The Litany of Peace
Written By The Most Reverend Karl PrüterLord, Heavenly Father help us to become peacemakers, that we may be called, “The Children of God.”
Lord, hear our prayer, and grant us Thy peace.
Lord, Heavenly Father, help us purge ourselves of those attributes which make not for peace but which set the stage for war.
Lord, hear our prayer, and grant us Thy peace.
Lord, open our minds to see ourselves as Thou seest us, or even, as others see us, and save us from all unwillingness to know our infirmities.
Lord, hear our prayer, and grant us Thy peace.
From all hasty utterances of impatience; from the retort of irritation and the taunt of sarcasm; from all infirmity of temper in provoking or being provoked; from love of unkind gossip, and from all idle words that may do hurt, save us, O Lord.
Lord, hear our prayer, and grant us Thy peace.
Grant us, O Lord, the strength to obey Thy commandments, that we defraud our neighbor in nothing. May we never commit adultery nor do anything to disturb our neighbor’s home or family.
Lord, hear our prayer, and grant us Thy peace.
Lord, Heavenly Father, grant that we covet nothing that is our neighbors, neither their house, nor their auto, their bank account, their job, nor anything that is our neighbors.
Lord, hear our prayer, and grant us Thy peace.
Heavenly Father, help us to maintain peace within our own households, with our neighbors in our communities, within our own nations, and in the world.
Lord, hear our prayer, and grant us Thy peace.
Lord, Heavenly Father we pray not only for the absence of war, but more especially for Thy peace, which passeth all understanding.
Lord, hear our prayer, and grant us Thy peace.
Lord, Heavenly Father, grant us Christ’s wish that we may become One with Him, and with Thee; that in union with Thee, we may desire only what Thou dost desire, and thus come to know Thy perfect peace.
Lord, hear our prayer, and grant us Thy peace, this day and for evermore. Amen.
Memorial Day and the Work of Peace
A Christ Catholic Reflection
Memorial Day asks us to remember.
At its best, it is not merely a long weekend, not the unofficial beginning of summer, not a sale at the store, not a flag waved without thought. It is a day of memory. It is a day when we pause before the terrible cost of war and remember those who gave their lives in military service. We remember names known and unknown, bodies returned and bodies lost, families forever altered, empty chairs at tables, mothers and fathers who did not come home, children who grew up with stories instead of arms around them.
A Christ Catholic perspective begins there, with reverence for the dead and tenderness for the grieving but it cannot end there.
Because if Christ is the center, then even our national remembrance must be brought under the searching light of the Gospel. We honor sacrifice, yes. We grieve the dead, yes. We give thanks for courage, yes. But Christians cannot romanticize war. We cannot baptize violence simply because it wears our own flag. We cannot pretend that the death of any child of God, soldier or civilian, friend or enemy, is anything less than a wound in the body of humanity.
That is why Archbishop Karl Prüter’s Litany of Peace is such a fitting prayer for Memorial Day. It does not begin with the nations. It begins with the heart.
“Lord, Heavenly Father help us to become peacemakers, that we may be called, ‘The Children of God.’”
That is where Christ begins too. “Blessed are the peacemakers,” Jesus says, “for they shall be called children of God.” Not blessed are the war-makers. Not blessed are the loudest patriots. Not blessed are those who win every argument, dominate every enemy, or preserve peace by fear alone. Blessed are the peacemakers.
Peacemaking is not cowardice. It is not weakness. It is not pretending evil does not exist. Peacemaking is holy labor. It requires truth, courage, restraint, humility, repentance, and the willingness to see even the enemy as a human being beloved by God. Sometimes it asks more of us than war does, because war permits us to reduce people to targets. Peace requires us to remember they have faces.
Archbishop Prüter’s litany asks God to help us “purge ourselves of those attributes which make not for peace but which set the stage for war.” That is a hard prayer, because it refuses to let us blame war only on people far away. It tells the truth: war begins long before the first shot is fired. War begins in the human heart. It begins in contempt. It begins in greed. It begins in envy. It begins in the small daily rehearsals of cruelty that teach us to stop seeing our neighbor as kin.
The litany names these things with uncomfortable precision: hasty utterances, impatience, irritation, sarcasm, infirmity of temper, gossip, idle words that do hurt. At first glance, those may seem too small for Memorial Day. What do sarcasm and gossip have to do with battlefields? More than we want to admit.
A culture of war is not created only by generals and politicians. It is nourished by ordinary meanness. It grows in households where peace is not practiced, in communities where neighbors are treated as enemies, in churches where disagreement becomes contempt, in nations where fear is easier to sell than compassion. The battlefield is the terrible harvest of seeds planted in countless unconverted hearts.
So on Memorial Day, a Christ Catholic does not only ask, “Who died?” We must also ask, “What kind of people must we become so that fewer must die?” That question is not anti-soldier. It is profoundly pro-human. It honors the dead by refusing to make more death our highest wisdom.
Archbishop Prüter’s litany also prays: “Lord, open our minds to see ourselves as Thou seest us, or even, as others see us, and save us from all unwillingness to know our infirmities.” That line is a sword through the national soul. Every nation prefers its own mythology. Every people wants to remember its courage more than its cruelty, its sacrifices more than its sins, its victories more than its victims but the Gospel does not permit selective memory. Christ calls us into truth.
To see ourselves as God sees us is both terrifying and healing. God sees the valor and the vanity. God sees the soldier who died trying to save a friend. God sees the civilian caught beneath the machinery of empire. God sees the chaplain praying in the mud. God sees the politician using patriotism as cover for ambition. God sees the grieving widow. God sees the enemy mother receiving the same awful news. God sees all of it and God’s peace is not built on lies.
That is why Memorial Day should make us humble. We can be grateful without being triumphalist. We can honor service without worshiping war. We can remember the dead without pretending every conflict was righteous or every decision was pure. We can stand before the flag, if we choose, but we must kneel before the Cross.
For the Cross tells us something no empire wants to hear: God’s victory does not come through domination. It comes through self-giving love. The Lamb conquers by being slain. Christ reigns from a tree, forgiving those who drive the nails. The risen Lord comes to frightened disciples and says, “Peace be with you.” Not revenge be with you. Not conquest be with you. Peace.
A Christ Catholic Memorial Day is therefore not only remembrance. It is repentance. It is intercession. It is a recommitment to the way of the Gospel. It asks us to pray for the dead, comfort the grieving, tend the wounded, support veterans who carry visible and invisible scars, and work for a world where fewer families are asked to pay the price of human failure.
It also asks us to begin close to home. Archbishop Prüter prays, “Heavenly Father, help us to maintain peace within our own households, with our neighbors in our communities, within our own nations, and in the world.” That order matters. Peace is not abstract. It begins in the home, in the words we speak, in the grudges we release, in the neighbor we refuse to demonize, in the church conflict we choose not to inflame, in the family wound we stop passing down.
World peace sounds impossible until we remember that every war is made of human hearts. So is every peace.
The litany wisely says we pray “not only for the absence of war, but more especially for Thy peace, which passeth all understanding.” The absence of war is not yet peace. A ceasefire is not reconciliation. Silence is not healing. A household may have no shouting and still be loveless. A church may have no open conflict and still be ruled by fear. A nation may have no declared war and still be violent toward the poor, the stranger, the prisoner, and the forgotten.
The peace of Christ is deeper. It is not passive quiet. It is right relationship. It is justice with mercy. It is truth without cruelty. It is reconciliation without denial. It is the healing of what has been torn. That is the peace we seek and this is where the Christ Catholic confession becomes more than words: Jesus cares. Christ is the center. The Gospel is the way.
If Jesus cares, then we must care about the soldier who died and the family who grieves. We must care about the veteran who comes home and cannot sleep. We must care about the civilian dead whose names we may never know. We must care about the children raised under drones and bombs, the refugees made by war, the moral injuries carried by those who were ordered to do terrible things, and the societies that keep asking young people to spend their lives for the failures of the old.
If Christ is the center, then no nation can be. Not even ours. Our patriotism, if we have it, must be chastened by the Gospel. It must be humble, repentant, and accountable to the Prince of Peace.
If the Gospel is the way, then peace is not optional. It is not a side project for gentle Christians. It is at the heart of discipleship.
Memorial Day can become holy when memory becomes mercy. It becomes holy when grief becomes prayer. It becomes holy when gratitude becomes responsibility. It becomes holy when we refuse to use the dead as props for pride and instead allow them to become witnesses against the waste of war.
So today we remember. We remember the fallen. We remember their families. We remember the cost. We remember the courage. We remember the failures that made their sacrifice necessary. We remember Christ, who stands with every grieving mother, every wounded soldier, every frightened child, and every soul longing for peace.
And with Archbishop Karl Prüter, we pray: Lord, hear our prayer, and grant us Thy peace.
Not the peace of denial.
Not the peace of domination.
Not the peace of silence forced by fear.
But the peace of Christ.
The peace that passes understanding.
The peace that begins in converted hearts.
The peace that makes enemies into neighbors.
The peace that turns swords into plowshares.
The peace that teaches us, at last, to care.
May we become peacemakers.
May we become children of God.
May we remember the dead by serving the living.
And may the Prince of Peace have mercy on us all.