Pope Leo XIV has, during the first hours and days of his pontificate, spoken much about peace. Whether or not his pontificate will see some time of peace in the Church and the world is a matter of history that is out of sight to us now because it is in the future. We can certainly pray for and desire such a blessing, even if the temporal and ecclesiastical status quo does not look very placid at present. Further, we must pray very much for Pope Leo, in keeping with what the Fatima messages tell us about the necessity of praying for the Holy Father.
Regardless of what our new Supreme Pontiff does or fails to do to advance the cause of genuine peace, we cannot expect him to do what is incumbent upon us — in keeping with the duties of our own state in life — to establish peace in our souls, in our families, and in our social circles. Outsourcing our own duties to the sacred hierarchy is not showing them respect; it is, rather, cowardice and dereliction on our part, and is asking too much of them.
“Peace,” said Saint Augustine, “is the tranquility of order.” Its opposite is violence, which is a disturbance of the peace, and which can manifest itself in ways as varied as extreme and widespread armed conflict, as in a “World War,” or the small-scale but very real disorder of personal, private venial sin. With the obvious exceptions of violence used to restore order — such as a just war or a lawful authority forcefully restraining or punishing a wrongdoer — all violence is an assault on the tranquility of order.
Antecedent to Creation, in God’s blessed eternity, there was only peace because there was only order and no disorder. The twin tragedies of the fall of the angels and the fall of man brought about the disorder of sin — doing violence against the Eternal Law of God and, therefore, against the divinely established order of things.
The Peace of Paschaltide
We are currently in Paschaltide — albeit toward the end of that blessed season — and have only recently heard these words of Jesus Christ, the Prince of Peace, in the Church’s liturgy, words He uttered to the astonished Apostles immediately after using His gift of subtlety to enter the sealed room:
Jesus came and stood in the midst, and said to them: Peace be to you. And when he had said this, he shewed them his hands and his side. (John 20:19-20; cf., Luke 24:36)
One week later, when Saint Thomas, who was absent before, is now present, we read this:
And after eight days again his disciples were within, and Thomas with them. Jesus cometh, the doors being shut, and stood in the midst, and said: Peace be to you. Then he saith to Thomas: Put in thy finger hither, and see my hands; and bring hither thy hand, and put it into my side; and be not faithless, but believing. (John 20:26-27)
It seems that, in both instances Our Lord (and the Evangelist) are connecting the imparting on peace to the Apostles peace with His sacred Stigmata — the wounds of His hands and side (those of the feet are not mentioned). It is as if the Prince of Peace had said, “Have that peace which I have just merited for you by means of My Passion, the signs of which I still bear in My glorified Body.”
This reading comports with what we know from elsewhere in Scripture, e.g., from Ephesians 2:14: “For he is our peace, who hath made both one, and breaking down the middle wall of partition, the enmities in his flesh,” and Colossians 1:20: “And through him to reconcile all things unto himself, making peace through the blood of his cross, both as to the things that are on earth, and the things that are in heaven.”
Peace Offerings in the Old Testament
Christ’s Sacrifice on the Cross, which is re-presented in an unbloody manner in the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass, is the fulfillment of all various sacrifices of the Old Testament. Now, among the types of sacrifices offered in the Old Testament was the “peace offering”(zebach sh’lamim), which could be offered for a variety of motives. Here, I cite a Jewish authority, Judaism 101, to define the term for us:
A peace offering is an offering expressing thanks or gratitude to G-d for His bounties and mercies. The Hebrew term for this type of offering is zebach sh’lamim (or sometimes just sh’lamim), which is related to the word shalom, meaning “peace” or “whole.” A representative portion of the offering is burnt on the altar, a portion is given to the kohanim [priests], and the rest is eaten by the offerer and his family; thus, everyone gets a part of this offering. This category of offerings includes thanksgiving-offerings (in Hebrew, Todah, which was obligatory for survivors of life-threatening crises), free will-offerings, and offerings made after fulfillment of a vow. Note that this class of offerings has nothing to do with sin; in fact, the Talmud states that in the age of the messiah (when there is no more sin), this will be the only class of offering that is brought to the Temple.
Please note that the peace offering was offered for different reasons — including free-will offerings — but that one form of the peace offering was the thanksgiving-offering (todah), which was obligatory for those who has survived some threat upon their life. Note also that, unlike the whole burnt offering (holocaust), in which nothing was saved to be eaten but all was burned; and unlike the sin offering, some of which was reserved for the priest only to eat; in the sh’lamim, the priest and also the offerer (with his family) partook of the sacred banquet.
Peace in the New-Testament Liturgy
Here, we see one of the many Old Testament preparations for the Mass, for Christ is our peace offering; and, at this sacrifice, which is also a banquet, priest and people partake of the victim. Although the Mass is superior to all the various Old Testament sacrifices and fulfills them all in some way or another, we can see the Holy Sacrifice of the New Covenant as a Christian todah, that kind of peace offering that was made specifically in thanksgiving. Remember that the Greek word eucharistia, whence comes Eucharist, means thanksgiving.
In the Ordinary of the traditional Roman Rite of Mass, there are numerous references to “peace” (pax), the vast majority of which take place between the Consecration and Communion. The most notable of these, to this writer, takes place right after the “fraction,” or breaking of the Host, when the priest takes a small portion of the consecrated Host between his thumb and index finger of his right hand, holds it over the chalice (over which he has done the fraction), and says, “Pax + Dómini sit + semper vobís + cum” (May the peace + of the Lord be + always + with you). The crosses in the text indicate three cruciform blessings with the Particle. Then the Particle is dropped into the chalice, mystically representing the Resurrection, just as the separate consecration of Body and Blood mystically represent Christ’s death. After another short prayer, the celebrant then recites the Agnus Dei, with its final petition, dona nobis pacem (grant us peace).
About the Pax + Dómini following the fraction, Father Nicholas Gihr has this to say in his book, The Sacrifice of the Mass:
The fact that this salutation of peace is made precisely between the symbolical fraction and mingling, signifies that Christ by His redeeming death and glorious resurrection has become the author and source of true peace; likewise does the sign of the Cross over the chalice, containing the Precious Blood, allude to the fact that the peace of God was purchased and negotiated for us by the holy Cross and the blood shed thereon: ‘for through the blood of the Cross hath Christ made peace, both as to the things on earth and the things that are in heaven’ (Col. 1:20).
Jesus is our peace offering. In Himself, He made peace between God and men. Ironically, He did so by means of the violence of His Passion and Resurrection. Order is now restored in principle.
The Reconquest of Peace
Given what we have said so far, we can draw a few conclusions. After the fall, peace is now the result of a triumph, a victory, a conquest; and, since it is a restoration of order where chaos entered in, it is a Reconquest, one that establishes a new order of things in Christ’s Mystical Body.
The ultimate and complete restoration of peace is eschatological — when all is consummated at the end of time and the full measure of the elect will all “rest in peace.”
But each day is an opportunity and a challenge for us to restore peace within ourselves and, inasmuch as we are social creatures, to radiate peace to those around us in our families, among our friends, and in our communities.
Jesus Christ is and remains ever the Prince of Peace. He desires to restore order in us, to set straight our disorders, and He sends us from the Father the Holy Ghost so that we may have order in our souls and the tranquility that follows upon that order. This is His gift that He bequeaths to us.
This divine project of making peace will not be completed till the end of time. But, for each of us, inasmuch as we must cooperate with it, it is the work of our entire lifetime to achieve this peace, or, rather, to let the Prince of Peace gently conquer us so that we might be called “children of God” because we are “peacemakers” (cf. Matt. 5:9).
In this vale of tears, the Mystical Body of Christ is the Church Militant, that is, a fighting Church. But what are we fighting for?
We are fighting for that Reconquest of Jesus Christ by which He will restore all things. We are fighting — as ironically as Jesus did in His Passion — to have peace.
We can only begin to have that peace when we honestly acknowledge our disorders and our need to be set right. As long as we are content with our disorders, or as long as we think that we are the source of our peace of soul, we will not be at peace. Hence the necessity not only of meekness, but also of humility so that the Prince of Peace may work in our souls. This is the same as saying that we cannot receive the divine mercy — which is a loving condescension to our misery — unless we first acknowledge that misery. But, once having done that, may we not hope that “the peace of God, which surpasseth all understanding” (Philip 4:7), will keep our “hearts and minds in Christ Jesus”?
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“Peace is the tranquility of order and the genuine manifestation of religious virtue. The first duty for every one of the faithful (especially for every religious) is to restore peace in his own little disordered world, but since the issue of peace is one and universal, every such victory or realization touches the universal war. Every little campaign is part of the total strategy.” — Brother Francis, M.I.C.M., The Challenge of Faith, p. 28.
