Genoa (Fides News Agency) – “Peace is a possible mission”: this, along with many other meaningful insights and reflections, represents the core of the new book with the equally emblematic title “I choose not to hate”, published by EMI and written by Father Pier Luigi Maccalli, a priest of the Society of African Missions.
Father Gigi experienced first-hand “the evil face of war”, as he himself writes in reference to his long period of captivity in the Sahel at the hands of the Group for the Support of Islam and Muslims (GISM) (see Fides, 18/9/2018).
The missionary, who was kidnapped in Bomoanga, Niger, describes himself as “scarred for life” by those two years and three weeks he spent as a hostage, which he recounted in his first book ‘Chains of Freedom’ (see Fides, 20/9/2021) and that terrible experience which inevitably changed him, as he later notes in his subsequent 2024 publication ‘Liberate la pace’.
In ‘I Choose Not to Hate’, the author reflects on many aspects of our daily lives, recounting how he went from the silence of the desert to a torrent of thoughts. He expresses his profound unease regarding what many of the powerful people in the world call a ‘just war’, describing it, in every respect, as a ‘crime that defies human reason’. “War is the exaltation of destruction and death, and justice is the harmony of relationships and the defense of life restored to its rightful place,” he writes. After two years of imprisonment, chains and humiliation, Father Gigi chooses not to hate, to forgive, and to propose this path as an alternative to the logic of rearmament and the “just war” that dominates today. He uses firm and clear words to express his total opposition to every form of hatred, addressing strong terms such as ‘rearmament’ which are used very frequently, and calls for ‘an essential element that has been forgotten in building peace, not with weapons, but through another path that finds its culmination in the love of one’s enemy’.
“Thou shalt not kill” and “do not respond to evil with violence” are the two essential “no’s” that the missionary considers tools for achieving peace and avoiding war. Father Gigi chose not to hate those who kidnapped him; he chose forgiveness and peace, confirming their power in “I choose not to hate”, dedicated to all those who commit themselves with an unarmed heart to dialogue and peace. (AP) (Fides News Agency, 14/5/2026)
