ADDRESS OF PAUL VI
TO THE PARTICIPANTS IN THE 40th SESSION OF THE NATO DEFENSE COLLEGE*

Saturday, 15 July 1972

Dear friends,

We are pleased to welcome you and to extend our greetings of peace in the Lord.

Peace in our time is indeed something weak, something not yet perfected, and something circumscribed by the many limitations of our age. Your mission is to render it strong and stable.

We are convinced that you will succeed in this mission if you work to strengthen the bonds of solidarity and union among peoples, the bonds of friendship and the bonds of fraternal collaboration. These - not armaments - are the means adapted to your goal. With these means you are assured of success.

We pray that God will bless your efforts and through his grace armaments will be substituted by the spiritual weapons of justice and love. And thus in God’s strength we hope to find the great blessing of lasting peace.

Gentlemen,

Before setting out for your respective countries, you manifested, like your predecessors, the desire to meet us. You are most welcome.

This session of instruction, with its cycle of select conference, exchanges, and committee work; will have enabled you, we think, to tackle and study in common a fair number of questions, which concern the prosperity of your countries, individually and as a whole. This experience, we do not doubt, will be of appreciable help to you when you have to exercise the responsibilities entrusted to you.

Here, too, you have learned better to compare particular points of view, listen to one another, understand one another, estimate one another and cooperate with one another: all precious assets to continue to bridge frontiers, according to the noble motto of your College: "Unitatem alentes". We hope that these bonds of friendship will be prolonged beyond this Session, and that you will take away with you a harvest of cultural memories and enriching spiritual testimonies. We invite you to put this enrichment of the mind and of the heart in the service of all those with whom Providence calls upon you to work.

*ORa n.30 p.8.