Moved by this strong, insistent love for humankind we cannot take this   
occasion of the message which Your Excellency has kindly addressed to us to   
repeat an appeal made by us more than once in these past few years.  It is a   
prayer that everywhere, as far as humanly possible, the civil populations be   
spared the horrors of war; that the homes of God's poor be not laid in ashes;   
that the little ones and youth, a nation's hope, be preserved from all harm -   
how our heart bleeds when we hear of helpless children made victims of cruel   
war-; that churches dedicated to the worship of God and monuments that enshrine   
the memory and masterpieces of human genius be protected from destruction.  We   
repeat this appeal unwilling to yield to any thought of its hopelessness,   
although almost daily we must continue to deplore the evils against which we   
pray.  And now even in Rome, parent of western civilization and for well nigh   
two thousand years center of the Catholic world, to which millions, one may   
risk the assertion, hundreds of millions of men throughout the world have   
recently been turning their anxious gaze, we have had witness the harrowing   
scene of death leaping from the skies and stalking