“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

beatitudescenter.org

johndear.org

https://fatherjohndear.substack.com/

This week I speak with Melisssa Parke, executive director of the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons, winner of the 2017 Nobel Peace Prize.

Melissa Parke is the former Minister for International Development for Australia, where she’s from, and was a member of the Australian Parliament from 2007 to 2016.

Prior to being elected to Parliament, she worked as an international lawyer with the United Nations in Kosovo, Gaza, New York and Lebanon from 1999 to 2007.

“ICAN, the Int’l Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons was started in Melbourne by a group of friends who sat around a small kitchen table to discuss what they could do to abolish nuclear weapons,” she says.

“Today, through the work of ICAN, the United Nations’ Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons has 101 nation signers.

They are saying, ‘We do not accept that nuclear weapons are a legitimate security measure.’ We are working to stigmatize nuclear weapons until they are abolished."

“Most of the world's problems today stem from humanity’s disconnection from nature and each other."

"We forget that we are all connected. "

"What we do to each other and the planet we ultimately do to ourselves."

"Action is the antidote to a sense of helplessness."

"We all have a right to demand answers from our governments."

"We can each ask our local, city and state governments to join the Ban Treaty.”

Listen in and be inspired!

🌻 John

www.icanw.org

beatitudescenter.org

https://fatherjohndear.substack.com/publish/home

On today’s episode I reflect on the life and witness of Dorothy Day, founder of the Catholic Worker.

Last month, at the Catholic Institute for Nonviolence international conference in Rome, I suggested in my speech that it’s time we all took up Dorothy Day’s example and committed ourselves full time to Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount. J

ust after the Japanese bombing of Pearl Harbor, as the U.S. entered World War II, she published a bold headline saying, “Our Manifesto Is the Sermon on the Mount!” Thousands left her movement overnight. That is the stand that we all need to take.

With that in mind, I’m offering a new podcast on the life and witness of Dorothy Day, to learn from her how we too can live as servants and disciples of the nonviolent Jesus and proclaim the coming of God’s reign of peace, even in a bad time.

“Nonviolent resistance is the only sane solution,” she wrote during the war. “We have to continue to make our voice heard until we are finally silenced—and even then, in jail or concentration camp, to express ourselves.

If there are not some who still hold this ideal, still speak in terms of the counsels of perfection, the ideal will be lost.

I do not see why we must accept the inevitability of war. It was only in the last century that slavery was done away with here in this country, and I suppose that everybody thought it was something to be accepted.

If we are working towards peace, we must look with hope that in a future generation, we will do away with war. With great suffering and great prayer, we are trying to hold up these ideals.”

Listen in and be inspired!

https://catholicworker.org/dorothy-day/

beatitudescenter.org

God bless everyone!

🌻 John