Bishop, in Vatican newspaper, calls for peacemaking, criticizes American Protestant fundamentalism
April 07, 2026
In a front-page op-ed in today’s edition of the Vatican newspaper, an Italian bishop described peacemaking as the third way between “naive pacifism” and “vulgar militarism.”
Bishop Domenico Pompili of Verona descried peacemakers as “social poets”: “artists of the human fabric who recompose what hatred tears apart, demonstrating that everything is connected.”
“In a world that celebrates war as realism and derides peace as weakness, perhaps it is time to recognize that the true realists are precisely these disarmed poets,” he said. “It is they who, rejecting the logic of inevitable confrontation, continue to weave threads of dialogue where others see only knots to be severed with a sword.”
Bishop Pompili strongly criticized strands of American Protestantism:
We stand at the very polar opposite of certain traditions within American Christian fundamentalism—though this phenomenon is not unknown in Europe—where God is enlisted to one’s own side, prayed to for victory in war, and asked to bestow divine blessing upon the elimination of the enemy, and where crusades are invoked. Truth be told, the Christ being utilized in this manner finds no counterpart in the Gospels: it is an armed, identity-obsessed, and exclusionary Christ.
This Christ does not spring from the Sermon on the Mount, but rather from the laboratories of cultural resentment, selfishness, privilege, and violence—a complete inversion of the Beatitudes. Pope Leo, precisely during these days of Easter, has repeatedly warned against all of this: never may God be invoked to bless war and violence. This is not merely a diplomatic stance; it is a theological necessity.
“Easter, in fact, tells us that in that suspension of time—between night and day, between war and peace, between hatred and love—we are not entirely powerless,” Bishop Pompili added. “We can facilitate this transition toward light, peace, and justice by living, even now, as those who have been resurrected.”
The prelate suggested gestures such as “openly and courageously critiquing any power that commodifies and sacrifices human lives;“ “sharing in the pain of others as if it touched upon our very own existence,” and “embracing the demands for hope, even when they strike us as absurd.”
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