Vatican City, Nov 11, 2018 / 05:22 am
The bells of St. Peter's Basilica rang out in unison with thousands of other church bells around the world Sunday as Pope Francis commemorated the 100 year anniversary of the end of World War I.
"While we pray for all the victims of that terrible tragedy, let us say forcefully: invest in peace, not on war!" Pope Francis said at the end of his Angelus address Nov. 11.
The memory of World War I should be a warning to "reject a 'culture of war' and seek every legitimate means to put an end to the conflicts that still bleed several regions of the world," he said and added, "It seems that we do not learn."
Francis quoted Pope Benedict XV, an advocate for peace during WWI, who denounced the war as "useless slaughter" in his 1917 peace plan. As pope throughout the entirety of the first world war, Benedict wrote five encyclicals and three apostolic exhortations concerning peace.