Vatican City
This week, I’ve had the enormous pleasure of being
invited to take part in the Fourth Scholas
Occurrentes World Congress at the Vatican, a project that bears the seal of
Pope Francis. Within the context of this invitation, I also had the honor of
being asked to present my book, El crimen
de la guerra (soon to be released in English as War: A Crime Against Humanity), the message of which is in perfect
harmony with that of the Scholas mission: the consolidation of peace through
education and through acceptance of human diversity.
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| I had the honor of presenting my book in this Vatican hall. Pope Francis will speak here tomorrow. |
Here in Rome, we’re anxiously awaiting the closing presentation headed
by His Holiness, Pope Francis.
Scholas Ocurrentes is a worldwide educational network inspired by
the Pope with the aim of promoting the linking of schools from all over the
world in a huge network. The idea is for a wide variety of learning centers to share
their projects and, in doing so, to mutually enrich one another. Although the
guiding idea is to create a rich dialogue among schools of all kinds, the
project places special focus on providing the kind of help such networks can
generate to schools with low resource levels, so as to eventually create education
without exclusion.
Despite the support provided by the Vatican and by the Pontiff himself,
this network is not oriented toward only connecting schools found in Christian
majority nations. On the contrary, according to José María del Corral,
Worldwide Director of Scholas Occurrentes,
“The best result to date was for the experiments we did when the Pope was
Archbishop of Buenos Aires and we brought together kids from schools with
different religions, Jewish schools, and Catholic schools, and Islamic
schools...and we tried an experiment that we called ‘neighbors’ schools’. And
there they learned what real co-existence was, what different points of view
were, different beliefs and projects and they built solutions based on the
difficulties they had, like alcohol, drugs, insecurity, violence.”
And this is where the philosophy of my book, War: A Crime Against Humanity, coincides completely with this
congress in which I have had the honor of participating. In my essay turned
book, I propose that the world can no longer afford to back any policy that
includes war. If we can’t find a way to live in peace and devote ourselves to
solving in a completely universal way the social and environmental problems
that are afflicting us as a planetary family, then we will have to confront the
specter of our own extinction as a species. And the only way to achieve the
worldwide peace, of which we are so gravely in need, is through education.
The conference in which I am taking part this week addresses the core
issue of educating for peace through sports, art and technology, the three
pillars of Scholas, which has already
morphed into a worldwide network of 400,000 schools. This project also
coincides with another one (currently in the planning stages) in which I am
working with former Chief Prosecutor for the International Criminal Court, Dr. Luis
Moreno Ocampo, through which we eventually hope to achieve the creation of a
worldwide network of teachers specializing in peace and justice studies. Through
this worldwide network, these educators will share materials and methodologies
for teaching peaceful and empathic behavior, so as to create, in the short,
medium and long terms, a more peaceful world, and one in which war will be
considered a crime against humanity, punishable by law and condemned the world
over.
In the coming days, I will continue to write about this magnificent
event and, next up, I will have news of Pope Francis’s presentation.
In the meantime, peace be with you.
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