Vatican News called attention in its editorial today to the great danger hanging over all our heads: “the risk of humanity destroying itself” through nuclear war. Under the headline, “The Magisterium of the Popes and Nuclear Weapons,” illustrated by a photograph of the savagely-destroyed city of Hiroshima, Vatican News’s Editorial Director Andrea Tornielli gathered in one editorial short citations from each of the seven Popes who have served since the atomic bombings of Japan in August 1945, starting with Pius XII’s Christmas Radio Message of 1955 warning that “there will be no cry of victory, but only the inconsolable weeping of humanity, which will desolately contemplate the catastrophe brought about by its own folly,” to today’s Pope, Leo XIV, who since assuming the Papacy in May 2025, has issued multiple statements decrying the existence of these weapons “with the power to cause an indescribable catastrophe.”
In his General Audience on August 6, 2025—the 80th anniversary of the bombing of Hiroshima—Pope Leo issued an appeal: “Despite the passing of the years, those tragic events constitute a universal warning against the devastation caused by wars and, in particular, by nuclear weapons…. I hope that in the contemporary world, marked by strong tensions and bloody conflicts, the illusory security based on the threat of mutual destruction may give way to the tools of justice, to the practice of dialogue, and to trust in fraternity.”
