Our responsibility to be peacemakers...

Struggling to find real peace in your life at this moment? Then let Our Lady and these inspired words of Fr Slavko help you today. Accept the wonderful invitation of Our Blessed Mother to the way of peace and reconciliation.

• Our Lady is giving us messages. She is inviting us to prayer, peace, reconciliation, faith and fasting… Why does this happen? It happens for one reason only. We are all invited to peace and reconciliation. And we are all in great need of this very peace – individuals, families, the Church and the whole world. According to all these messages – one could say – Our Lady is making us responsible for peace. And I do believe Our Lady knows what she is doing, what she is saying – namely, that we must allow ourselves to be made responsible.

Please do not wash your hands of it by saying, “I am not a diplomat, I am not a politician, peace does not depend on me.” Peace depends on us all.

This, it seems to me, is the most important thing – to look with a new heart, with a new eye at one’s responsibility in the world and all that is going on around us, How can we give our personal response to all this which we are invited to?

Our Lady said, “Pray and fast.” This is perhaps the hardest way to obtain peace, but is it not perhaps the only one?

Conversion is asked of all of us – a change in one’s own everyday life. And this is the most difficult thing of all. Sometimes it is easier to give money to the poor than to forgive someone for a word or to forget an insult. But it is only on these grounds that one can build up peace – by being reconciled and by forgiving.

And every man who is reconciled, every family who lives in peace, is always a new sign that peace is possible and, with each reconciled person, the entire world is brought closer to peace.

• Fr Slavko Barbaric ofm