EditPope Leo tells Europe to sacrifice positions to end the war in Ukraine
An American pontiff still talks as if Brussels can halt a conflict it does not control. Does he overestimate Europe?
The scenery in Metz was doing too much work. Schuman’s name on the building, the border city, the altar of melted guns, Macron rewriting his diary to sit the Mass: all of that is real, and all of it is secondary. The sentence that matters is the one about sacrifice.
Leo XIV told European leaders they must “show courage in negotiation” and “be prepared to sacrifice certain positions for the higher good of peace.”
He asked: “Today we must ask whether we are truly making ‘creative efforts’ to foster world peace, or whether we are simply trying to ‘stem the haemorrhage of war’ and to prepare ourselves better for the wars we assume are still to come.”
Rearmament, he said, is an illusion if it is treated as the answer. He did not say Ukraine. He did not have to. The only war that fits “War has returned, even to Europe: a new ‘useless massacre’ that claims countless civilian lives every day” is that one. Reuters heard it that way. So will Moscow. So will Warsaw.
That is a critique of the present European position, not a travelogue. The position, since 2022 and again after the failed ceasefire cycles, is that security comes from stocks, coalitions and time: more munitions, more common projects, more “readiness.” Macron, speaking first in the same hall, called support for Ukraine the true Schuman line. The Pope used Schuman for the opposite emphasis: meet rather than fight; share resources so that war becomes not only immoral but materially harder; talk before the next arsenal is ready. Two heirs, one ancestor, two policies.
The “who sacrifices?” question is where the speech is weakest as politics and strongest as theology. He never assigns the concession. A Kremlin cut will assume Ukraine, because the party that did not start the war is always the one invited to be reasonable. That reading is available, and it will be used. It is not required by the rest of the text.
In the same pages he said: “International law and multilateralism underline the real equality of states in their mutual relations and are the best antidote to the will to dominate, which is the source of every conflict.” And: “Today human relations, and relations between states, are growing ever more barbarous. The given word is held in contempt; people boast instead of lying and deceit. Europe can put an end to this spiral through the respect for the other that it has learned to cultivate and preserve, because it has amply shown over the past eighty years that competing opinions, claims and interests can be asserted by meeting rather than by fighting.”
A war of annexation is domination. Treaties broken in 2014 and 2022 are a despised word. If the only addressee were Kyiv, those lines would be padding. They are not. The discomfort is that both can be true at once: Russia is the aggressor, and a Europe that only arms is not yet making peace. Leo insists on saying the second sentence in a week when European ministers are naming joint defence projects in Brussels. That is the veil, and it is thin.
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Will the message pass? Unlikely, in the form he wants. Eastern capitals have heard a decade of Western appeals to “creative diplomacy” that left them with a ruined neighbour and a longer border to defend. They will file the Metz line with every other Roman appeal that named no occupier. Paris and Berlin may like the music — it rhymes with Macron’s old Moscow channel — but they cannot spend it without splitting the Union. Washington under Trump has already called this Pope weak on foreign policy. A speech that praises multilateralism and refuses to name the President is not going to move him. The unnamed men in the room stay unnamed because naming them would force a choice the Holy See still will not make.
Does an American Pope overestimate Europe? That is the sharper doubt. He speaks as if the continent of 1950 were still a working moral technology: legal equality of states, the kept word, the habit of sitting down. Europe has spent five years discovering that those habits did not deter a revisionist army and do not substitute for air defence. The Schuman method assumed partners who preferred prosperity to plunder.
Leo talks as if that assumption can be willed back into force by memory and liturgy. It cannot. Europe can still be the place that knows how to negotiate. It is also the place that has to hold a flank. An American on the chair of Peter may feel the first truth more keenly than the second, because he comes from a republic that still thinks of Europe as a civilian project it once midwifed, not as a front. Metz was built for the first story. The war is the second. He closed with John Paul II’s “Do not be afraid.” Until he says who must move, and by how much, the sacrifice he asks for will be praised in the cathedral and ignored in the chancellery.
Caption: French President Emmanuel Macron, Pope Leo XIV and Cardinal Jean-Marc Aveline attend a meeting titled ‘At the Roots of Europe for Peace and Unity’ at the Robert Schuman convention centre, in Metz, France, 28 September 2026. The Pontiff arrived in Metz on the last day of his four-day visit to France. EPA/BENOIT TESSIER / POOL
Updated: September 28, 2026 - 13:45
