The opening words of Pope Leo XIV’s papacy, ‘Peace be with you all!’, have come to hold a prophetic tone. Whether through condemnations of war, calls for dialogue, or prayer vigils for peace, Pope Leo has consistently been seen to make manifest the greetings of peace that Jesus spoke to his disciples. Indeed, a recent article from Vatican News claims that the word “peace” has appeared over four-hundred times in Pope Leo’s addresses alone. In his 2026 World Day of Peace message, Pope Leo describes the peace of Christ as ‘unarmed and disarming’. But what exactly does Pope Leo mean by a peace that disarms and is unarmed? In what follows, some of the key features of the phrase that has come to mark Pope Leo’s first year of papacy will be unpacked, showing its theological rooting and realistic applicability.
Peace is the Way of Christ
Pope Leo positions an unarming and disarming peace as lying at the heart of the Gospel; it is the way of Christ. He speaksof how ‘I have often mentioned that the peace of the risen Lord is “unarmed.” … because he always responded to violence and aggression in an unarmed way’. Indeed, as Pope Leo proclaimed during his Easter Urbi et Orbi message ‘The power with which Christ rose is entirely nonviolent’. Here Pope Leo speaks to the way in which Jesus disarms the violence of the world with the unarmed nonviolent love of God. This is exemplified not only through the Cross but also through Jesus’ teachings to ‘love your enemies’, the way in which Jesus practiced constructive peacemaking through solidarity with the marginalized, defying laws of exclusion, preached forgiveness and reconciliation as practices which interrupt and disarm the cycle of violence, and shared a vision of the positive peace of the Kingdom in the Sermon on the Mount.
Peace is a Gift
Pope Leo’s World Day of Peace Message refers to how Jesus asked the disciples ‘to follow this path to the end’, to which all Christians are called to ‘bear prophetic witness’. Pope Leo acknowledges the difficulty in following the way of Christ: ‘the Gospels do not hide the fact that what troubled the disciples was his nonviolent response’. However, Pope Leo reminds us that, before his arrest, Jesus leaves the disciples with his reassuring gift of peace: ‘Peace I leave with you; my peace I give to you’, and the first words Jesus speaks to his disciples after the Resurrection are similarly blessings of peace. Similarly, in his 2025 Urbi et Orbi message, Leo describes a peace that is disarmed and unarming as a gift, ‘the peace of the risen Christ’, a peace ‘that comes from God’. It is because we receive peace first as a gift, that we are emboldened to hope and work for peace.
Peace is Realistic
Furthermore, for Pope Leo, through the salvific work of Christ, peace is made inherently realistic. In his Urbi et Orbimessage this Easter, the pope speaks of how ‘Christ’s resurrection is the beginning of a new humanity; it is the entrance into the true promised land, where justice, freedom, and peace reign’. Through this we are assured that ‘evil is not the last word, because it has been defeated by the Risen One’. In his World Day of Peace Message, Leo affirms that the gift of peace, ‘truly brings about a lasting transformation in those who receive it, and consequently in all of reality’. Those who believe in the inevitability of violence ‘surrender to a partial and distorted view of the world, disfigured by darkness and fear’. Pope Leo warns: ‘When we treat peace as a distant ideal, we cease to be scandalised when it is denied, or even when war is waged in its name’. ‘Now more than ever’, Leo states, we must affirm that ‘peace is not a utopia’.
Peace is Nourished in Prayer
We are called to nourish the gift of peace within ourselves, to disarm our hearts. At the prayer vigil for peace this April, Pope Leo spoke of how it is through prayer that we can commit to ‘profound conversion of heart’. Through prayer we encounter God and enter into the logic of the Kingdom, and ‘leave behind whatever violence remains in our hearts and minds’. Leo continues:
Prayer teaches us how to act. In prayer, our limited human possibilities are joined to the infinite possibilities of God. Thoughts, words and deeds then break the demonic cycle of evil and are placed at the service of the Kingdom of God. A Kingdom in which there is no sword, no drone, no vengeance, no trivialization of evil, no unjust profit, but only dignity, understanding and forgiveness.
Rather than residing in a place of fear and distrust, which leads to the logic of deterrence through military might, prayer allows us to enter into the mystery that ‘we are a people who are already risen’, forming ‘the most selfless, universal and transformative response to death.’ Far from an act of retreat or passivity, prayer enables our own internal disarmament so that we may share the peace of God in the world.
Peace is Active and Nonviolent
As Pope Leo has expressed many times, Jesus’ peace is not only a gift to accept but is also a gift to be shared. Like popes before him, Leo regards peace as more than the cessation of war or violence. We are called not just to condemn violence but are imbued with a responsibility to be active peacemakers. This active and participatory vision of peacemaking is reflected in how Pope Leo speaks of a ‘Kingdom of peace that is built up day by day—in our homes, schools, neighborhoods, and civil and religious communities…Everyone has a place in the mosaic of peace!’
This co-creation of peace is concretized through practices of nonviolence. In his Arena of Peace Address, Pope Leo reiterated that ‘Non-violence, as a method and a style, must distinguish our decisions, our relationships and our actions’, highlighting particular methods of active nonviolence such as mediation, reconciliation, restorative justice, encounter, solidarity, and nonviolent language. In his June 2025 Address to the Italian Episcopal Conference, Pope Leo notes the necessity of educating for nonviolence and conflict resolution so that such methods can be infused within society: ‘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’.
To Unarm and to Disarm
Pope Leo’s understanding of a peace that is unarmed and a peace that disarms reaffirms the centrality of Jesus’ example of nonviolence which actively counters, interrupts, and disarms violence through the unarmed power of nonviolence. Through Jesus’ gift of peace, a new mode of engagement emerges in which peace becomes not a far-off dream, but a tangible reality to be accepted. Through prayer, we can encounter the peace of God which transforms and disarms our own interior violence, equipping us to go forth in sharing God’s peace in the world. This is not a peace that can be achieved through recourse to violence, nor does it retreat from the complexities and conflict of human life. Rather, it confronts violence nonviolently and cultivates practices and institutions of peace that seed the disarmament of society and enable a just peace to flourish.
The consistency and insistence of Pope Leo’s focus within his addresses bears testimony to the import of peace. We also see within Pope Leo’s own practices how peace may yield fruit. In the debates within the US over the war with Iran, the pope has continued to call for peace and reconciliation, affirming the Gospel message and causing pause for thought among American Catholics.
Pope Leo’s vision of peace is one that exists not just at the level of papal leadership and diplomacy, but at all levels of society, which all of us have a responsibility to live, develop, and safeguard. Through his teachings and his own actions, Pope Leo calls on the Church to participate by exemplifying and sharing the witness and example given to us by Christ. Though nonviolence has all too often been dismissed as idealistic, Pope Leo, in line with developments within socio-political research, uplifts the effectiveness of nonviolent peacemaking, and importantly, centres it within the life of the Church:
‘Peace is not a spiritual utopia: it is a humble path, made up of daily gestures that interweave patience and courage, listening and action, and which demands today, more than ever, our vigilant and generative presence’.
A version of this essay was published in the Pastoral Review 22.3 (July/August/September 2026) pp.26-28.