“Pope Leo is demythologizing war; he’s saying, 'It’s over.”—says Ken Butigan

On today’s episode of “The Nonviolent Jesus Podcast,” I reflect with Ken Butigan on Pope Leo’s Call for an ‘Unarmed and Disarming Peace’.

It’s a great blessing to welcome back to the podcast my friend Ken Butigan, author, organizer, activist, speaker, nonviolence trainer, and leader of Pace e Bene and the Catholic Institute for Nonviolence. Ken recently retired from DePaul University in Chicago where he taught for many years. If you look up and listen to his podcast from a year ago, you’ll hear his amazing stories about leading the Pledge of Resistance in the 1980s, Pace E Bene and Campaign Nonviolence and other campaigns addressing homelessness, nuclear weapons, freedom for East Timor, and the US wars in Iraq.

In the last ten years, he has been a leader with Pax Christi International's Catholic Nonviolence Initiative and working with the Vatican to promote Gospel nonviolence.

Last month we were in Rome together for the latest conference on Pope Leo’s call for an unarmed and disarming peace, where he and Marie Dennis and others launched the Catholic Institute for Nonviolence.

Ken Butigan has been tracking every speech on peace and nonviolence under Pope Francis and now Pope Leo, and he met both of them. If you go to paceebene.org/pope-leo-statements, you’ll find a dozen more links that open up to hundreds of pages of messages by the last two popes on peace and nonviolence.

If you look up just Pope Leo’s speeches over the last year and a half, since May 2025, you will be amazed at the hundreds of times he has called for peace, a message ignored by the mainstream US media. I’ve been stunned by the material that Ken put together, so I invited him back to the podcast to tell us about it.

You can find info on the conference, including my talk, at paxchristiusa.org and paxchristi.net.

"Pope Leo has been calling us over and over and over again to be unarmed and disarming,” Ken says.

“He calls us to create ‘a civilization of love by building houses of peace.’ He wants the church to take nonviolence seriously and put it into practice." Just listen to his Easter Message: “'The peace of the risen Jesus is unarmed. Easter is the victory of nonviolence and peacemakers. May every person make peace his or her life's cause'.”

Listen in and be inspired!

🌻 John

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