Peace is anything but trite or futile. It is our way to a fuller life, a life ordered to the flourishing for which God made us. Pope Leo’s invocation of peace is a demonstration of his love for all peoples and his zeal for their salvation.
Peace is an early theme of Pope Leo XIV’s pontificate. In fact, it was the first public word he uttered as the Roman Pontiff: “Peace be with you!”—using the Risen Lord’s words to the disciples after the Resurrection (John 20:19). Since then he has called for an end to the wars in Ukraine and Gaza, has offered to mediate peace talks between the Ukraine and Russia, and most recently, a book of his early speeches and homilies entitled Let There Be Peace has just been published.
The cynics among us may think that calling for an end to war is futile or even a farce. Calling for peace is a tired campaign and seems unlikely to happen, they say, so we should spend our effort elsewhere. We may even be tempted to think that these conflicts do not concern us because they are far away. However, for Pope Leo, the absence of war or conflict is not a goal unto itself, it is part of a larger vision.
Saint Augustine—whom the Holy Father quotes frequently and for whom he has a strong devotion owing to his vocation as an Augustinian friar—defined peace as the “tranquility of order” (City of God, Bk. XIX, Ch. 13). This order is established by Almighty God, the Creator of all things. God, in his wisdom, sees the whole picture of the universe at once. God not only creates each individual creature, but he puts it in an order relative to other creatures, as we read in the creation account in Genesis 1. Man is especially blessed in this regard because he is made in the image of God (cf. Gen 1:27). Thus, man is the crown of all creation. God has blessed man with a mind that grasps the divinely created order and a heart which desires to be conformed to it. We sin by acting contrary to the very order God has designed for our flourishing. When we live in accord with what God has designed, our lives are made whole, marked by the peace which God has planned for us. Hence in Psalm 119 we read, “Lovers of your law have great peace.”
Jesus Christ, the Son of God, comes into the world to show us how this divine order is meant to be lived out. Our Lord Jesus takes on our humanity in every way but sin. He is the perfectly ordered man. He has no selfishness, no division, no hatred in his heart, only love for the Father and all that the Father has created. For this reason, he is called Wisdom Incarnate. From his interior peace, he distributes his peace outwards to those who follow him, as he tells the disciples: “Peace I leave you, my peace I give you” (John 14:27). Likewise, we read in Matthew’s Gospel, “Blessed are the peacemakers for they will be called children of God” (Matt 5:9).
We are all marked by the sin of Adam. We all have divisions in our hearts whereby we love ourselves more than we love God and our neighbor. This is manifested on a larger scale with conflicts in our families, country, or church. As Christians, our peace comes by conforming ourselves to Jesus Christ, the Son of God. The more we imitate him the more peace we cultivate in ourselves and in those around us, the more we share in his divine sonship. This will hopefully be fully realized for us in heaven.
Peace is anything but trite or futile. It is our way to a fuller life, a life ordered to the flourishing for which God made us. Pope Leo’s invocation of peace is a demonstration of his love for all peoples and his zeal for their salvation. All human beings are made for one thing: life with God in heaven. By cultivating our interior peace in conformity to that of Jesus Christ, the world’s true peace, we become peacemakers in the world around us and help our world to reflect that of the world to come.
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Republished with gracious permission from Dominicana (September 2025).
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