On the occasion of the National Peace Consciousness Month promoted by the government thru the Office of the Presidential Adviser for Peace Process (OPAPP) for this month of September with the theme: “Healing as One Nation Recovering as a Better Generation”, we invite all to join this important event in the midst of so many problems caused by the pandemic and other divisions and conflicts.
This special month celebration started in 2004 with Proclamation Number 675 and along the years OPAPP has developed and promoted a lot of initiatives, including the Harmony Prayer introduced by the Silsilah Dialogue Movement in the year 2000. And now, thanks to OPAPP and other agencies and groups, it is spread in the country and around the world accompanied by the beautiful melody of the Harmony Prayer Song.
In the spirit of this celebration, we are happy to inform all that the UNI Harmony Partners Zamboanga (UNI-HP-Z) following the tradition from 2012 up to now is moving to organize the WIHW 2022 (February 1-7) promoting the theme, “Celebrating the spirit of Love and Hope as one family moving together to serve “our common home”.This theme was agreed by the partners of Zamboanga and now we share to other partner groups in Mindanao and other part of the country.
Every year, the theme starts with the word, “Celebrating” and over the years, we remain faithful to the message of “Celebrating”. It inspires us to continue to celebrate even now “in the spirit of Love and Hope” as one family. Saying, “One Family” moving in the Spirit of Love and Hope” reaffirms the importance of moving as the Human Family of people of different cultures and religions. The second part of the theme, “together to serve our common home” affirms the importance of serving together without any barriers. In serving, we also emphasize, as the last part of the theme says “Our Common Home” to remember the encyclical letter of Pope Francis’ “ Laudato Si’ ” where he strongly invites humanity to take care of our common home especially now. We observe the natural calamities that often happen because of the abuse of the environment that is becoming more visible we normally call it, “Climate Change”.
It is not easy to do initiatives in this difficult time including the celebration of the WIHW, but by experience, we know that this is possible. In fact, we continue to celebrate the international week promoted by the United Nations in 2010. Thanks to the efforts of the partners of Zamboanga it became the Republic Act No. 10525, “An act declaring the First Week of February of every year as World Interfaith Harmony Week (WIHW) in the entire country and mandating its observance by the different Government Agencies”.
We are happy that many local government authorities are officially supporting this celebration and CBCP has been in many ways in the frontline to encourage and support this celebration.
For more information about this event, you can visit https://worldinterfaithharmonyweek.com/ and https://harmonylink.info/ and you can contact us thru email at uniharmonypartners@gmail.com .