Pope Francis Begs the World* to Abolish War

(*Vladimir Putin)

Photo by Philbo on Unsplash.

As much as it offends our modern sensibilities to think so, the world seems to be marching closer and closer to war.

There have been wars and rumors of wars since time out of mind, but over the last two years in particular, war has been again rearing its ugly head.

We forget in the modern age that the generations previous to this one had to endure the threat of global nuclear war. A decades long Cold War between the U.S. and the U.S.S.R. could have boiled over at any moment during its height to become a thermonuclear conflict with enough mutually assured destruction to knock every man, woman and child on earth back into the Stone Age.

Or even further.

Americans who remember those days remember a time of fear and uncertainty, marked by periods of heightened tensions and periodic drills designed to prepare a civilian populace to take immediate shelter in the event of a nuclear attack.

When capitalism soundly trounced communism sometime in the 1980’s without a single nuclear warhead being fired, the world breathed a temporary sigh of relief. The Berlin Wall fell and revealed that the soviet communist system had died a quiet and relatively peaceful death long before, much to everyone’s surprise.