Mediterranean bishops and mayors meet in Florence for peace while war breaks out on Europe’s doorstep

From 23 to 27 February, the heart of Florence will be the theatre for the double ecclesial and civil forum that will be concluded on Sunday by Pope Francis. The Dominican convent annexed to the Basilica of Santa Maria Novella will welcome 58 bishops arriving from three continents for the second edition of the Mediterranean meeting, a frontier of peace. “As a Church we feel the responsibility to carry out a necessary process of discernment and to do our part in responding to what is happening in the basin: from conflicts to injustice, from poverty to discrimination, from economic or political crises to the migration phenomenon that has transformed the great sea into a cemetery, as Pope Francis has denounced several times,” said Antonino Raspanti, Bishop of Acireale and vice-president of the Italian Episcopal Conference.
(Source: Avvenire, 22/2/2022)

The novelty, compared to the Bari meeting in 2021, is that this year, together with the bishops, there will also be Orthodox, Jewish and Muslim mayors from the Balkans, the Maghreb, Israel and Turkey. The two parallel meetings will converge on Saturday and Sunday to discuss the Mediterranean question with its lacerations and contradictions, which is crucial for the fate of the world.

Florence thus fulfils the prophecy on the Mediterranean of Giorgio La Pira, of Sicilian origin, defined as the “holy mayor” of Florence, a man of dialogue who, with his international relations, made Florence a crossroads of Peace.

In 2018 Pope Francis authorised the Congregation for the Causes of Saints to promulgate the decree regarding the heroic virtues of the “holy mayor” of Florence, a holiness of the everyday: a man of “extraordinary complexity” who in reality was only ever faithful to the Gospel he had embraced and to the Constitution of which he was one of the fathers, but without ever having the desire to claim it. “Today Italy needs people like him,” Cardinal Gualtiero Bassetti, President of the Italian Bishops’ Conference, told Avvenire in April 2019.

We are already accompanying the work of this extraordinary Forum for Peace, responding to Pope Francis’ call to make 2 March, Ash Wednesday, a day of fasting and prayer for peace, addressing in particular the very serious Russian-Ukrainian crisis.