On Nov. 8, the Schiller Institute-Peru published the following Open Letter to Pope Leo XIV, on the occasion of his Nov. 11-17, 2026 visit to Peru.
De pace fidei: Peace with Development, Peace with Justice
Dear Pope, “welcome home.” Peru welcomes you with an open heart. We welcome you not only as the Pope of Catholics but also as a moral guide—with ecumenical reach—to help the entire world establish lasting peace, with development and justice, in the face of the grave situation we face.
Your Holiness, the world cries out for your guidance. We are facing a moment in history in which security and peace are threatened by a global conflagration. The global crisis is systemic. What was once a unipolar, imperial international security architecture is collapsing, as wars and destabilization spread across entire countries and regions, instigated by those who seek to preserve their dominance. Conflicts are escalating and are fueled by the imminent collapse of the national debt and derivatives financial bubbles. The danger of a nuclear war looms over the planet.
For this reason, we reiterate the “Appeal to Pope Leo XIV to Organize a Global Leaders Summit to Address the Questions of Peace and Nuclear Disarmament”, which is circulating internationally with the endorsement of hundreds of pro-peace leaders and organizations around the world, including the Schiller Institute. This initiative could bear fruit at the summit meeting between Presidents Xi Jinping, Vladimir Putin, and Donald Trump, which will take place during the APEC meeting on November 18–19. This summit could become the starting point for a negotiation process in which, by identifying the common interests of humanity, a dialogue among civilizations is established, aimed at defining common ground on the principles and programs that should guide the construction of a New Security and Development Architecture.
Your Holiness, you have helped establish a moral direction for the solution. That summit could become the ecumenical starting point where the “coincidence of opposites”—a principle articulated by Cardinal Nicholas of Cusa (15th Century) in his work De pace fidei and elsewhere, which you have praised and which is highly applicable to the current crisis—is established. It was Cusa who introduced this concept, which invites warring parties to resolve their apparent disagreements based on their common principles and purposes. It is not a matter of one civilization imposing itself on another; each civilization has its own historical and cultural traditions, and has the right to preserve them, while it is the duty of others to respect them. The goal is to establish a genuine dialogue so that different civilizations can coexist without abandoning their own identities. All civilizations share common spiritual and moral principles, and we all bear responsibility for the legacy we will leave to future generations. It is a matter of identifying and respecting common global principles and interests to achieve peace, shared development, and the common good.
Your Holiness, the world cries out for your guidance. “You may be the only person who could hopefully avoid a descent into what you yourself have called an ‘irreparable abyss,’ an escalation of the unprovoked war against Iran into potentially a global nuclear war, which would end all life on Earth,” wrote Helga Zepp-LaRouche, the founder of the Schiller Institute, in an open letter she sent you last March.