Acta Apostolicae Sedis - Commentarium Officiale444

nationally and internationally. While the global political landscape has chan-

ged significantly in the intervening half-century, the vision offered by Pope

John still has much to teach us as we struggle to face the new challenges for

peace and justice in the post-Cold-War era, amid the continuing proliferation

of armaments.

"The world will never be the dwelling-place of peace, till peace has found

a home in the heart of each and every human person, till all preserve within

themselves the order ordained by God to be preserved".1 At the heart of the

Church's social doctrine is the anthropology which recognizes in the human

creature the image of the Creator, endowed with intelligence and freedom,

capable of knowing and loving. Peace and justice are fruits of the right order

that is inscribed within creation itself, written on human hearts 2 and there-

fore accessible to all people of good will, all "pilgrims of truth and of peace".

Pope John's Encyclical was and is a powerful summons to engage in that

creative dialogue between the Church and the world, between believers and

non-believers, which the Second Vatican Council set out to promote. It offers

a thoroughly Christian vision of man's place in the cosmos, confident that in

so doing it is holding out a message of hope to a world that is hungry for it, a

message that can resonate with people of all beliefs and none, because its

truth is accessible to all.

In that same spirit, after the terrorist attacks that shook the world in

September 2001, Blessed John Paul II insisted that there can be "no peace

without justice, no justice without forgiveness".3 The notion of forgiveness

needs to find its way into international discourse on conflict resolution, so as

to transform the sterile language of mutual recrimination which leads

nowhere. If the human creature is made in the image of God, a God of justice

who is "rich in mercy",4 then these qualities need to be reflected in the

conduct of human affairs. It is the combination of justice and forgiveness,

of justice and grace, which lies at the heart of the divine response to human

wrong-doing,5 at the heart, in other words, of the "divinely established

order".6 Forgiveness is not a denial of wrong-doing, but a participation in

the healing and transforming love of God which reconciles and restores.

1 Pacem in Terris, 165. 2 Cfr Rom 2:15. 3 Message for the 2002 World Day of Peace. 4 Eph 2:4. 5 Cfr Spe Salvi, 44. 6 Pacem in Terris, 1.