Pope Leo XIV, who has advocated for an end to wars since the beginning of his pontificate last year, calls for nuclear disarmament in a new book being published on Tuesday.
The book, “Unarmed and Disarming: Peace Is a Gift,” collects Leo’s speeches, homilies and writings on war, the role of diplomacy and resolving disputes without violence. In the book, the pope does not mention any nation by name, instead writing broadly about the dangers of the nuclear arms race.
“Above all in the atomic era, the affirmation of the truth must push through: it is not atomic weapons that generate peace, but disarmament,” the pope writes in a preface to the book. “This truth, which seemed clear in past decades when we witnessed a nuclear de-escalation, has been obscured by a race to armament that today frightens and terrifies.”
Earlier in the preface, Leo writes that “even those who make war claim to act ‘in the name’ of peace.’” He added: “No one has the audacity to declare that they want war for the sake of war: even the powerful of the Earth know that every person aspires to justice and wishes to live in peace.”
In recent months, the pope has emerged as a particular critic of the U.S.-Israeli war in Iran. On a flight to Spain in June, Leo said that “in Iran, the criteria for a just war are not present.”
President Trump has lashed out against the pope for opposing the war, criticizing him in April on social media as “terrible for foreign policy.” The pope, in turn, said he had “no fear, neither of the Trump administration, nor of speaking out loudly about the message of the Gospel.”
In an interview in late June, the U.S. ambassador to the Holy See, Brian Burch, said that when the pope spoke out against the war in Iran, he was not doing so as the leader of the Roman Catholic Church, but only as the sovereign political leader of the Vatican City-State.
The Vatican pushed back against that interpretation with an editorial by Andrea Tornielli, a senior Vatican official who helps run its communications department. The editorial was clear that even when the pope speaks about “war and peace, migration or how to remain human in the age of artificial intelligence,” he “remains, above all, a spiritual leader.” Mr. Tornielli also wrote that the pope, in speaking out against war, “is not speaking as a head of state. He is simply proclaiming the Gospel.”