Christians, and especially lay people, must learn to contribute to the international balance that the Holy Father mentions.
Nicholas Meyer*
The message for the World Day of Peace 2026 comes to us at a time when humanity seems to have become accustomed to groping. The Holy Father Leo
This message is based on a personal and radical experience: the encounter with the Risen Lord. It is an invitation to reject the path, so highly valued lately in our political and social markets, of hopelessness and discouragement. Because, although we so often find ourselves in the dark to inhabit and promote peace, our task as Christians is not to curse the darkness, but to open ourselves to recognize the luminosity of peace in others.
We must urgently ask ourselves: Who are those close to me who ignite that peace in those around them? How do I seek with them a communion of spirit that allows us to travel this path together? Because, as the Holy Father so lucidly summarizes, peace, more than a distant goal, is a presence and a path. “And, in doing so, they will find at their side brothers and sisters who, through different paths, have known how to listen to the pain of others and have freed themselves internally from the deception of violence.”
The message reminds us how Jesus, on his determined path towards Jerusalem, is the first to disarm the options of justice and reign through force, those that some of his disciples expected and even longed for with a certain revolutionary impatience. “More profoundly, the Gospels do not hide that what disconcerted the disciples was their nonviolent response;” an answer that continues to baffle today those who believe that authority is imposed by force.
It is the Lord who, on this path of encounters, parables, miracles and conversations, pedagogically presents the route of peace. But it is not only their ideas that transform, but especially their presence. Through gestures and symbols, it confirms the transformative capacity of peace. The resurrection will be the gesture par excellence that explains how the peace of the Crucified One—incited time and again to respond with violence—becomes light and life in the Risen One.
However, let’s not be naive: this path is not easy. Just as peace has its tradition, its prophets and its evidence, war, violence and hatred also have their marketing. The “influencers” of violence, the leaders who dishonor their agreements and seek the rupture of dialogue processes, those who cynically justify the obscene increase in weapons, today find in liquid communication a powerful and viral speaker. The algorithm seems to reward division.
But the believing community has a subversive capacity: that of making peace viral. Documents like The Joy of the Gospel y Brothers all They are the updated manual of a Church that collects this experience lived in so many forgotten communities in the world. How do we do it? Meeting, listening and dialoguing; reading the signs of the times with a hopeful gaze, not endogamically locking ourselves in ourselves, but going out to meet others. We must look for those people, groups and organizations that, based on their own beliefs and good faith, seek to be builders of peace, initiating processes rather than occupying spaces of power, promoting social friendship with the unwavering conviction of a missionary option capable of transforming everything.
Pope Leo is clear about the need to return to the source: “For this reason, together with action, it is increasingly necessary to cultivate prayer, spirituality, ecumenical and interreligious dialogue as ways of peace and languages of encounter between traditions and cultures. Throughout the world it is desirable “that each community becomes a “house of peace”, where we learn to defuse hostility through dialogue, where justice is practiced and forgiveness is preserved.” Today more than ever, in fact, it is necessary to show that peace is not a utopia, through attentive pastoral creativity and generative.”
Christians, and especially lay people, must learn to contribute to the international balance that the Holy Father mentions. This balance is not static; manages tensions, interests and conflicts, always seeking to make the whole superior to the parts. The challenge is immense: How do we make the leap from community and local spaces to the new areopagus of regional and global power? It is there where we have the political responsibility to bring the pedagogy of peace.
The “world war in pieces” that we are experiencing will only be disarmed through a pedagogy of peace that will also be “in pieces”, artisanal, territorial. Not as isolated events, but as a continuous process that begins with the conviction that the Spirit, from within each heart, groans with birth pains for that desired peace. It is the Spirit who moves many people to work for that vision that the Pope proposes to us: “Peace be with you all: towards a “disarming and disarming” peace.
When reading this message, one cannot help but feel that the pen of Pope Leo XIV is loaded with experiences and images that he was able to experience firsthand. The dark years of violence and internal conflict in Peru, which he had to endure on the peripheries, alongside the first and most defenseless victims, must have challenged his inner conviction again and again, but also cemented his confidence in his pastoral decisions in favor of peace and justice. Years later, we can recognize that peace has prevailed in his heart. The paths of the Risen Lord have led him to write this universal message, not only for the millions of Catholics, but for all those men and women of good will who yearn, dream and build, in every corner of the planet, peace as a presence and as a path.
*Regional Coordinator of Cáritas LAC