Insight into larger contexts, also known as truth, freedom and peace are interrelated. In the Gospel of John, it sounds like this: “You will know the truth, and the truth will set you free” (John 8:32). War and conflict arise, among other things, from the fact that someone can only take a certain perspective and cannot see and accept that of the other person. To see the truth, you have to have a broad view. If you don’t, you run the risk of slipping into the dichotomy of ‘either/or’, ‘me or you’, ‘good’ and ‘evil’. And the result is war.
We have seen a lot of this ‘culture of war’ in recent years. Currently, politically in the Ukraine crisis. I have just recently written a text about peace in times of war for the MWGFD website. In it, I take the beatification of Max Josef Metzger in the Freiburg Minster on 17 November 2024 as an opportunity to point out the danger of the current warmongering. Metzger was a pacifist and was executed by the Nazis for treason because of his pacifism. At the moment, no one is punished by death for treason in Germany. But many who do not go along with the warmongering are virtually and socially assassinated.