Cultivating Peace in a Culture of War, Ctd.

Relating to my previous post from Medium, Pope Francis’s 2015 message to the children of Italian schools came to mind today. Particularly relevant as this was a message to children — a difficult message — which ties in perfectly to the concept of how what virtues, habits, beliefs, and dispositions we instill in our children determine how they, as adults, will live and act in the world. What they defend and what they resist. This entails enlightening them to truths which so often run counter to the spoken and unspoken narratives of the world:

Why is it that so many powerful people don’t want peace? Because they live on war. The arms industry: this is grave. The powerful, some of the powerful, profit from the production of arms and they sell arms to this country which is against that one, and then they sell them to the one that goes against this one. It is the industry of death! And they profit. You know, greed does us so much harm: the desire to have more, more and more money. When we see that everything revolves around money — the economic system revolves around money and not around the person, around man, around woman, but around money — so much is sacrificed and war is made to protect the money. And because of this, many people don’t want peace. There is more profit with war. Money is earned, but lives are lost, culture is lost, education is lost, so many things are lost. This is why they don’t want it.

—Pope Francis, May 11, 2015