Rome Newsroom, Jun 25, 2020 / 04:20 am
Korean Catholics marked the 70th anniversary of the start of the Korean War -- a war which never technically ended -- Thursday with Masses offered for reconciliation on the divided Korean peninsula.
"Prayer is the most powerful weapon of the Church struggling for peace," Cardinal Andrew Yeom Soo-jung, archbishop of Seoul, said June 25.
"By creating a culture of forgiveness, justice will become more human, and peace will be more permanent," the cardinal said in Seoul's Myeongdong Cathedral.
Nearly three million Korean people died in the Korean War, in which the peninsula lost 10% its overall population from 1950 to 1953. During the conflict, the United States suffered 33,686 deaths in battle, as well as 2,830 non-battle deaths. The Korean peninsula is technically still at war, 66 years after the armistice signed in July of 1953.