Pope Leo XIV during an audience with the media on May 12, 2025. Photo by Edgar Beltrán, The Pillar, and available on Wikimedia Commons license CC BY-SA 4.0.
Pope Leo’s Message for Peace and Disarmament
Pope Leo focuses on the need for disarmament at many levels in his message for World Day of Peace as the U.S. and Russia move closer to the end of the last remaining arms control treaty between the two nuclear powers.
The world is standing at a dangerous crossroads. As we enter the New Year, we are just weeks away from the expiration of the New START Treaty—the last remaining guardrail preventing an all-out nuclear arms race between the U.S. and Russia.
This is just one of many broken relationships in the world today. To meet this fraught moment, Pope Leo has given us a vision for peace.
Don’t miss Pope Leo’s message for the World Day of Peace, available on the Vatican website. Describing the peace of Christ as “unarmed and disarming,” Leo presents a call to action centered on the concept of “disarmament”—not just of weapons, but of the human heart and modern technology. This prophetic call is what the world desperately needs right now—a world that is on the brink of a new nuclear arms race.
Please use the form on our website to tell Congress to speak out for extending the New START Treaty and reopening negotiations with Russia. If this treaty expires on February 5, 2026, there will be no legal limits on the world’s two largest nuclear arsenals for the first time in decades. We need a groundswell of public pressure to ensure that members of Congress publicly support extending the treaty and demand a return to the negotiating table.
Faith in action
Read Pope Leo’s World Peace Day message for the World Day of Peace.
Tell Congress to support extending the New START treaty.
Photo: Pope Leo XIV, available in the public domain via Wiki Commons.
