Popes for peace: Leo and Francis, and Pius and John

Leo seems to be more in line with Pius XII where Francis echoed St. John XXIII

From the first words of his first appearance, Pope Leo XIV has called for peace.

As a stylistic choice, greeting the crowd in St. Peter’s square with the traditional “peace be with you,” was a point of difference with his immediate predecessor Francis, who famously opened a simple “good evening.”

Pope Pius XII and the future Pope St. John XXIII. Public Domain.

But Leo’s first words as pope were not simply a stock phrase, as he went on to lay out the need for peace as the priority and mission of the Church in the world, calling for “the peace of the risen Christ.”

Of course, peace, especially in the global diplomatic order, is an urgent issue for both Francis and now for Leo.

If anything, the state of world affairs has deteriorated since Leo’s election, with conflict in the Middle East spreading to Iran now, in addition to the ongoing war in Ukraine, the violence against Christians in different regions of Africa, and global tensions with China.

Francis, of course, put diplomatic efforts at the forefront of the latter years of his pontificate, and Leo has begun to shape his own approach to a time of global conflict.

As he does so, differences in language, tone, and emphasis are already emerging between the popes in their common calls for peace, and perhaps mirroring similar differences between the popes of the last century.

As the Church waits for Leo’s first encyclical letter, whenever it may come, it seems increasingly likely to take up an urgent call for peace as a central theme. If it does, the signs so far suggest that Leo might echo more closely Pius XII than St. John XXIII.

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War and the threat of war dominated much of the 20th century and, necessarily, dominated the focus of the popes who reigned during that period, most obviously Pius XII, who was elected on the eve of World War II, and St. John XXIII, who watched the post-war period devolve into the Cold War and the nuclear age.

In their respective encyclicals Summi pontificatus, issued just weeks after Germany’s invasion of Poland in 1939, and Pacem in terris, given in 1963 in the months following the Cuban missile crisis, both popes sought to address a world order committed to rearming itself and poised on the brink of catastrophic violence.

Both popes warned against the looming sense of inevitability of armed conflict, and diagnosed a wider decline in the moral order which threatened human dignity as the cause.

In Summi, Pius wrote of his efforts to “prevent recourse to arms and to keep open the way to an understanding honorable to both parties.”

“Convinced that the use of force on one side would be answered by recourse to arms on the other,” he wrote that he’d done everything he could to avoid “the horrors of a world conflagration, even at the risk of having Our intentions and Our aims misunderstood.”

Fewer than 25 years later, John warned against the “common belief that under modern conditions peace cannot be assured except on the basis of an equal balance of armaments and that this factor is the probable cause of this stockpiling of armaments.”

“Consequently people are living in the grip of constant fear,” wrote John in Pacem in Teris. “They are afraid that at any moment the impending storm may break upon them with horrific violence. And they have good reasons for their fear, for there is certainly no lack of such weapons.”

A renewed rush to global re-armament is now underway, with NATO and European Union countries committing to new levels of national defense spending in response to Russian belligerence in Ukraine and the escalating conflict in the Middle East.

And in recent month renewed warnings about the global direction of travel have come from the Vatican, too, most immediately at the United Nations where the Holy See’s diplomatic representatives this week warned against “ever-growing military expenditures,” especially at the expense of more humane priorities.

Under Pope Francis, the Holy See seemed to opt for a policy of maximum diplomatic engagement and openness to negotiation and dialogue.

That approach often drew criticism, with the Vatican being accused of promoting moral equivalency between Ukraine and Russia over the invasion when Francis appeared to laud Russia’s imperial military past and accuse NATO of provoking Vladimir Putin and when the Holy See seemed to offer equal billing to Russian participants in the famous stations of the cross procession in 2022.

Francis’ approach to peace through dialogue also came in for pushback when it took the form of interfaith meetings and declarations with Muslim leaders in the Middle East, as with the 2019 “Document on Human Fraternity for World Peace and Living Together.”

Common criticisms of the Francis approach to peace tended to focus on the priority of common human dignity and values, rather than explicitly Christian assertions. And Francis in turn often spoke against “proselytizing” by Catholics, and championed a witness of dialogue and proximity, and concern for the marginalized and suffering.

In that sense, Francis can be said to be somewhat in line with the tone of Pacem in terris, which also sought to address threats to peace through appeals to that which is “not only dictated by common sense, but is in itself most desirable and most fruitful of good.”

John appealed “above all to the rulers of States, to be unsparing of their labor and efforts to ensure that human affairs follow a rational and dignified course.”

That which is “rational and dignified” was, according to John, “inscribed in man's nature, and that is where we must look for them; there and nowhere else.”

“These laws clearly indicate how a man must behave toward his fellows in society,” according to John, as well as “what principles must govern the relations between States… and the world-wide community of nations.”

The proclamation of Christ, the Prince of Peace was absent from John’s letter — on the contrary. But Pope St. John XXIII seemed more hopeful that Christ would take the initiative to intervene than that world leaders might be encouraged to seek him themselves.

Pacem in terris famously included a lengthy treatment of those basic human rights and duties which the Church promotes as natural fruits of the natural law, sealed by the truth of Christian doctrine, but equally applicable and accessible from the perspective of a noble kind of humanism.

That sort of enlightened pragmatism and willingness to engage with the world in the project of peace on common universal principles seems equally applicable to Francis’ insistence that there is always scope for finding common ground with anyone.

“I don't exclude dialogue with any power, whether it's at war, whether it's the aggressor... sometimes dialogue has to be done in this manner, but it has to be done; it ‘stinks’, but it has to be done,” he famously said in 2021.

Four years later, however worthy and sincere Francis’ efforts may have been, global conflict has worsened, not bettered, leaving his successor Leo no less concerned for peace but perhaps in a situation more closely akin to that of Pius XII, who became pope as global war was breaking out, than John XXIII who still hoped to help prevent it.

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Interestingly, in his public statements so far, Leo seems also to be mirroring more the tone of Pius XII more than John — and perhaps Francis, too — in offering a more explicitly evangelical and Christocentric response.

In his first address from the loggia, Leo called for a distinctly Christian approach to peace, “peace that is unarmed and disarming, humble and persevering. A peace that comes from God, the God who loves us all, unconditionally.”

In an address to the diplomatic corps accredited to the Holy See last month, one of his first major addresses to the international community, Leo went further in identifying peace as not a geopolitical state but as “the first gift of Christ.”

“For her part, the Church can never be exempted from speaking the truth about humanity and the world, resorting whenever necessary to blunt language that may initially create misunderstanding,” said Leo. “Truth is not the affirmation of abstract and disembodied principles, but an encounter with the person of Christ himself, alive in the midst of the community of believers.”

While no less committed than Francis or John XXIII to the principles of internationalism, dialogue, and concern for the poor and marginalized, the first weeks of Leo’s pontificate have so far appeared to ground these principles more explicitly in the announcement of the person Christ, rather than proposing them as universal values uniquely interpreted by Christianity.

Earlier this week, in a meeting with the leadership of the Sovereign Military Order of Malta, Leo pointedly observed the essential link between the order’s diplomatic and humanitarian work and “the faith that is propagated and protected.”

In words that could be, and at times have been applied to the Vatican, Leo told the Order of Malta that good works, even the most noble, have to be accompanied by a commitment to “announce to them God’s love with the word and witness. If this were lacking, the Order would lose its religious nature and would be reduced to being a philanthropic organization.”

“We must continually embrace what Jesus taught, that he did not ask the Father to remove us from the world, because he sends us into the world, but that we are not of the world, just as He is not of the world,” Leo said.

The linkage of diplomatic and humanitarian work to the explicit announcement of Christ is something which, in recent years under Francis, could have been interpreted by some as “proselytizing,” yet under Leo it appears to be a necessary and central part of Christian action in the world for the promotion of justice and peace.

This, in turn, appears to be more directly in line with Pius XII, who at a time of war breaking out issued his own encyclical offering a very similar assessment to Pacem in Terris but with a markedly more Christocentric proposal for peace.

Both Summi Pontificatus and Pacem in Terris explicitly credited the international movement to conflict to a disregard for fundamental human dignity and the right ordering of society, both of which, according to both popes, are to be found in the natural law.

But while John appealed to the international order’s stated openness to rationality and humanistic principles, Pius condemned “a world which, preoccupied with the worship of the ephemeral, has lost its way and spent its forces in a vain search after earthly ideals.”

To the leaders of his time, Pius saw that the “philosophy of life for which the doctrine of love and renunciation preached in the Sermon on the Mount and the Divine act of love on the Cross seem to be a stumbling block and foolishness.”

In response, he insisted, as Leo seems to be doing now, that in the face of “this apocalyptic foresight of disaster, imminent and remote,” his duty was to “raise with still greater insistence the eyes and hearts of those in whom there yet remains good will to the One from Whom alone comes the salvation of the world - to One Whose almighty and merciful Hand can alone calm this tempest - to the One Whose truth and Whose love can enlighten the intellects and inflame the hearts of so great a section of mankind plunged in error, selfishness, strife and struggle, so as to give it a new orientation in the spirit of the Kingship of Christ.”

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The differences in tone and emphasis between Pius and John, and indeed between Francis and Leo, can be credited to a number of possible influences — personal character, ecclesiology, vision for their pontificate, and style of preaching.

But a crucial distinction between them could also be the slim line between a world teetering on the brink of global conflict and one in which it appears to have already begun.

How Leo chooses to address this reality is, obviously, still a work in progress. But an emerging lesson which might be drawn from the example of the four popes is that the more urgent the need for peace a pope sees, the more explicit the announcement of Christ in their diplomatic action becomes.