Pope Leo XIV: We want peace, we pray for peace and we are witnesses of peace

The Youth Jubilee, which is being celebrated in Rome, sees hundreds of thousands of young people from every continent converging on a single question: what contribution can we make to world peace? Pope Leo XIV, in his surprise speech in St Peter's Square during the inaugural Mass, shouted this desire loudly: "We want peace in the world, we pray for peace and we are witnesses of peace and reconciliation".

Words spoken in Italian, English and Spanish, which moved the 120,000 participants. The Pontiff called them "salt of the earth" and "light of the world", inviting them to be "missionary disciples of hope" in a world marked by conflict, alienating digitalisation, indifference, violence and "a culture of death" . The meeting with a delegation of young people from Peru also reaffirmed the commitment to the concrete witness of faith: 'Flood your lands with the joy of the Gospel, love and serve freely'.

While young people raise a choral cry for peace, the world remains torn apart by humanitarian dramas. The Gaza war has exceeded 60,000 Palestinian casualties since October 2023, of which around 31 % are children. According to the Ipc, Gaza has already reached famine thresholds: food shortages for a large part of the population, severe malnutrition among children, and hundreds of deaths from starvation (at least 122 in one recent report alone). Thousands are also dying trying to access aid convoys: in July alone, there were dozens of deaths at the Zikim border and over 1,000 deaths since the beginning of the conflict due to violence related to food distribution.

No less devastating is the civil war in Sudan, which began in April 2023. The violence between the army and Rsf militias has left at least 40,000 dead, while over 12 million people have been internally displaced and 4 million are refugees abroad. According to the Sudan Doctors Union, over 522,000 children have died from malnutrition since the beginning of the conflict.

In the Democratic Republic of Congo, the situation remains dramatic: at the beginning of 2025, the M23 group conquered regions of North Kivu amidst bloody clashes; there are more than 7.8 million internally displaced persons (IDPs) and thousands of deaths from aggression, mass rapes, and attacks on refugee camps.