Hòa Bình Ơi! — A Catholic Reflection On Peace

Today's news involving the strike on Iran and the immediate military responses makes it difficult for me not to feel that familiar heaviness that comes with military escalation: the sense that these actions expedite suffering, and that ordinary people will once again absorb the consequences of decisions made far above them. Even when we try to keep a measured distance, modern media has a way of bringing the world’s instability to the screens of our phones and laptops, and in doing so it exposes what we often prefer to ignore: how quickly the economy of power is treated as “normal,” and how easily peace is seen as a real but unattainable ambition.

When the events like these happen, I find myself returning to the Vietnamese songs I grew up hearing, many of them written during the long years of civil conflict and its aftermath. Many of those songs expressed an interior world of the ordinary person: grief, longing, fractured relationships, the pain of separation, and a kind of hope that refuses to surrender peace to a violent future.

The refrain “hòa bình ơi!” is a cry that treats peace as something intimately personal, something beloved and absent, something one calls out to as one would call out to a missing friend.

In Hòa Bình Ơi! Việt Nam Ơi!, the imagination is strikingly simple yet powerful. The song imagines a day when “Bắc Nam rồi không còn ngăn cách," - when North and South are no longer divided - and when life is no longer organized around suspicion and fear. The images are uncomplicated: the land is envisioned as healed, relationships restored, and movement made free again, as if even birds are meant to fly without borders carved into the sky by artillery flares. Whether one knows all the historical details or not, the point is accessible: peace is not merely the stopping of gunfire, but the return of ordinary life as a place where communion is possible again.

Another song, Tình Em Biển Rộng Sông Dài, approaches the same longing through the language of love, and it is precisely there that its relevance widens beyond Viet Nam. The song speaks of love as wide as rivers and seas. Then it returns again to the refrain that calls for peace, insisting on an obvious truth: that peace and love belong together. The world illustrated by the song is one where the lover waits for the beloved with a prepared wedding garment, where reunion is celebrated, where the rebuilding of a home and the rebuilding of a land belong to the same hope. Here, the listener is reminded of the conviction that life is meant for union rather than division, and that the human heart naturally desires reconciliation and peace.

The Catholic tradition stresses this with even greater clarity. Peace is not simply the absence of conflict, and it is not something we can reduce to a temporary pause between cycles of violence. In the Christian imagination, peace is bound to right relationship: with God, with neighbor, and within the self. It is connected to justice, yes, but it is justice shaped by charity rather than by cold calculation. It is also inseparable from truth, because a “peace” purchased by lies or maintained by dehumanizing the other is not peace but a fragile arrangement that will eventually locate new victims. That is why the Church can acknowledge the tragic complexity of nations defending themselves while still urging, with equal seriousness, that war is always a marring of humanity and never something to romanticize.

What those Vietnamese songs helped form in me, perhaps without my realizing it at the time, was an understanding that peace begins as longing that builds upon hope. War trains people to accept division as permanent; it hardens the imagination so that retaliation seems like the only language left. But a people who can still cry out “hòa bình ơi!” are a people who have not fully surrendered hope. They have not allowed violence to convince them that the future must look like the past.

For Catholics, this longing is deeply theological. We believe that Christ does not simply recommend peace as an ideal; rather, he gives peace as a gift rooted in his own life, death, and resurrection. He offers a peace that faced violence and crucifixion and refused to mirror them. The Cross reveals to us how peace can be attained if is to be real: peace cannot be built by multiplying wounds.

So when we read and watch current events, we should refuse to let our hearts become a small copy of the conflict: anxious, reactive, and eager to wound. Instead, respond with prayer: pray for those whose names we will never learn, who will nonetheless bear the trauma of what is unfolding. Pray for families, for civilians, for soldiers, for leaders, for those tempted to treat violence as an inevitable resolution, and for those who have already decided that peace is naïve. Pray, too, for the conversion of language that propels violence, because war often takes root first in speech that delights in contempt, and in narratives that dehumanize entire peoples.

The longing for peace that I heard in those Vietnamese songs is, through a Catholic lens, a longing to become capable of communion again. It is the desire to live in a world where distrust and suspicion are no longer our default approach to one another, and where human lives are not reduced to collateral damage. Indeed, it is the refusal to let cynicism have the last word. In that sense, “hòa bình ơi!” cannot be a refrain left in the past; it must be a prayer for the present.

And so I find myself returning to it now in desperate petition:

Lord Jesus, Prince of Peace, give peace to places that are trapped in violence, and give peace to hearts that have forgotten how to desire anything beyond power. Teach us to long for reconciliation, and make us, in our own small and concrete ways of speaking and doing, people who do not merely talk about peace but practice the dispositions that make peace possible.

Amen.