Pacem In Terris Quotes

“The horrors of wars have shadowed our path in life. The soil of our land is saturated and soaked with the blood of the victims of genocides.”
― Widad Akreyi

“The more division the Iraqi authorities cultivated, the more we worked for inclusion. The more aggression they showed us, the more time we devoted to peace and reconciliation. The more civilians they tortured and slaughtered, the more my instinct guided me to reach out to all segments of society. The more they tried to erase the evidence, the more risks we took to document the atrocities and the harms inflected on humans and the environment.
Because one day, we thought, one day the world will wake up and realize the repercussions of overlooking our suffering, and on that day, the souls of victims will finally find peace.”
― Widad Akreyi

“Our lives and the lives of future generations do not only depend on the conflicts that take place, but also on the solutions we offer in response to them.”
― Widad Akreyi

“But what is Pacem in Terris’s most important contribution in the context of the genesis of Gaudium et Spesis its repeated recourse to‘the signs of the times’ as measures and tools with which to comprehend the reality of a constantly changing world. The innovation of this approach lies in its implied recommendation to study in all seriousness contemporary reality and society in order to determine in which way the values of the Gospel have materialized in today’s world. Rather than relying on pre-established and traditional doctrine to judge present-day reality, Catholic believers are enjoined to place trust in investigatory methods that could be described as sociological, historical, and anthropological, before making value judgements on the phenomena of today’s world”
― Gerd-Rainer Horn, The Spirit of Vatican II: Western European Progressive Catholicism in the Long Sixties