In the first year of his pontificate, Pope Leo XIV has appealed hundreds of times for a reconciliation that is “unarmed and disarming,” and urged the “lords of war” to listen to “a melody greater than ourselves.”
By Edoardo Giribaldi
“Unarmed and disarming.” With these words, at sunset on 8 May 2025—the dawn of his pontificate—Pope Leo XIV described his vision of peace.
It is not the silence of weapons that comes from a ceasefire, he explained on Christmas morning, distancing himself even more clearly from the fragile agreements of international geopolitics.
Such agreements risk making every appeal for reconciliation seem disarming in the negative sense: stripping people of the will to react, respond or resist. It is that “great weariness” that threatens to seep into hearts and empty words of meaning.
During the Urbi et Orbi Blessing on 25 December, he pointed to the horizon of a “wild peace,” inspired by the poet Yehuda Amichai: a reconciliation that springs up “suddenly,” like wild “flowers,” those that stubbornly, with seeming naïveté, grow through cracks in the concrete. “May it come,” Pope Leo said of that harmony, “because the field needs it.”
More than 400 mentions of “peace”
The word “peace” appears more than 400 times in the addresses delivered by the Bishop of Rome during the first year of his pontificate. It has been applied in different contexts, beginning with members of the press, who attended the Pope’s first meeting in the Paul VI Hall.
“You are on the front lines” in reporting wars and uncovering the aspirations for reconciliation within them, the Pope said, encouraging them to promote a form of communication “capable of leading us out of the ‘Tower of Babel’ in which we sometimes find ourselves, out of the confusion of loveless languages, often ideological or partisan.”
For peace does not rest beneath banners. Above all, peace is not naïve. Therefore, it is useless for “the lords of war” to pretend “not to know that it takes only a moment to destroy, but often not even a lifetime is enough to rebuild.” It is useless, too, for them to pretend “not to see that billions of dollars are needed to kill and devastate, while the resources needed to heal, educate and lift people up cannot be found.”
There is no use pretending, because “people are beginning to realize the amount of money that ends up in the pockets of merchants of death,” Pope Leo said when meeting participants in the plenary assembly of the Reunion of Aid Agencies for the Oriental Churches (ROACO). He exposed the paradox, adding: “Money that could be used to build new hospitals and schools is instead being used to destroy those that already exist!”
The consequences of war
From the Pope’s first mentions of peace in the Vatican to his latest words, spoken less than a month ago in the heart of Africa, in Bamenda, Cameroon, during a meeting in St. Joseph’s Cathedral precisely to promote reconciliation with the local community, Pope Leo’s message of communion stretches across different temporal and geographical dimensions.
Above all, the harmony evoked by the Pope goes beyond the heights of the palaces where the “lords of war” decide on “actions of death”; it bends down over the devastated and helpless bodies of those who “feed only on despair, tears and misery.”
These words resounded at the headquarters of the FAO, the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization, as a reminder of one of the many dramatic side effects of conflict: hunger.
Depth, closeness: the knee bends, offering, as described in the homily for the Mass in Coena Domini on Holy Thursday, the image of a God who is almighty in service.
The idols that fuel conflicts
Holy Week itself marked one of the high points of the Bishop of Rome’s appeals for peace.
On the morning of Palm Sunday, he reiterated that no one can justify war in the name of God: God “does not listen to the prayer of those who wage war, and rejects it, saying: ‘Even though you multiply your prayers, I will not listen; your hands are full of blood.’”
As the Successor of Peter, the Pope bends down over the wounds of war. He looks from below upward, while at the same time rising above those who are “enslaved to death” because they have turned “their backs on the living God in order to make themselves and their own power a mute, blind and deaf idol.”
Thus, just as his words encompass the full breadth of peace, Pope Leo leaves out none of the idols that feed today’s conflicts. If it is not the thirst for power, it is often the thirst for money, as he recalled during his journey to the Principality of Monaco.
Pope Leo releases a dove as a symbol of peace in Cameroon (@Vatican Media)
The lightness of reconciliation
The words spoken during Holy Week after the Rosary to invoke the gift of peace were heavy but counterbalanced by an idea of harmony that is also lightness. He spoke of harmony that does not tread upon the earth except to dance to the rhythm of music, as he recalled in Lebanon.
“It is like an interior movement that flows outward, enabling us to let ourselves be guided by a melody greater than ourselves, the melody of divine love,” he reassured the people of a country that, like few others, feels the groans of war.
Between dance and journey, then, peace is something to be reached, with the certainty that one day it will be attained. Otherwise, the theme chosen by the Pope for the 59th World Day of Peace would be emptied of meaning: “toward” a peace that is, precisely, “unarmed and disarming.”
The audacity of disarmament
The Pope’s appeals touch on the concrete reality of conflicts and one of their most evident triggers: the arms race.
As the Bishop of Rome himself recalled, global military spending rose by 9.4% in 2024, confirming an uninterrupted ten-year trend and reaching 2.718 trillion dollars, or 2.5% of global GDP.
“Lay down your sword!” the Pope urged the powerful of the world, taking up the words of Jesus and inviting them to have “the audacity of disarmament” during the Marian Vigil for peace in October 2025.
Today, weapons have changed: from swords to drones, which distort the image of war into “the scenario of a video game.” Yet war remains a dramatic reality to which we must not grow accustomed, as he forcefully insisted at the end of the General Audience of 18 June 2025.
Sport and culture: instruments of reconciliation
On the contrary, it is necessary to find creative ways to avoid “indifference toward the law.” These words come from a letter the Pope wrote precisely to identify one such vehicle of communion: the value of sport, which teaches that in a competition—but above all in life—“a fall is never the final word.”
Christians themselves, Pope Leo said at the General Audience of 3 September 2025, do not conquer evil by force, “but by fully accepting the weakness of love.”
Communion also passes through contemplation and the value of study, promoting, as he asked the Italian bishops, “paths of education in nonviolence.” Speaking of peace, the Pope recognized the need for “a realignment of policies” linked to education, one that encourages a “culture of memory” capable of preserving “the awareness gained in the twentieth century” and not forgetting its millions of victims.
“After centuries of history, how can anyone believe that acts of war bring about peace and not backfire on those who commit them?” he asked, again addressing ROACO.
Everything can be forgotten, even “the light,” the Pontiff acknowledged. And so may “wild peace” come: the stubborn flower in the midst of the concrete, with a disarming beauty.
