Please pray for us!
We ask for your prayerful support before and during the unique Nonviolence and Just Peace conference, in Rome, April 11-13. The following is a prayer written especially for the conference by Austrian nonviolence activist and theologian Hildegard Goss-Mayr.
Download and share a PDF version of the prayer.
Photo: Judy Coode, conference coordinator (left) and Marie Dennis, co-president of Pax Christi International (right), unfurl the banner for the Nonviolence and Just Peace conference.
A call for prayer and solidarity
Holy Spirit, our source of light and strength, we thank you for having inspired the call to peace-makers from all over the world to meet in the dramatic situation of humanity to reconsider our responsibility, to deepen and promote the liberating and healing nonviolence of Jesus.
Merciful God, our Father and Mother, you sent your Son Jesus, our Brother, to reveal through his life and teaching your divine, self-giving Love and so incarnate in our world the power of nonviolence, able to overcome ALL forms of violence and to reconcile humanity in justice and peace.
We confess that for centuries our Church, people of God, has betrayed this central message of the Gospel many times and participated in wars, persecution, oppression, exploitation and discrimination.
Holy Spirit, as we meet as peacemakers, we count on your light and your strength to help revive in the Theology of Peace the nonviolent message of Jesus in which there is no place for violence and to offer to all Christians the arms of peacemaking, pardon and reconciliation.
Holy Spirit, we trust in your light and strength that this Conference may mark a new step for our Church, on its way to becoming a Church of Peace, in the spirit of our Brother Jesus and so respond to the cry of humanity for life in dignity and peace.
- Hildegard Goss-Mayr,
written for the Nonviolence and Just Peace Conference
in Rome, Italy, April 11-13, 2016
