Forty years ago, Pope Paul VI instituted the World Day of Peace. He intended by that to mark the first of January, the beginning of the New Year, as a moment in which the Church would invite men and women of good will around the world to join in a recommitment to peace in its totality and to a deepening consciousness of one other particular aspect of the challenge of peace.

Through the years, Pope Paul VI and his successors have faithfully continued this tradition. The annual World Day of Peace message is delivered personally to the heads of government and heads of state in most of the countries of the world in the name of the Holy Father by the local papal representative. During the year, this becomes not simply a message for one day but rather a text which catechizes as well as announces the great themes of peace. A brief look at the list of topics that the popes have covered in the last 40 years gives us a very clear idea of how comprehensive has been this ongoing teaching on peace which has become a hallmark now of three pontiffs.

The theme for this year’s World Day of Peace message is “The human family, a community of peace.” Picking up on a theme which has already been a significant one in his pontificate, Pope Benedict XVI calls attention to the roots of the human family and how those roots become in effect the source of life and renewal for the many institutions in society by which we live as a people under law and in harmony with one another. In this year’s message, this is brought out in a number of very clear ways.

First of all, the Holy Father looks at the family as itself a place where one learns values and grows in a harmonious way through the bonds of life and love, of justice, kindness, compassion, goodness and peace. All those qualities that should mark the family by its very nature are extolled by the Holy Father as means for the family to become a rich resource for peace and an instrument to advance peace within one’s own society and community. The Pope speaks of the role that each member of the family plays and the responsibility that they have one for the other and he raises a very beautiful question about young people when he asks, “Where can young people gradually learn to savor the genuine taste of peace better than in the original nest of the family which nature prepares for them?”

Speaking of the family, the Holy Father also calls our attention to the fact that the family as the basic cell of society deserves and has every right to expect support from the political and social communities that make up our human living. In fact, in this 60th anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which the Holy Father calls “a landmark of juridic civilization of truly universal value,” the Holy Father underscores to us that all of the nations of the world through the United Nations have agreed that the family is “the natural and fundamental group unit of society and is entitled to protection by society and the State.” An additional point of the importance of family in our society at large is the fact that 25 years ago the Holy See developed and sent to all of the international organizations and nations of the world a Charter on the Rights of the Family. This important document remains a clear statement of the Church’s understanding of family through the reflection of natural moral law and the revelation that comes to us from God the Father.

From this, the Holy Father argues that humanity is one great family. The themes we can learn about relationships in family life can also teach us much about relationships in the wider human family that makes up the world in which we live today. The Holy Father calls it “the common human family to which we all should be committed to living our lives of responsibility before God, acknowledging Him as the source of our own existence and of all others.” To illustrate what he means, the Holy Father goes on to mention three specific areas of importance.

The first of these is the family and the environment in which we live. The Book of Genesis gives us the great magna carta of our responsibilities for the good of God’s creation and the role we are called to play as co-creators with Him in the care for the earth which has been given to us for our protection and our development. The Holy Father takes that deep biblical message and shows how it extends and branches out to embrace the whole human community in a common effort to preserve the good of the environment. That makes the human community responsible for the world about us even as the human family is responsible for the world that surrounds it. This stewardship of the earth’s energy resources is one of the principal ways that we can see to it that the world in which we live is a world that is shared by all and that care for it is a responsibility that is accepted and embraced by all.

The second area to which the Holy Father calls attention is the human community and the economy. Just as individual families need, through work and effort and collaboration, to work and toil for the means to keep the family alive and prosperous, so too does the human community need to recognize that there is a familial equation that touches on our approach to the development of the economy — whether it be in our own neighborhood, our own nation or the whole global economy seen as one. The spirit of solidarity that marks the natural family can be something that can teach us about the same sense of solidarity that should enter into our relationships with one another through economic growth, and through both the production and the distribution of those things by which human life can become better and all human kind, but especially the poor, can have a share in the goods of our economic efforts.

The third area that the Holy Father chooses to make as one of the three aspects of this World Day of Peace message is the human community and moral law. It is the need of our common standard of life, a moral law to which we all adhere, that ultimately can guarantee that the human community will act as a family in building up peace in our own day. As the Holy Father says, “power must always be disciplined by law and this applies also to relations between sovereign states.” To that end he calls us to go back to the norms of the natural moral law, as a basis for us to build the kind of juridic institutions and humanitarian laws that will help us live a life in community which is one that reflects the human family in its commitment to justice, to truth, to harmony, and to peace.

At the very end, the Holy Father reminds us of the many conflicts and particularly the challenge to disarmament of both nuclear and conventional arms that face us in the world today. All these are aspects of the challenge of peace in our day. All of them deserve and must receive attention from those who carry the appropriate responsibility for these.

However, the message of the World Day of Peace is that all of us share that responsibility and that the human family has a place in being a source to renew our own understanding of the call of peace, to deepen our own commitment to being peacemakers, and to find within ourselves new resources to build the means and structures by which peace might be shared more widely in this world and conflict might be overcome through the human family, who sees itself mirrored in the family of all humankind.