“Peace be with you all. Towards an unarmed and disarming peace” is the theme of Pope Leo XIV’s Message for the World Day of Peace 2026 which will be celebrated on January 1, 2026.
The Pope invites everyone to welcome peace and become witnesses to it because it “exists; it wants to dwell within us. It has the gentle power to enlighten and expand our understanding; it resists and overcomes violence. Peace is a breath of the eternal”. Christians must become witnesses, and quoting St. Augustine, the Pope invites them ” to forge an unbreakable bond with peace”. We are all invited to walk this path traced by Jesus. He himself embodied unarmed peace because “his was an unarmed struggle”.
Peace is a gift that must be safeguarded, in fact if it “is not a reality that is lived, cultivated and protected, then aggression spreads into domestic and public life” and one can fall into the trap of thinking that in order to achieve it, one must prepare for war by embodying the “irrationality of relations between nations, built not on law, justice and trust, but on fear and domination by force”…
- Read the Message for World Day of Peace 2026 here
- Watch the video clip (2:24)
