For Francis, peace was first and foremost a spiritual matter. In fact, that’s exactly what he explained to journalists upon returning from a trip to the Holy Land in 2014. In the days prior, he had stopped in Bethlehem, standing before the separation wall built by Israel in the West Bank—as he had done in Jerusalem at the Wailing Wall—and had just invited Israeli President Shimon Peres and his Palestinian counterpart Mahmoud Abbas to the Vatican. Not to undertake any mission or engage in active negotiations, but simply to pray. The meeting took place June 8, 2014, in the Vatican gardens, where the three men prayed silently for peace in a region torn apart by decades of violence.

A few months earlier, in September 2013, he had, for the first time, declared a day of fasting and prayer for peace in Syria, the Middle East, and around the world. One hundred thousand people responded to his invitation, attending a prayer vigil held in a packed and hushed St. Peter’s Square. From the moment of his election, Francis refused to remain indifferent to the civil war raging in Syria.

At that time, the Argentine pope, following in the footsteps of his predecessors, would not stay silent. “May the noise of weapons cease!” he implored. “War always marks the failure of peace; it is always a defeat for humanity.” These words would be repeated over and over throughout his papacy—a period marked by war, what he described as madness without excuse. “Never again war!” he wrote, echoing the words spoken in 1965 by Paul VI at the United Nations.

Syria, Yemen, the Holy Land, South Sudan, the Central African Republic, Lebanon, Ukraine, and many others… It would take too long to list all the countries shaken by violence—whether internal or against their neighbors—that marked Francis’ time as pope. He even coined a staggering phrase to describe this grim reality: “a world war fought piecemeal.” For more than a decade, he repeatedly called for an end to conflicts and for reconciliation, both in Rome and on his travels. In Colombia in 2017, he emphasized social justice and the fight against violence. Two years later, in Sofia, Bulgaria, at the heart of a still-tense Balkan peninsula, he urged peace and called for “melt the icy chill of war and conflict.” In 2020, he also issued an appeal from Rome—almost in anguish: “We need peace! More peace!”

A 'spiritual retreat' with the enemy leaders of South Sudan

In 2020, during a historic trip to Iraq, amid the ruins of the city of Mosul—devastated by the Islamic State before its liberation—he declared: “If God is the God of life — for so he is — then it is wrong for us to kill our brothers and sisters in his Name. If God is the God of peace — for so he is — then it is wrong for us to wage war in his Name. If God is the God of love — for so he is — then it is wrong for us to hate our brothers and sisters.” This was a categorical condemnation of terrorism committed in the name of religion.

In Rome, his gesture—both unprecedented and unexpected—made in April 2019, at the conclusion of a 24‑hour “spiritual retreat” organized in the city with the primate of the Anglican Communion, Archbishop Justin Welby, and the moderator of the Presbyterian Church of Scotland, Reverend Martin Fair, will be remembered for a long time. Clad in white, he knelt and kissed the feet of the enemy leaders of South Sudan, pleading with them to make peace. He promised to travel to Juba to continue his calls for peace—a promise he fulfilled in January 2023, though with little tangible success on the ground.

Well aware of the limits of diplomacy without economic or military power—and thus confined to its moral dimension—Pope Francis placed in charge of the Holy See’s “foreign affairs” a trust that he granted to no one else in the Curia. For him, “everything is connected,” and peace cannot be reduced merely to the silence of weapons. As he explained in Laudato si’, his major green and social encyclical, respect for peoples—as well as for creation—is one of the conditions for lasting peace.

The Japanese turning point

In fact, Francis’ detractors—and critics of the Vatican in general—had long been quick to denounce the weakness of the papal message. It must be said that the pope’s mediations often proved, at best, ineffective. He did convene the highest-ranking Lebanese Christian leaders in 2021, urging them to take responsibility in a country whose political class was in a state of advanced decay. But it was all in vain.

Just as he had done for Yemen in 2014, the pope repeatedly invited the faithful to pray and fast for peace. The same was true for Ukraine, where war broke out following Russia’s aggression in February 2022, or for the Holy Land, after the attack on Israel by Hamas. At the outset of the conflict between Ukraine and Russia, many recall his desperate attempt to speak with Vladimir Putin, as he rushed to the Russian embassy near the Holy See in the early hours of the crisis—only to receive an implicit refusal from the Russian head of state. Toward the end of his papacy, the pope became almost obsessed with that conflict, deeply shaken by the return of war to Europe, just as he had been after the attack on Israel by Hamas on October 7, 2023. In the months that followed, he maintained a close connection with the Catholics of the Gaza Strip.

Yet it was his trip to Japan in 2019 that, according to those close to him, marked the true turning point of his papacy in his approach to peace. By visiting Hiroshima and Nagasaki—two cities devastated in 1945 by nuclear bombs dropped by the Americans—the pope condemned, with unprecedented force, not only the use but also the possession of such weapons. This uncompromising denunciation of any deterrence policy—a first for a pope—was followed in the ensuing months by increasingly frequent calls against arms dealers and an appeal for the creation of a global food fund financed by the money that states would forgo investing in armaments. A project that ultimately remained a papal utopia.