«During 2024, global military spending increased by 9.4% compared to the previous year, confirming the uninterrupted trend for ten years and reaching the figure of 2,718 billion dollars, or 2.5% of global GDP». Pope Leo says it clearly in his first message for the Day of Peace. The celebration, wanted at the time by Paul VI, marks the beginning of each year. For 2026 Prevost relaunches the phrase he said immediately, looking out from the Loggia of Blessings, at the moment of the election, titling the text: «Peace be with you all. Towards a disarmed and disarming peace.” The Pontiff denounces “the enormous economic effort for rearmament” with which they want to respond to today’s challenges. Not only those educational policies which, «instead of a culture of memory, which preserves the awareness developed in the twentieth century and does not forget the millions of victims» instead promotes «communication campaigns and educational programs, in schools and universities, as well as in the media, which spread the perception of threats and transmit a merely armed notion of defense and security».
But, to quote Saint Augustine, «He who truly loves peace also loves the enemies of peace» and with them, rather than insisting «with the register of reproach», he prefers the path «of listening and, as far as possible, of meeting the reasons of others».
Pope Leo, in the 26 pages of the message, he recalls how revolutionary the phrase «Peace be with you» is which «is the peace of the risen Christ, a disarmed peace and a disarming, humble and persevering peace. It comes from God, God who loves us all unconditionally.” A peace that broke down, with the resurrection, the walls of separation between human beings.
He makes no concessions, he talks about today’s difficulties, the contrast between darkness and light that grips us too: «It is an experience that passes through us and shocks us in relation to the trials we encounter, in the historical circumstances in which we find ourselves living. Well, seeing the light and believing in it is necessary to avoid sinking into the darkness.” Despite all the attempts to keep us in despair, the Pontiff writes, “peace exists, it wants to live there, it has the gentle power to illuminate and broaden intelligence, it resists violence and overcomes it. Peace has the breath of the eternal: while to evil one shouts “enough”, to peace one whispers “forever”. The Risen One introduced us into this horizon.”
He speaks of a third world war in pieces, taking up Pope Francis’ definition and asks believers and non-believers to open up to peace which, as he also said in Lebanon, “before a destination, is a journey”. «Although thwarted both inside and outside of us, like a small flame threatened by the storm, let us guard it without forgetting the names and stories of those who witnessed it to us. It is a principle that guides and determines our choices.”
And although many of us feel gripped by what Pope Leo defines as the globalization of impotence, the testimony of many who have managed to find peace and sow it despite the pain and suffering they have endured, as the presence of Agnese Moro, daughter of the Christian Democrat president kidnapped and killed by the Red Brigades in 1978, also explains well, invites us not to lose hope.
Following the example of Jesus who, before being captured and put to death, tells his disciples «Peace I leave with you, my peace I give you. Not as the world gives it, I give it to you.” And he immediately added: “Do not let your heart be troubled and do not be afraid.” The disturbance, Leone writes, “”could, of course, concern the violence that would soon befall Him. More profoundly, the Gospels do not hide the fact that what disconcerted the disciples was his non-violent response: a path that everyone, Peter first, contested, but on which the Master asked every last one to follow him. The way of Jesus continues to be a source of disturbance and fear. And He firmly repeats to those who would like to defend Him: “Put your sword back in its sheath”. The peace of the risen Jesus is disarmed, because his struggle was disarmed, within precise historical, political and social circumstances. Christians must, together, prophetically bear witness to this novelty, mindful of the tragedies in which they have too often been complicit.”
We cannot treat peace as something distant and inaccessible, explains Leone, because otherwise «we end up not considering it scandalous that it can be denied and that war is even waged to achieve peace. The right ideas, the well-considered phrases, the ability to say that peace is near seem to be missing. If peace is not a reality experienced and to be preserved and cultivated, aggression spreads in domestic and public life. In the relationship between citizens and rulers, we come to consider it a fault that we do not prepare enough for war, to react to attacks, to respond to violence. Far beyond the principle of self-defence, on a political level this contrasting logic is the most current fact in a planetary destabilization which is taking on greater drama and unpredictability every day.”
Not surprisingly, the text continues «the repeated appeals to increase military spending and the choices that follow are presented by many governments with the justification of the dangerousness of others. In fact, the dissuasive force of power, and, in particular, nuclear deterrence, embody the irrationality of a relationship between peoples based not on law, justice and trust, but on fear and the dominion of force.” This is a danger that the council fathers had already seen who, in Gaudium et Spes, reiterated the responsibilities of the political classes in pursuing peace. The world war was not a distant memory and the Church wanted to mark the path of non-violence to stem conflicts and new wars.
«The characteristic risk of modern war consists in the fact that it almost offers the opportunity to those who possess the most modern scientific weapons to commit such crimes and, by a certain inexorable chain, can push the will of men to the most atrocious decisions. Therefore, so that this should never happen again in the future, the bishops of the whole world, now gathered, adjure everyone, in particular the rulers and the supreme military commanders, to continually consider, before God and before all humanity, the enormous weight of their responsibility”, they wrote then with an appeal that Leone also makes his own in his message when speaking of the new challenges posed, in the military field, by Artificial Intelligence.
And he concludes by taking up Leo XIII and his appeal to those who are called to public responsibilities in the highest and most qualified offices, so that they «consider in depth the problem of the peaceful recomposition of relations between political communities on a global level: a recomposition based on mutual trust, on sincerity in negotiations, on fidelity to the commitments undertaken. Let them scrutinize the problem until they identify the point where it is possible to begin the journey towards loyal, lasting, fruitful agreements.” This, says Leo
The Church, in a time of destabilization like this, is called to «motivate and support every spiritual, cultural and political initiative that keeps hope alive, countering the spread of “fatalistic attitudes, as if the dynamics underway were produced by anonymous impersonal forces and by structures independent of human will”. In fact, if “the best way to dominate and advance without limits is to sow the lack of hope and arouse constant distrust, even if masked with the defense of some values” to such a strategy the development of conscious civil societies, of forms of responsible associationism, of experiences of non-violent participation, of restorative justice practices on a small and large scale must be opposed.”
