War comes as THE great failure of man and festers out of lust for power, injustice or misery.
General Dwight Eisenhower, Supreme Commander of the Allied Forces that liberated Europe in 1944-45, said: "As never before, the essence of war is fire, famine and pestilence. They contribute to its outbreak, they are among its weapons, they become its consequences."
General William Sherman, famed General of the Northern Arm in the American Civil War, said: "War is hell." He would have known, for he was the perpetrator of the Scorched Earth Policy as he fired a corridor of destruction to break the spirit of the South.
The perceptive French thinker, Blaise Pascal: "Can anything be more ridiculous than that a man has a right to kill me, because he dwells on the other side of the water, and because his prince has a quarrel with mine, although I have none with him?
" All soul is soul war: because a man has war within himself, he is at war with others.
Drawing up the Charter of Unesco in 1945, the founders wisely said: "Since wars begin in the minds of men, it is in the minds of men that the defence of peace must be constructed."
Lord Bertrand Russell: "Patriots ... always talk about dying for their country, and never killing for their country."
United States president John Kennedy, at the height of the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962 that almost plunged the world into a nuclear holocaust: "Man must put an end to war, or war will put an end to mankind."
David Lloyd George, prime minister of England during the Great War: "You're not going to get peace with millions of armed men. The Chariot of Peace cannot advance over a road littered with cannon."
Peace is our happy, natural state.
War our corruption, our disgrace.
I can sense the Diggers among you stirring: "Hold on Padre! Surely a word to affirm what we went through?"
Cardinal Spellman, chaplain-in-chief to the American Armed Forces in World War 2, said as America entered the war after Pearl Harbour: "There is nothing honourable about war as such. But it is an honourable and heroic thing to fight for those ideals and principles we account worthy of preservation."
An Archbishop Ireland of Baltimore wrote in 1884: "The Catholic Church commands and consecrates patriotism. The true Catholic needs to be a true patriot. In the eyes of the Church, loyalty to country is loyalty to God; patriotism is a heavenly virtue, a high and holy form of obedience. The patriot dying for his country wears the halo of the martyr."
Menachun Begum, on signing the Egyptian-Israeli Treaty in 1979: "If you love freedom, you must hate slavery. If you love your people, you cannot but hate the people who compass their destruction. If you love your country, you cannot but hate those who seek to conquer it."
Let's leave out the word "hate" and recall the dying words of nurse Edith Cavell, 1915, executed by the Germans for helping 200 soldiers to escape to freedom: "I realise that patriotism is not enough. I must have no hatred or bitterness towards anyone."
To those of you who, despite these assurances of going to war in justice and in truth, still see no cause for war, may I ask this question: What would be our situation today if the Kaiser had won in 1918?
If the Axis Powers of Hitler, Mussolini and Tojo had conquered in 1945?
If the Western democracies had capitulated to communism in the Cold War?
We cherish today our Christian way of life because in the wars of last century, the bloodiest of all centuries, 18,000 of our fellow Kiwis gave their lives for what we live by today, in principles, values and freedom.
As we honour Anzac Day 2012, may we respect the past by creating a better future. Let's live and bequeath to our children the peace that Jesus gives to us: "Peace I give to you. My own peace I give to you, a peace the world cannot give, this is My peace to you."
And our prayer for this and every Anzac Day?
From Alfred Lord Tennyson's poem, his greatest work, In Memoriam:
Ring out old shapes of foul disease:
Ring out the narrowing lust of gold.
Ring out the thousand wars of old.
Ring in the thousand years of peace.
Ring in the valiant man and free,
The larger heart, the kindlier hand:
Ring out the darkness of the land,
Ring in the Christ that is to be.
