Prayer for Permanent Peace?

As Becky Roach describes on her blog, Donald Trump has called for this upcoming Memorial Day to be a day of prayer for "permanent peace".  "Regardless of how you feel about President Trump’s policies and actions, we can all agree that praying for permanent peace throughout the world is a non-partisan desire," she writes.  OK, what she clearly meant was that permanent peace throughout the world is a non-partisan desire for which we can all pray, not that the prayer itself is the desire, but even so, is this something we can all agree to pray for?  I don't think so.

Suppose your granddad is still alive.  You love your granddad, and you hate the thought of one day losing him.  Should you pray for his life and health?  Absolutely.  Would it be wrong to pray that the Lord will grant him many years?  By no means; that is a good thing to pray for.  What about praying that he never undergo death at all?

That is a problem, because "it is appointed unto men once to die, and after this the judgment".  God has already made known His will in the matter, to pray contrary to that revealed will is to have the wrong attitude toward prayer.  I have already written something about this, and I will say more in my next post.

It is the same with peace.  We should pray for peace in our day, and for a peace that lasts a long time, but it has already been revealed that permanent peace will only come with the return of Christ.  

676 The Antichrist's deception already begins to take shape in the world every time the claim is made to realize within history that messianic hope which can only be realized beyond history through the eschatological judgment. The Church has rejected even modified forms of this falsification of the kingdom to come under the name of millenarianism, especially the "intrinsically perverse" political form of a secular messianism.

We can pray for the return of Christ, of course (671 ... That is why Christians pray, above all in the Eucharist, to hasten Christ's return by saying to him: Marana tha! "Our Lord, come!") , but that is not what is really being urged.