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ACU’s Rome Campus hosts conference on peace and Ukraine

ACU’s Institute for Religion and Critical Inquiry is co-organising an international conference, Unwounded World: A Marian Peace for our Shared Future, to be held at the Rome Campus on 5-6 October 2022. Dedicated to the suffering of children, women and men in Mariupol, the symposium addresses the possibility of a future politics through Mary as a universal symbol of peace and protection from violence.

The Ambassadors of Ukraine, Australia and Slovenia to the Holy See will give the conference opening addresses. The two-day program includes sessions on the sacralization of violence and the roots of war; interreligious reflections on suffering and peace; Marian approaches to justice, peace building, mourning and suffering; Russian Church documents on the war in Ukraine; narratives of peace; and the aftermath of war.

ACU’s Professor Claude Romano will address the hope for peace in an unprecedented war in Ukraine. He argues that the ‘special operation’ launched by Putin represents an unprecedented form of war with the nuclear weapon used as an aggressive dissuasive weapon for the first time since World War II. The transformation into an unlimited licence to assault with impunity consequently brings all other countries to intervene directly militarily under threat of a nuclear world conflict.

Director of ACU’s Institute for Religion and Critical Inquiry, Professor Peter Howard, will chair the sessions and give a concluding reflection.

The conference is jointly organised by ACU, University of Notre Dame (USA), the Science and Research Centre Koper (Slovenia) and the European Academy of Arts and Sciences (Austria) with financial support from ACU and the Slovenian Research Agency. It is part of a larger program of research activities on the Rome Campus, including a public lecture series in September with distinguished international theologians, philosophers and historians.