When a war does (not) end

It is often said that the only thing that is certain when a war begins, is that sooner or later it will end. It is a bitter consolation and yet it does not correspond with reality. Indeed, while in a distant past conflicts “only” involved armies in areas that were far away from residential areas, for too long now, and with ever-increasing frequency, as reported in recent years, it is civilians who often pay the price, and among them, children in particular. Thus once war begins, it never really ends. It lasts at least as long as an entire generation, the generation that suffered through it. This is why it takes away hope: because, like a black hole, it swallows up the future long after the last mortar has been fired.

This is well known to those who return home from the front after hostilities have ceased, or even worse, those who return after having been held as prisoners of war. They are people who have been tried physically and, to an even greater extent, crushed in their spirit, because some scars become thinner on the skin with time, whereas the scars on the soul struggle to heal. After the Vietnam War, a medical condition was identified to explain what US veterans had experienced, or better, survived: Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder ( ptsd ). How many people in today’s “third world war being fought piecemeal” find themselves precisely in that same situation, if not worse? And how many people — wives, children, parents — will have their lives shaken forever because their husbands, fathers or sons who lived through the horrors of war, will never be the way they used to be once they return home to them?

Moreover, there are those who will never return home. Speaking at the War Cemetery in Rome on 2 November, Pope Francis said: “I would like to consider something that happened to me at the entrance. I was looking at the age of the fallen. The majority were between 20 and 30 years old. Lives cut short, lives without a future. And I thought of the parents, of the mothers who received that letter: ‘Madam, I have the honour of informing you that your son is a hero’. ‘Yes, a hero, but they have taken him away from me’”.

This is war. Once it starts, it never really ends. The Pope knows this. He feels the full weight of its burden and this is why he never stops repeating that we should not give in to its logic, to the spirit of Cain. He does so with his tireless appeals, with prayer and fasting, the powerful weapons of Christ’s disciples. And he does so with courage, meeting victims of war, of all wars — meetings in which he touches the wounds of the world, and along with his words, he communicates with his gaze, by listening and in silence — the privileged “instruments” of tenderness and consolation. They are the instruments of those who dream of a “Field Hospital Church”.

By Alessandro Gisotti