It begins with a description on many pages of the shipwreck of the “italian Titanic” : the SS Principessa Mafalda. His grandparents and their only son had bought their tickets for that crossing from Italy to Argentina, but since they couldn’t sell what they owned in time they had to exchange their tickets. It is the occasion to plead in favor of a better world for migrants, the problem isn’t inequalities but unfairness, your fate shouldn’t be determined by your family and country of birth, that’s not fair(, or “meritocratic”).
Where is our heart when migrants travel to die in the Mediterranean sea ?

p.31 :
« Each day the world seems more elitist, and each day crueler, toward those who have been cast out and abandoned. Developing countries continue to be drained of their finest natural and human resources for the benefit of a few privileged markets.
Genuine development is inclusive, fruitful, directed toward the future and future generations, whereas false monopolistic development makes the rich richer and the poor poorer, in all times and all places. And the poor are not forgiven for anything, not even for their own poverty. They cannot allow themselves to be timid or disheartened, they are looked upon as a threat or incompetent, they are never able to see an end to their suffering. The creation of a hostile architecture has even been postulated to keep them out of sight, even off the streets. Walls can be built and entrances barricaded to create the illusion of being safe from those who are left outside. But it won’t be like this forever. The “Day of the Lord,” as described by the prophets (Amos 5:18 ; Isaiah 2:5 ; Joel 1:3), will break down the barriers created between countries, and will replace the arrogance of a few with the solidarity of many. The condition of marginalization in which millions of people are oppressed cannot last much longer. Their cry rises and encompasses the whole earth. In the words of Don Primo Mazzolari, a great Italian parish priest, the prophetic, luminous, and “inconvenient” face of an unclerical cleric : “The poor are a constant protest against our injustices ; the poor are a powder keg. If it is set on fire, the world will explode.”
We cannot escape from the pressing call that the Word of God entrusts to the poor. Wherever we look, the compass of Holy Scripture points to those without enough to live on, the oppressed, those reduced to prostration, the orphan, the widow, the foreigner, the migrant. Jesus was not afraid to identify himself with this countless throng. “Whatever you did for one of these least brothers of mine, you did for me” (Matthew 25:40). Not for those like me, not for my group, but for the lowest, hungry, thirsty, naked. To escape from this recognition is like watering down revelation, mystifying the Gospel, turning it into color and show, not presence. Because there is no “first” for Christians, apart from “first before the last.” The “last” that every day cry out to the Lord, begging to be freed from the sufferings that afflict them. The last in the fringes of our city life. The last deceived and left abandoned to die in the desert ; the last tortured, abused, raped in detention camps ; the last who defy the waves of a pitiless sea.
The wars being fought today involve several regions of the world, but the weapons with which they are fought are produced in entirely different regions—in those same regions that then refuse and turn away the refugees who have been generated by those weapons and by those conflicts. »

p.52 :
« I had just been contemplating the immense beauty of the countryside in the whole of that area, men and women who work and look after their families, children playing, old people daydreaming… and now i found myself walking among thousands and thousands of graves that all looked the same. Gravestones of young men. And so, as I was celebrating Mass there, with bishops and hundreds of priests from every country involved in the 1914–18 conflict, all i could say was : War is folly ! Before me i had a physical demonstration of it, in brutal full view. While God pursues his creation and calls on us all to assist in his work, war destroys, it destroys everything. Even the human being, God’s most beautiful creation. It upsets everything, even the bond of fraternity. War is folly, and its mad development plan is destruction. Over the entrance to that cemetery hovered the scornful adage of every war : “What does it matter to me ?” This is Cain’s answer to God : “Am i my brother’s keeper ?” (Genesis 4:9). An answer that looks no one in the face : old people, children, mothers, fathers… »

p.56 :
« While those who declared war had always fought it by sending others to die on their behalf, while war was always fought “For the king !” but the peasant was the one who died in it, then the First World War, our grandfathers’ war, represented a kind of watershed. Since then, in every conflict, from the Middle East to the Balkans, from Asia to Africa, the great majority of victims — indeed 80 percent since the start of this twenty-first century — have been from the civilian population. A war correspondent has written : “In the modern-day war, the so-called collateral victims are now the soldiers.” From almost every conflict of the past three decades, it has been less difficult to get out alive wearing a military uniform than, perhaps, the red T-shirt of a young child. Most of all, it is those who are defenseless that get massacred : one in three of them is a child. It is those who have merely suffered the folly of war. Forget heroism, forget rhetoric : war is none other than baseness and shame to the highest degree. A shame that all of us must feel as ours, because it is tragic when people no longer feel ashamed about anything. »

p.150 :
« As a child, when someone commented about such things, or another quarrel loomed, i hid and cried, and sometimes made a votive offering for them not to happen. They deeply upset me. At home, thank God, my parents and we five children lived in peace ; but i think these events left a mark upon me and increased in my heart the desire to ensure that people do not fight, that they remain united. And, if they argue, that they then make peace. »

p.167 :
« One day, i gave my bicycle to a classmate, who had an accident and damaged it. I told him he would have to get it repaired, and he did : his mother had to pay. Causing her no doubt to make sacrifices, since they certainly weren’t wealthy. Well, this guilt remained with me for years. For many years, i felt i had been unfair, that i had been ungenerous, and this feeling stayed with me for a long while.
(…)
This went on for three months. For the first few days, my police escorts kept to themselves.
Then, they saw that i wanted the experience to be as ordinary and simple as possible, and we started talking about all kinds of things.
One day, i told them i had been to school in Ramos Mejía. “My father was there too,” one of the young police officers said. “What’s your name ?” I asked. “Peña,” he replied. “Is your father José Valentin ?” It was. This man was the son of the boy in the bicycle story ! I got him to give me his father’s telephone number, i called him, apologized at last, and once again, that sense of regret that had stayed with me for fifty-nine years was finally gone. »

p.414 :
« The parish priest, Father Toufic Bou Merhi, before he abandoned the building, along with a caravan of refugees, taking the relics and the blessed sacrament with him to the capital, launched a moving and dramatic plea during Mass, addressed to the weapons themselves :
“Dearest bomb, i beg you, leave us alone. Dearest missile, do not explode. Do not obey the hand of hatred.
I am turning to you because the hearts of those who are in a position of responsibility have hardened, and the brutal treatment of people has spread, therefore, listen to me, I implore you.
They call you smart bombs ; be smarter than those who use you.”
There is no one left to kill, he said. Families are exterminated. Sila, a girl of six, lost her father, mother, her little sister of eighteen months, her grandfather, grandmother, and her uncle with all his family. The day before that homily, a rocket destroyed nine houses fifty yards away from the convent. Stones fell into the courtyard where the refugees were staying. Terror, screaming, crying, and fear mingled with the blood of the injured.
I am with them. I am with those forced to leave their homes, with their families tormented, in ruin. I am with those who are forced to abandon their schools and their work, to wander in search of some place where they can escape from the bombs. I am with mothers who grieve for their dead children, and with children who are even denied the right to play. I am with those who are afraid to look up, because fire rains from the sky.
All of them are in my thoughts each day, in my prayers, and sometimes in my tears.
Faced with the flood of violence, while tears run down their faces, the mouths of children, in every part of the world, repeat Munch’s scream each time : “Enough !” The same cry that I make, the same prayer that I have repeated in telephone calls to heads of state, in appeals to those who have the grave responsibility to govern nations. “Enough ! Bring an end to the noise of weapons. Think of the children.”
Some time ago, i was shown a drawing that illustrated the eternal conflict in Afghanistan. It was the outline of a maimed child, with a dotted line in place of the face. By it was written : “If you want to understand what war is, stick a photograph of your child here.” This is the war, the terror that is not captured on the films taken by drones but in the wards of field hospitals : in Kabul or in Kiev, in a kibbutz or in Gaza, or Tyre. To think of all those children as your own children is the antidote to the dehumanization that transforms every just claim to existence into an increasingly bloody battle for the non-existence of the other. »