For her big Scouting project, a young friend of mine has been planning a peace pole for the parish prayer garden and a tree of peace cranes for the church’s narthex.
Here she is (right) at work with her parents (left and center) this morning:
The tree awaiting its settlers in front of the parish reconciliation chapel:
A flock of cranes:
This one can hardly wait:
What a great initiative. I am so glad that a young woman is doing this.
It would be good to include the story of Sadako Sasaki as well as some of the churches teaching on nuclear weapons as part of the church’s publicity. It may end up being controversial but here’s a quote from Paul VI’s 1976 World Peace Day message:
“If the consciousness of universal brotherhood truly penetrates into the hearts of [humans], will they still need to arm themselves to the point of becoming blind and fanatic killers of their brethren who in themselves are innocent, and of perpetrating, as a contribution to peace, butchery of untold magnitude, as at Hiroshima on August 6, 1945? In fact has not our own time had an example of what can be done by a weak man, Gandhi — armed only with the principle of nonviolence — to vindicate for a nation of hundreds of millions of human beings the freedom and dignity of a new people?”