Pope Leo’s Focus on Peace and Nonviolence

“Peace be with you all!” Pope Leo XIV’s first greeting to the world from the balcony of St. Peter’s Basilica on May 8 set the tone for what has become a consistent and prominent theme for the new leader of the Catholic Church. He described the peace he wished to share as “the peace of the risen Christ – an unarmed peace and a disarming peace, humble and persevering.”

The pope’s words draw an immediate connection between nonviolence and peace, and evoke the Catholic notion of “integral disarmament,” introduced by John XIII and repeated often by Pope Francis, by which we must disarm hearts — our own, then others’ — of “poison and resentment,” the roots of violence and war, in order to achieve lasting military disarmament.

In the following days, Leo echoed this call, speaking to a group of journalists of “disarmed and disarming communication,” freed from aggression, “capable of listening and of gathering the voices of the weak who have no voice. Let us disarm words and we will help disarm the world.”

Here, we are reminded of another prominent theme for the new pope: that of a synodal church. Synodality is, in large part, a way for the church as an institution to practice that same communication, with an emphasis on deep listening.

Pax Christi, the Catholic peace movement, has explored in depth the ways synodality is an expression of gospel nonviolence. Sister Filo Hirota, who served on the seven-person committee convened by Pope Francis to organize the Synod on Synodality in Rome, and is a member of the steering committee for Pax Christi  International’s Catholic Nonviolence Initiative (CNI), says she believes the synod “is a journey toward evangelical nonviolence.”

Another leader of the CNI, DePaul professor Ken Butigan, writes that by aspiring to become a church where, in Leo’s word’s, “synodality becomes a mindset, in the heart, in decision-making processes and in ways of acting,” our new pope has  “sketched a vision of a culture of nonviolence that the Church can nourish concretely in the midst of the challenges and realities of this wounded world.”

CNI leadership has been following closely the pope’s many public reflections and addresses, and compiling his teachings on peace and nonviolence. In an article entitled “Pope Leo and the Nonviolent Way Forward,” Butigan says that Leo has “made unmistakably clear that peace is at the heart of the Gospel, peace is at the core of the mission of the Church, and peace will be central to his papacy.”

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(H)is call for peace has also, like that of his predecessor, relentlessly denounced the terror of war in Ukraine, Myanmar, Israel, Gaza, Sudan, and other nations… (There are 196 references to war in Pope Leo’ addresses and Vatican News reports since his becoming pope.)

But Pope Leo is not simply condemning specific wars.  He has emphasized that “we must reject the paradigm of war,” indicating that our task in this time is not simply to hope for peace but to “prepare institutions of peace” and to build a “culture of life, dialogue, mutual respect.”

In this spirit, he has pointed to nonviolence as key to achieving this alternative paradigm, by emphasizing the need for “witnesses of a different, nonviolent life style” and “credible protagonists of nonviolent processes of peacebuilding.”

“Nonviolence as a method and as a style must distinguish our decisions, our relationships, our actions,” the pope has declared.

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In an address to some 200 Italian bishops at the Vatican on June 17, Pope Leo invites the whole church, in concrete terms, to live nonviolence: “I hope…that every diocese may promote pathways of education in nonviolence, mediation initiatives in local conflicts, and welcoming projects that transform fear of the other into an opportunity for encounter. May every community become a ‘house of peace,’ where one learns how to defuse hostility through dialogue, where justice is practiced and forgiveness is cherished.”

Butigan concludes, “In the first days of his pontificate, Pope Leo is teaching us anew how nonviolence — defusing violence, dispelling hatred, returning to the foundations of our faith, and living ‘unarmed and disarming’ — is the way to peace at the heart of the Gospel. Now is the time, His Holiness seems to be saying, to build a culture of nonviolence and peace in the Church and the world.”

Faith in Action: Read the whole article by Ken Butigan, “Pope Leo and the Nonviolent Way Forward,” here: https://mogc.me/Leo-XIV-peace and Pope Leo’s June 26 message to the Eastern Catholic Churches here: https://mogc.me/Leo-XIV-6-2025