Credit: Angel Valdez
“Peace be with you!” These were the first words that Pope Leo XIV spoke as he emerged from the balcony of St. Peter’s on May 8, 2025. He would use the word “peace” nine more times in his short address. Peace, it was clear, would take priority in his pontificate.
As Pope Leo made that priority clear, one phrase stuck out: a “peace that is unarmed and disarming” (“una pace disarmata e una pace disarmante”). The phrase has reappeared throughout the early months of Leo’s pontificate. Several days after his election, he implored journalists to “disarm words and we will help to disarm the world.” Since then, he has invoked this “unarmed and disarming peace” in messages to Pax Christi in the United States and a conference on interreligious dialogue in Bangladesh. Recently, the Vatican announced that Pope Leo chose “Peace be with you all: Towards an ‘unarmed and disarming’ peace” as the theme for the 2026 World Day of Peace. The phrase has emerged as a distinctly Leonine refrain and so offers an interpretive key for the kind of holiness to which he is challenging the world.
So too does it insert us into the history of the saints that Peter Maurin saw as the central story of history. May 8, the day of Pope Leo’s election, also happened to be the feast day of the Martyrs of Algeria. The feast remembers the nineteen Catholic missionaries killed during the Algerian Civil War in the 1990s.
One of those martyrs was the French Dominican, Pierre Claverie. Firmly committed to dialogue with Islam in the overwhelmingly Muslim Algeria, he became the Bishop of Oran in 1981. As Westerners came under increasingly virulent suspicion from various Islamic extremists the next decade, Claverie sensed the vulnerability and risk of such dialogue. In July 1994, he wrote, “What could be more foolish than going to meet death with no other protection than an unarmed and disarming (désarmé et désarmant) love that dies forgiving? Yet we are such people.” Almost exactly two years later, on August 1, 1996, a set bomb killed both he and his Muslim assistant. Mourners at his funeral called him “the bishop of the Muslims too.”
His commitment to interreligious friendship embodied an unarmed and disarming love, even to the point of death.
by Rita Corbin
Claverie’s words and life remind us of Dorothy Day’s own confession: “We are sowing the seed of love, and we are not living in the harvest time so that we can expect a crop. We must love to the point of folly, and we are indeed fools, as our Lord Himself was who died for such a one as this. We lay down our lives too when we have performed so painfully thankless an act, because this correspondent of ours is poor in this world’s goods.” An unarmed and disarming love— whether offered to a child, an immigrant, or our enemy—is vulnerable to the point of folly, even death. Christian de Chergé would describe such a commitment as a “martyrdom of love” or, even more, a “martyrdom of hope. Prior of the Cistercian Abbey of Our Lady of Atlas in Tibhirine, Algeria, de Chergé and his community’s story has been movingly told in the 2010 French film Of Gods and Men. Among the film’s most memorable scenes—true to history—is de Chergé’s harrowing encounter with Sayah Attia and his men at the monastery on December 24, 1993: the eve of Christmas, feast of the Prince of Peace. While Attia was renowned as a ruthless killer, de Chergé pacified him by displaying his community’s commitment to the surrounding Muslim community and his own intimate knowledge of the Koran. A year later, in a Lenten retreat, he recalled the incident: “After the episode of Attia, I wanted to pray for him. What should I pray to God? ‘Kill him?’ No, but I could pray, ‘Disarm him.’ But then I asked myself, Do I have the right to ask God to disarm him if I don’t begin by asking, ‘Disarm me, disarm my brothers.’ That was my prayer each day.” Eighteen days later, around midnight on March 26, 1996, Islamist insurgents broke into the monastery and abducted de Chergé and six monks—all disarmed. A few months later, their kidnappers announced the monks’ deaths; today, their graves stand at Our Lady of Atlas.
The unarmed and disarming peace of the Tibhirine monks found footing in their monastic vow of stability: their steady friendship with the area’s Muslim villagers amid the instability of a grisly civil war. While the monks had ample opportunity to leave, they stayed. While the monks were offered military protection, they declined. Tellingly, in a review of Of Gods and Men, the famous film critic Roger Ebert faulted the idealism of the monks and labeled their decision as folly. Yet, their reasons were Christological; in that same Lenten retreat, de Chergé professed that the call “to live the mystery of the Incarnation… is the deepest of all the reasons why we stay at Tibhirine…. The only way for us to give witness is to live where we do, and be what we are in the midst of banal, everyday realities.” We can think again of Dorothy Day, the Benedictine oblate, and her commitment to the corporal works of mercy in the Christological spirit of Matthew 25: the hungry, thirsty, and naked are Christ. That incarnate mercy takes the kenotic—unarmed and disarming—shape of Christ.
As Pope Leo reminded us in his first appearance, “Peace be with you!” are “the first words spoken by the risen Christ, the Good Shepherd who laid down his life for God’s flock.” This is a Peace that the world cannot give (Jn 14:27). This is a Peace that we receive and sign at each Eucharist: “grant us the peace and unity of your kingdom where you live for ever and ever.” After all, as Pope Leo’s episcopal motto—taken from that great Algerian saint, Augustine—reminds us, “In the one Christ, we are one.” Holy, unarmed, and disarming martyrs of Algeria, pray for us that it may be so.
Houston Catholic Worker, Vol. XLV, No. 4, October-December 2025.
