War victim, assassinated leader’s daughter help present papal peace message
December 19, 2025
A Bosnian war victim and the daughter of an assassinated Italian prime minister helped present Pope Leo XIV’s Message for the World Day of Peace (CWN analysis) at a Vatican press conference yesterday (video).
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Before commenting on the papal message, Father Pero Miličević, pastor of a parish in Mostar, Bosnia, recounted the day in 1993 when “Muslim military units of the Army of Bosnia and Herzegovina attacked our village,” killing his father and other family members.
Miličević, his mother, and his surviving siblings were taken to a prison camp “along with 300 Croatian Catholics ... In the camp, in moments of inner turmoil, what sustained us was the daily prayer of the Rosary that our mother had taught us.” After recounting the hardships of the camp, he said:
Was there anger for everything I experienced? Yes. But when I became a priest in 2012 and began hearing confessions, I understood how necessary inner peace is, and that peace cannot be achieved without forgiveness, without confronting what one has experienced.
Dr. Maria Agnese Moro, daughter of Prime Minister Aldo Moro and a journalist, said that “for peace to be real and lasting, it is necessary to defuse the mental and emotional mechanisms that underlie any act of violence and the radioactive residue that irreparable violence, whether perpetrated or suffered, carries with it.”
“Restorative justice, which the Pope mentions in his message as a tool to be supported and increased, can help to do this with its ability to restore humanity where dehumanization and its consequences have reigned,” she continued, adding:
It is impossible to strike someone’s body and destroy it unless they are first considered non-human, not like me, unless they are reduced to a uniform, a function, an enemy, a ghost. And in doing so, one also sets aside, suspends, and ignores one’s own humanity. Similarly, those who have suffered violence, in hating those who harmed them, dehumanize themselves and the object of their hatred.
Moro then discussed her meetings with her father’s assassins.
Cardinal Michael Czerny, SJ, the prefect of the Dicastery for Promoting Integral Human Development, and Professor Tommaso Greco of the University of Pisa also spoke at the press conference. Cardinal Czerny summarized the papal message; Greco sought to rebut the charge that Christian peacemaking entails collusion with evil.
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