ASSISI, Italy (CNS) – A common thread ran through many of the speeches and invocations of this year’s “prayer for peace” encounter in Assisi: the uneasy sense that the world is facing not merely conflicts and wars, but a much broader crisis that affects social and cultural life in every country.

Environmental damage, the rich-poor divide, erosion of cultural traditions, terrorism and new threats to society’s weakest members were cited as increasingly worrisome developments by speakers at the interfaith gathering in Assisi.

Pope Benedict XVI, addressing the 300 participants, echoed those points in his own analysis of the state of global peace 25 years after Blessed John Paul II convened the first Assisi meeting.

In 1986, he noted, the world was caught up not only in simmering armed conflicts but also in a cold war between two opposing blocs.  Today, the Cold War is over and there is “no threat of a great war hanging over us,” but “nevertheless the world is, unfortunately, full of discord,” he said.

The pope said this discord has taken on “new and frightening guises,” and he singled out two forms: terrorism, including acts of violence that are religiously motivated; and the spiritual erosion that has occurred in highly secularized societies.

“The worship of Mammon, possessions and power is proving to be a counter-religion, in which it is no longer man who counts but only personal advantage,” he said. He cited the illegal drug trade and drug dependency to show how desire for happiness today can degenerate into “an unbridled, inhuman craving.”

Twenty-five years ago, the success of the Assisi prayer summit was measured in part by how many warring parties respected Pope John Paul’s call for a one-day truce.  In the 2011 edition, there was no truce call and no mention of specific conflicts by participants, with the exception of a brief reference to Jerusalem as a contested city.

That’s not because wars have disappeared from the horizon, but because world harmony is seen as threatened in alarming new ways.