, that God grants us as a reward for our self-giving, is always a consequence of the interior fight. We reach true peace when each one of us struggles against his bad inclinations. Then this peace, which is the fruit of the victory against ourselves, carries over into families and overflows into society and into the whole world. Only when we Christians are truly men and women of peace - because we struggle - only then will there be peace in the world. And anything else is just an illusion: you will have to struggle against yourselves always, while you live here on the earth, even though you might live to be very old.

We put this struggle to fulfil the will of God under the protection of Our Lady of Peace. We ask that she obtain victory for us from her Son, and that a wave of true peace spreads through the entire world as a consequence of the greater effort by Christians to correspond to divine grace.