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A symbolic image of the tragedy in London has circulated in the world’s media: the image of a woman wearing a white surgical mask against her burns, with the face of a first-aid worker beside her. All of us wished to know the true face and the story of Davinia, the young woman behind the mask. But the attempt to give a face and identity to the victims most mangled by the violence has been revealed, in the days following the massacre, an extremely arduous and daunting task. The police moreover have been devoting all their efforts and skills to giving a face and identity to the assassins. The way of violence proceeds by concealing and cancelling the faces, and leaving nothing but masks. The way of peace is that of revealing the personal face and story and grasping their unique and unrepeatable value. In recent days I saw the Mexican film Voces Inocentes by the director Luis Mandoki, dedicated to the civil war in El Salvador in the 1980s, which lasted for 12 years and caused some 80,000 dead and 8,000 ‘disappeared’. Albeit through the fiction of a film, I saw the faces of those who shot children and especially the faces of children massacred in cold blood, the face of their mothers. The 80,000 dead were no longer an anonymous mass, a news story consigned to the dustbin of history. I experienced the same emotions when I saw the real images of the massacre of the young men at Srebrenica 10 years ago: the faces of those who killed and those who were killed were seen and identified. With regard to London, some people have said: only some fifty people were killed, almost as if to say: all things considered it went well. But this is unacceptable: we are not dealing with an anonymous number 50, but 50 individual faces. We are perhaps becoming too inured to tragic images. When you see the faces, a fundamental question arises: how is it possible for man to kill his brother? How is it possible for someone to become so diabolic? Europe too is challenged to have the courage to re-embark on the search for a new approach, transcending its own security. A signal came from the G8 on European soil: the proper response to violence is to combat hunger, disease, exploitation.. But the path is long. Nations like China and India, for example, were not present at the summit of the G8: some two and a half billion people who are clamouring at the doors of our continent. And lastly, those experiences that claim to be religious, but that have nothing to do with a God who has a face, cancel the faces, in Europe too. Here the original task of Christians is posed: that of bearing witness to a God whose face was disfigured by humanity on the cross, depriving it of all beauty and splendour, and imposing on it the mask of pain. Just as in that photo from London. But the mask of the Crucified fell before the face of the Risen Lord.
