On Wednesday, Pope Leo called on the faithful to devote today, August 22nd, the Memorial of the Queenship of Mary, to fasting and prayer for peace, through the intercession of Our Lady under her title of Queen of Peace. We at WPI are responding to the Holy Father’s call, and encourage all of you, our readers, to do the same.
While this is hardly the first time a Pope has issued such a call, it is well worth looking back to see where we stand relative to the recent past, and what has brought us to this point. When Pope Francis stepped out for the first time onto the balcony above St. Peter’s Square, he looked out over a world fraught with pain and injustice, with scandal and division in the Church, with economic and social pressures bearing down on the marginalized. However, the spectacle of total warfare returning to Europe and engulfing the Holy Land in unprecedented destruction could not easily have been imagined.
The world of 2025, the world in which Leo XIV was elevated to the papacy, is not the world of 2011. When Francis spoke of World War III being fought piecemeal, many nodded in recognition; by the time Leo reiterated this message in the first days of his papacy, it almost seemed too obvious to bear mentioning.
Suffice it to say: This world is not at peace. No one can deny this. Hatred, greed and division have turned nations against nations and peoples against peoples. Across the globe, internal strife divides populations. The threat of nuclear weapons looms larger than at any point since the most inflamed moments of the Cold War.
Yet last Sunday’s Gospel proclaimed the Lord’s warning that he was not coming to bring earthly peace, and that households would henceforth be divided “three against two and two against three etc.” Surely this does this mean that he is pleased with this state of affairs in which we live?
Not at all. The peace which the world gives is the product of systemic corruption and shameful concealment, where the strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must, where mercy is scorned as weakness and justice is readily sacrificed in the name of order and stability, where the gods of the pagans show their favor by blessing the great with wealth and power.
True peace, the peace the world cannot give, is not like that. It is not won through force of arms, but through suffering and sacrifice. Those who live by the sword, die by the sword – how much better to live and die by the Cross, where redemption springs forth from the blood of Christ, testifying for and intermingled with the blood of every innocent from Abel the Just to the last child starved in Gaza. Drawing on the French-American sociologist and philosopher René Girard, Rainero Cardinal Cantalamessa preached:
The Eucharist makes present in the world the one who, by his teaching and by his life, has unmasked and broken forever the system that makes something sacral of violence. The Eucharist is the sacrament of non-violence! Thanks to the Eucharist, God’s absolute “no” to violence, spoken on the cross, echoes alive down the centuries. And, at the same time, it is God’s “yes” to the innocent victims, and it is the place where all the blood spilled on earth joins with the blood of Christ and cries out to God and “pleads more insistently than Abel’s” (Heb. 12: 24).
As ordinary citizens, we can do nothing materially to counter unjust aggressors worldwide; we have little with which to hold to account those who could do so but choose not to; we are unlikely, most of us, to die as martyrs of charity for the wretched of the Earth. We can, however, fast and pray. We can call on our Blessed Mother and Queen, who never held worldly power nor sought to sway by violence, to rule as Queen of Peace over our troubled world. This is what the Holy Father is asking of us today. It is the least we can do.
Image: Vatican News, August 20, 2025.
Dr. Paul Chu is currently a philosophy instructor for CTState, the Connecticut Community College, and has previously taught philosophy in college, university, and seminary settings. He also served as a staff writer and editor for various national publications. He is co-founder of Sacred Beauty, a Private Association of the Faithful in the Diocese of Bridgeport dedicated to honoring the beauty and holiness of God through artistic and intellectual creativity founded in prayer, especially Eucharistic contemplation. He contributes regularly to https://questionsdisputedandotherwise.substack.com/.
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