SCHOLAS OCCURRENTES IN THE VATICAN: EDUCATING FOR PEACE

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.

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.

A TOAST TO A BETTER WORLD

When I was young, I fancied myself a hippie. I also considered myself an artist. I was a musician and a painter. What I bought into wasn’t the psychedelic drug culture that grew up around the hippie movement, but the “flower power” philosophy on which that movement was based, and which created a veritable cultural revolution that caught on around the world. It was a philosophy that promoted everything that should be the accepted norm in the world—peace, harmony, empathy, cooperation. Above all, love. The hippies were seen by the establishment as “crazy kids”. But the learning moment that the hippie movement offered to the world came through its opening of minds of all ages not only to the possibility, but also to the appropriateness of its philosophy of love and kindness. In that context, it wasn’t the hippies who were “crazy”, but the establishment, the sick societies that sold war, division, racism, repression and violence as the nor...

SOME THINGS I’VE LEARNED ABOUT WAR AND PEACE

About a decade ago, I asked myself seriously why it was that if every major religion preached peace, and if almost every major nation professed adherence to one major religious faith or another, the world has lived in an almost constant state of war since the dawn of organized society. Over the course of my search for answers to this conundrum, I have come to certain conclusions about war and peace that, with year’s end upon us, I’d like to share with you. 1. War is easier to promote than peace. Governments, and indeed the mainstream religions, have a long and horrible history of supporting war over peace. Still today, the world is cursed with not only political wars but also with “holy wars”, which in both cases respond to ulterior motives based on power and greed rather than on their declared “patriotic” or “religious” causes. War is basically the path of least resistance. It is much easier to stir up destructive feelings of hatred for “the other”, and to sound the clarion...

EDUCATING FOR TOLERANCE

Tolerance...Except in select circles, it’s a word you don’t often hear any more in this age of growing political incorrectness. But it remains the single-most important key to community by community peace. As such, it is also the prime key to world peace. That said, although the need to imbue people with tolerance may not be an innate necessity, the societies, often indeed the families, into which we are born, tend to start undermining, from the time we are very small, the natural tolerance with which we come into the world. An infant doesn’t care what color the skin is of the person who is caring for him or her. Infants couldn’t care less what religion their care-giver professes, what sports team they are a fan of, how much money they have, what social class they belong to, where they went to school, whether they are literate or illiterate, whether they are gay or straight, or whom they voted for in the last election. The only thing small children care about is the care and...

Versión en español:

Peace, Justice and the Ultimate Crime

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