IN his World Peace Day message for New Year's Day, Pope John Paul refers to various areas of civil, conflict involving ethnic, cultural and religious divisions around the World and says the road to peace must start.
The time has come for "a true pilgrimage of peace starting from the concrete situation in which we find ourselves", he says in Offer Forgiveness and Receive Peace.
At times the difficulties were daunting because of ethnic cultural and religious differences and it was not easy to put traumatic differences behind us.
"But no process of peace can ever begin unless an attitude of sincere forgiveness takes root in human hearts.
"The difficulty of forgiving does not only arise from the circumstances of the present. History carries with it a heavy burden of violence and conflict which cannot easily be shed. .. The truth is that one cannot remain a prisoner of the past, for individuals and peoples need a sort of healing of memories', so that past evils will not come back again. This does not mean forgetting past events; it means re examining them with a new attitude.
"For this to happen, we must learn to read the history of other peoples without facile and partisan bias, making an effort to understand their point of view.
"This is the first step towards reconciliation, since respect for differences is an inherently necessary condition for genuine relationships between individuals and between groups. The suppression of differences can result in apparent peace but it creates a volatile situation which is in fact the prelude to fresh outbreaks off violence", the Pope says.