The Church of Our Saviour in Manhattan held its second annual March for Peace on Wednesday, January 1, coinciding with the Church’s 58th World Day of Peace.   

After the regularly scheduled noon Mass at the Chapel of the Sacred Hearts of Jesus and Mary on East 33rd Street, participants walked the sidewalks to the Church of Our Saviour (Park Avenue at 38th Street) with signs displaying names of countries and regions of the world in conflict. The chapel is part of Our Saviour parish.                    

The parish organized the prayer march in conjunction with New York-area coordinators of the Community of Sant’Egidio, a Rome-based, worldwide lay Catholic association dedicated to prayer, the poor, and peace. Organizers said about 80 men, women, and children participated in Wednesday’s March for Peace. The event was followed by refreshments at the parish.                     

“In New York City, this second edition of the march saw the participation of about 80 people who walked from the Chapel of the Sacred Hearts to the Church of Our Saviour, where Monsignor Kevin Sullivan (pastoral administrator) welcomed us; we read excerpts from the World Day of Peace message of the pope and prayed together,” Paola Piscitelli, a New York-area coordinator with the Community of Sant’Egidio, told The Good Newsroom. The excerpts were abstracts of Pope Francis’ 2025 Message for Peace, “Forgive us our trespasses: grant us your peace.”     

 “The march seemed particularly relevant this year with the growth of wars in the world. The countries at war were all mentioned by boards carried by the participants. The peaceful response to a conflictual mentality that we see increasing in our city and the world is especially important. The faces of the people who saw us in the street confirmed a desire to say something, to find a way to react simply and possibly to an atmosphere of fear and indifference that is pervasive,” Piscitelli added. 

“Peace is an uphill journey. It has its timetables and rhythms, its preferential routes and its technical times, its slowdowns and its accelerations. Perhaps even its pauses,” Father Enzo Del Brocco, CP, priest associate at the parish, and celebrant of the noon Mass, told The Good Newsroom in a January 2 email. “A peacemaker never gives up and enters into the conflict with open eyes, open ears, open hands, an open heart, and an open mind. Hope and patience are his strengths, and he never gets tired of starting over again and again. An essential element of peace that we often ignore or sometimes avoid or fail to recognize is forgiveness.” 

Citing his homily from the noon Mass, Father Del Brocco added that “peace does not avoid conflict, but it enters into it, transforming weapons into tools of dialogue: ‘and they shall beat their swords into plowshares, and their spears into pruning hooks.’ (Isaiah 2:4) These are tools to work the hardened soil of our hearts and to prune the branches that do not bear fruit. It does not have much in common with the banal ‘peaceful life.’” Father Del Brocco presided over the Mass, and Father Sam Sawyer S.J., editor-in-chief of America Magazine, served as concelebrant.  

Father Del Brocco has been a Passionist priest since 1991 and is currently a Passionist order vice-provincial in the United States. He served in Haiti for nearly six years until December 2019. In March 2024, at Our Saviour Church, he led a Prayer Service for Peace in Haiti.