During a Holy Hour for Peace and Reconciliation, Bishop Ruggieri says peace must start with each of us.
Saying that Jesus sends us into the world not as prisoners of fear or division but as peacemakers, Bishop James Ruggieri presided over a Holy Hour of Peace and Reconciliation on April 24 in the chapel of the Cathedral of the Immaculate Conception in Portland.
“We gather tonight for this Holy Hour for Peace and Reconciliation in the presence of our Eucharistic Lord. We do so because our world is wounded. We think tonight of Iran, of Ukraine, and of South Sudan, where conflicts continue to bring suffering, fear, and instability to so many. We pray for peace among nations, for peace where there is violence, and for peace where human beings no longer know how to live with one another,” the bishop said.
Bishop Ruggieri said, however, that the call for peace must not just be at the level of nations and far away conflicts. He said we are all called to be peacemakers and that, in the biblical sense, peace means wholeness, right relationship, and life brought into order under God.
“When Jesus blesses the peacemakers, he blesses those who allow God’s reconciling work to take hold in their own lives and then extend outward to others,” the bishop said. “That is why tonight, we must move from the large picture of the world to the more immediate picture: the human heart. If peace is to grow in the world, peace must also grow in us.”
The bishop pointed to the example of St. Peter, whose relationship with Jesus was wounded after he denied Christ three times during his Passion. The bishop said that St. Peter had to face not only what he had done to Jesus but also the painful truth that he was not the man he thought he was.
“Peter’s denial had the power to wound him interiorly. It produced not only guilt over what he had done but most likely shame, the painful experience that one's failure now seems to define the self. Jesus addresses exactly that wound. He neither minimizes Peter’s failure nor allows Peter to remain imprisoned by it. He restores Peter in relationship. St. Peter is healed in relationship. That is the model," Bishop Ruggieri said.
Through healing, the bishop said St. Peter becomes a person who is led by love rather than driven by the need to prove himself.
“He becomes something deeper: a man who loves Jesus, a man who has failed and been forgiven, a man whose love has been purified. That love now becomes the basis of his service,” the bishop said.
Bishop Ruggieri said the same must be true of us. He said the same Jesus that healed St. Peter can heal us and can heal his Church, and that is where peace begins.
“Peace begins when the human person no longer hides from the truth. Peace begins when rupture is brought into the light of Christ. Peace begins when shame no longer has the final word. Peace begins when the Lord restores us to relationship and, from that restoration, gives us a future,” the bishop said.
The bishop held the Holy Hour in response to Pope Leo XIV’s recent appeals for peace.
