The Community of Sant’Egidio opened its international meeting “Unarmed and Disarming Peace” in Assisi on Oct. 25. The meeting marks the 40th anniversary of the day of prayer for peace that Pope John Paul II convened there in 1986. It runs through Oct. 27, with the remote participation of Pope Leo XIV, who is recovering from surgery. EIR’s correspondents at the opening session singled out two speeches.

Cardinal Matteo Zuppi, Archbishop of Bologna and president of the Italian Bishops’ Conference, who served as Pope Francis’s peace envoy for Ukraine in 2023, said that prayer “is a rebellion against war, against its logic, against the many forms of complicity, against the subtle desensitization through which we grow accustomed to pain.... Never can the name of God bless war.” Over the past 40 years, he said, “we have seen many prophets of doom—those who... incite war that is always waged by others,... sowing division, inciting hatred, and seeking enemies rather than brothers and sisters.” Today “the prevailing vortex leads us to believe that rearmament is indispensable, a vortex that invariably results in further rearmament,” and “a coarse and ignorant culture of power” has spread, discrediting international organizations and appearing “in the temptation to construct a collective identity in opposition to an enemy.” That, he said, is quite different from “organising the necessary defense, which is always proportionate and always accompanied by dialogue and appropriate diplomatic means.” Zuppi also warned, according to ANSA, that “arsenals, joined with artificial intelligence, make war tragically more inhuman,” and concluded, “Only the unarmed can disarm.”

Zuppi quoted Pope Leo XIV’s warning that “the force of international law is thus replaced by the so-called ‘right of the strongest,’” and John XXIII’s Pacem in Terris, which held that when one nation arms, “the others must keep pace,” and called for nuclear weapons to be banned.