“There is no such thing as a holy war: only peace is holy,” Pope Leo XIV told religious leaders gathered in Assisi on Tuesday, in a video message marking 40 years since St. John Paul II’s World Day of Prayer for Peace.
Leo was planning to attend the event, but was prevented from doing so because of his recovery from lung surgery on Oct. 13.
Pope John Paul II held the first Assisi meeting during the Cold War, which Pope Leo said was “a very different situation from the one we face today.”
“After 1989 [when the Berlin Wall fell, marking the end of the Cold War], many believed that globalization would ensure lasting peace for the world,” he said.
“Unfortunately, as I wrote in Magnifica Humanitas, ‘an almost blind faith was placed in the ability of the markets to generate prosperity, democracy and stability. In reality, rather than automatically generating unity and peace, globalization has provoked fundamentalist, identity-based and nationalistic reactions’,” Leo explained.
It is interesting that the 71-year-old pope echoed the decades-old debate highlighted in Francis Fukuyama’s 1989 essay in The National Interest entitled, “The End of History?”
Fukuyama’s thesis was countered by Samuel Huntington’s 1993 essay in Foreign Affairs, “The Clash of Civilizations?”
Huntington predicted that future conflicts would follow cultural and religious lines, not the political ideology of the Cold War.
Many say this 1990s debate was answered by the 9/11 attacks on the United States in 2001.
Pope Leo told Assisi there has been a “troubling revival of war as an instrument of international politics,” quoting his encyclical.
“As the Catechism of the Catholic Church states, ‘the accumulation of arms strikes many as a paradoxically suitable way of deterring potential adversaries from war. They see it as the most effective means of ensuring peace among nations’, thus betraying the memory of the twentieth century and the senseless slaughter of millions of human lives,” the pontiff said.
Leo was echoing – again – another papal statement, this one going further back than the Cold War and even further back than World War II.
Writing about the ongoing First World War on Aug. 1, 1917, Pope Benedict XV said the conflict “appears more and more a senseless slaughter.”
Over 100 years ago, Benedict XV spoke about how his appeals for peace were ignored, and the World War continued “with all its horrors.”
“Indeed, it grew more bitter and spread over land and sea, and even into the air, so that desolation and death descended upon defenseless cities, upon peaceful villages and upon their innocent inhabitants,” the World War I pope said.
“Must the civilized world, then, be reduced to a field of death?” the pope asked.
Benedict XV asked if Europe must be “swept along by a universal madness, into the abyss, towards a true and genuine suicide?”
In the 21st century, Pope Leo XIV did not specifically mention the First World War.
That war certainly did have its religious dimension, both with the rise of atheistic Communism in the former Russian Empire and anti-Christian attacks during the fall of the Ottoman Empire.
However, he did say there is a need to cultivate the “spirit of Assisi” formed in 1986, which the pope said entails rejecting the religious justification of war, a spirit of mediation and dialogue, and contemplative reflection combined with creative action in the service of a future of peace.
“Yes, peace must once again become the common ideal of all peoples, the guiding star for all our choices, the standard that exposes injustice, and the shared horizon for all,” Pope Leo said.
“We must rebuild peace everywhere, not prepare for more wars. War can never be waged in the name of God,” he said.
Leo didn’t mention any specific conflicts in his video address.
It is impossible, however, to dismiss the fact that it was released in the wake of attacks on Christian Orthodox religious rituals in Jordan and Ethiopia. Religious attitudes also shape the ongoing conflicts in the Holy Land.
The pope did emphasize there is no such thing as a holy war, saying, “Only peace is holy.”
“That is why the journey begun in Assisi as a shared quest for peace is, first and foremost, the path of prayer,” Pope Leo said.
“Prayer may seem weak in the face of the powers of the world, but it is the humble strength of believers,” he said. “Let us turn to God, the giver of peace, that he may touch the hearts of those who seek war and terrorism. Let us not forget that prayer is never in vain.”
This message is for religious leaders. It remains to be seen if they will all heed it.
Follow Charles Collins on X: @CharlesinRome
