vaticannews.va
2026-05-23
"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 naivete, 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.