Pope Leo XIV has renewed his call for peace and the abolition of nuclear weapons in the foreword to a new book, Disarmed and Disarming: Peace Is a Gift, published in Italian by the Vatican’s Libreria Editrice Vaticana on July 21 and collecting his addresses on peace since his 2025 election, Vatican News reported.
The Pope opened with his first words as pontiff—"Peace be with you”—and warned that “today, a good 103 states are involved in some way in a war on Earth,” naming Ukraine, the Middle East, Sudan, Myanmar, Yemen, and Congo. Echoing John Paul II, he called recourse to war, after Hiroshima and Nagasaki, “ever more an ‘adventure with no return.’” In a passage aimed at the drive to hand war-making to artificial intelligence, Leo wrote that “a world in which machines, albeit sophisticated and faster than us, are the ones to decide to bomb defenseless people would be truly frightening.”
The foreword is also a rebuke to Washington. Church officials have condemned the U.S. attack on Iran; when President Trump claimed the Pope “would rather talk about the fact that it’s OK for Iran to have a nuclear weapon,” Leo answered that “the Church has spoken for years against all nuclear weapons.” An English edition is due in the coming months.
