Peace! Peace! Peace! by Archbishop Averky

“Peace!.. peace!.. peace!.. is heard now from every side: “mutual disarmament!..peaceful coexistence!.. we shall struggle for peace!.. everyone in defense of peace!..” How wonderful it would be, what a bright and joyful future it would promise for mankind if only these appeals had in mind that peace of which the angels sang on the night of Christ’s Birth: “glory to God in the highest, and on earth peace, good will to men!” (Luke 2:14); if only it were that peace which the Savior Christ promised to His disciples at the Last Supper when He said, “My peace I leave with you, My peace I give unto you” (John 14:27); if only it were that “peace of God which passeth all understanding” (Phil. 4:7) which, at the Lord’s command, the Apostles transmitted to the first Christians, which they were taught to seek (I Peter 3:11), and which they were encouraged to have with God and with all people (Rom. 5:1; 12:18). How gratifying it would be to hear them if these appeals came from people of whose sincerity we could not have the slightest doubt, whose words we could trust completely-from people who were really convinced that the highest good in life is precisely that peace-peace with God, peace with one’s own conscience, and peace with one’s neighbors in the name of God.
But alas! It is not of such peace that people are talking now. All these frequently unnatural and pompous speeches and at times hysterical cries for peace for the whole world come at the present time for the most part from people who are either far from true Christianity or are directly opposed to the Church-from people who do not live at peace with God and with their own consciences but are filled with spite in their relations with their neighbors.
Can we believe in the sincerity of speeches about peace when they are pronounced by people who in principle deny faith in God and love for their neighbors and do not recognize the voice of conscience?
Can we believe that people are really working toward peace when with open and bold blasphemy they have declared war on God Himself and His Holy Church?
When quite recently they did not hide the fact that their aim was to “stir up a worldwide conflagration”? When they openly preach “class hatred” as the basis of their ideology and are not in the least ashamed to pour out whole oceans of blood and to exterminate millions of people just for the suspicion that they disagree with their ideology?
Can we likewise believe in the sincere love for peace of those who in their words unctuously and cloyingly preach “Christian love” and “total forgiveness,” while in their actions they sow disturbances and discord and, by spreading lies and slander, create hostility and divisions, stirring people up against their neighbors? Can one, in general, believe that any sort of secure and reliable peace can be established on earth with the crude flouting of God’s Truth, with the lies and hypocrisy which are so clearly characteristic of the life of modern mankind?
Where the Truth of God is lacking there cannot be genuine peace.”