Only a real, honest policy of reconciliation can bring about long-lasting peace and create the foundation for a thriving coexistence between former enemies.

Power politics is a necessary complement to this peace policy, to the extent that it helps protect human rights and human dignity and checks the powers of evil.

Power politics as such is, however, insufficient: its effect is too limited, it leads in the wrong direction. It must subordinate itself to the primacy of the “thinking heart” and “loving intellect.” Power politics is only justified in the service of peace. That is its archangel.

We must give a strong voice to the Christian message of peace in order to provide it with significance in all countries, cultures and religions. Only then will we eliminate the deep-seated roots of terrorism, war and displacement and bring about a world with less hatred and less violence.

A Christian peace policy means:

We must see our enemy as a person and as our neighbor possessing individual dignity. We must approach him with an open heart and express convincingly our will to reconciliation and a new beginning.

An active policy of reconciliation shatters the encrusted shell of ideology from darker years; through intensive work it melts away traditional prejudices and stimulates the will on all sides to end the tragedy of animosities.

A lifestyle based on coexistence is insufficient. The passivity of mutual tolerance and distance must be replaced by mutual openness, interest and an active cooperation.

Let us liberate the human soul from the dark trenches of hostile thought, release and heal it.

Let us break through the walls of hostile thought and prejudice. This will not succeed if we simply banish from memory that which has occurred. Only he, who in full recognition of every sin, forgives and pardons, departs from the cycle of hatred, enmity and war. Justice and peace arise from truthfulness.

Let us help a former enemy discover in himself the strengths of peace, so that he becomes conscious of the benevolence of this value and develops the ability to change from an enemy to a friend. And let us always be aware that we need this help too.

We should not merely tolerate others; rather, we should accept them with all their differences. This does not mean self-abandonment, but respect for the special features, characteristics and traditions of a world with 6.5 billion people, so richly diverse culturally and ideally.

Nobody is an enemy only because he is different.

Nobody should become an enemy only because his proximity agitates us.

The elite in all countries of the earth must proclaim tolerance with respect to the values of others in their societies.

We need a new global system of responsibility for freedom and peace, humanity and respect, which radiates beyond boundaries and cultures.

As Christians, Muslims, Jews, Buddhists or Hindus, we must leave feelings of distance, irreconcilability and aversion behind us, thereby giving more generosity and kindness to our world.

We can learn this from the lessons of Augustine, the wisdom of Thomas Aquinas and Erasmus of Rotterdam the tolerantia pacifica and from Europe’s never easy tolerance history.

Patriotism, as well as devout Islam, are products of love and not hate. Pure nationalism and totalitarianism in politics and religion are, however, inhuman and always lead to hatred, aggression and ultimately to war—both internally and externally.

Ethnic cleansing and displacement are sins against humanity, regardless of how they are justified.

People have a right to their home. Displacement uproots them.

Terrorism is also a fruit of totalitarian exaggeration and blind ideology.

The shining concept of Christian love must now actively oppose the shadow of hate worldwide and on all levels, checking and banishing it.

We must now put a firebreak of love and reconciliation between the vast majority of the peaceable people and the numerically insignificant ideological arsonists and their terrorist tools.

Their containment through means of power and international law is morally justifiable and necessary, because only in this way can the cycle of further hatred and the poisoning of life be prevented.

Is it not the case that our traditional global foreign and peace policies are insufficient and will inevitably fail as they lack the spirit of reconciliation?

Why have the positive perceptions of the reconciliation of former ancestral enemies, such as Germany with France and Poland, not yet taken hold in Palestine, Sudan, Congo, Iraq or between Pakistan and India?

In order to achieve more than has been possible up to now, we need to raise our children with the Christian policy of peace. Training in hatred should be replaced in all countries of the world by education in reconciliation. The use of children and adolescents as soldiers or suicide bombers shows how deeply the ideologies which are behind them have fallen and must be condemned sharply.

The media bears a special responsibility for reconciliation and peace. They must not be allowed to shirk this duty by taking flight into superficial entertainment or through the excuse of achieving the highest possible audience ratings. They must no longer be allowed to function merely as a megaphone for the cycle of hatred and violence, but must also give room to the tender sprouts of reconciliation and represent the world as it really is: full of hope.

Moral Relativism

Oranament of a dove with olive branch near the entrance of St. Peter's cathedrial in the Vatican in Rome as the universial symbol of peace on earth.

The more materialistic a society becomes, the more soulless its thoughts and actions are. At the center of prosperity lies a spiritual vacuum.

Humans come up against the boundaries of thought, analysis and evaluation. They meet numerous inexplicable things, a dimension of the world that should humble them.

We know that our word has an end; however, we can not find it.

We know that there is love, although we can not measure it.

There are things which cannot be rationally and intellectually comprehended, in particular absolute values, which can be denied by misanthropic thinking and can be carried out ad absurdum, as the experience of Nazism and Communism has shown.

The worst part about the loss of belief is not that human beings no longer believe anything anymore, but that they are ready to believe everything and to even fill their spiritual vacuum with cruelty.

Human beings have a deep inner desire for absolute values and the purpose of life.

Without values, without the emotions and inspiration brought about by them, we resign the world to negative powers.

Only an elite, that is conscious of its spiritual responsibility can remove this deficit of purpose and counter the dangers of moral relativism.