The following preaching by Cardinal Priest Don Mimmo Battaglia, Metropolitan Archbishop of Naples is in response to Turkish President Erdogan gifting the leaders gathered at the NATO summit with revolvers.
“To the powerful of the earth, peace be with you!
Evil does not always come barging through a door.
Sometimes it slips in quietly.
It wears an elegant suit. It smiles for the cameras.
It is placed in a case, accompanied by a card, presented with all the honours.
And for a few moments, no one recognizes evil any more, because it has learnt good manners.
This is what pains me about the gesture made in Ankara [NATO Summit 2026]: not merely a pistol presented to representatives of NATO countries, but death transformed into courtesy. The ability to take a life has become a souvenir, an official memento, an object to be displayed.
We have tamed weapons to the point where we can give them away as gifts. This is the real scandal.
You tell us it is merely a symbol. But it is precisely symbols that shape the world. They come before laws, they penetrate deeper than speeches, they silently teach what a civilization considers normal.
And that gift teaches that power must be recognized in the metal of a gun. That an important [human] is an armed [human]. That among leaders, one can pay homage by elegantly bestowing upon one another the possibility of death.
The name of the recipient was engraved on the barrel. But every pistol always bears a second, invisible name. It is the name of the human at whom it might be aimed. The name of the woman who might be left without a husband. The name of the child who might wait in vain for his father’s return.
The true recipient of a weapon is never merely the one who receives it.
It is the unknown person who might one day be struck by its bullet.
That is why I cannot regard that gesture as a mere diplomatic eccentricity.
It reveals a certain view of the world. A world in which we have learnt to measure security by counting weapons, without ever asking ourselves how much fear must be sown in order to maintain it. A world that calls mutual terror ‘balance’ and the interval during which no one has yet fired a shot ‘peace’.
As a Christian, I cannot accept this.
The Gospel has given us a different image of power.
Christ, on the night when everything might have driven him to defend himself,
did not place a weapon in his disciples’ hands. He wrapped a towel round his waist. He knelt before them and washed their weary feet.
On the one hand, a weapon offered whilst standing,
amongst powerful men. On the other, God kneeling before human.
These are two civilizations. We must choose.
We Christians are not naive. We know violence. We encounter it in neglected
neighbourhoods, in homes where there is no bread, in the bodies of migrants,
in children returned to their mothers in a coffin. We know that evil exists.
Precisely for this reason, we refuse to make it look elegant. We refuse to adorn it, to polish it, to turn it into a sign of prestige.
A weapon does not become innocent simply because it is given as a gift.
It does not become silent simply because it does not fire.
It does not become human simply because a name is engraved on it.
I therefore ask you, the leaders of nations, not to treat that gift as a trophy.
Do not simply leave it in a room, out of sight, as if hiding a symbol were enough to erase its meaning.
Do something more difficult.
Reject the idea that death can be a form of tribute.
Declare publicly that no pact between peoples needs to be symbolised by a gun.
Say that a nation’s dignity does not lie in the amount of fear it can instill.
Say that security is not the privilege of those who can fire first,
but the right of everyone not to be shot.
And at the next summit, leave a chair empty.
Not for a president, not for a general, not for a minister.
Leave it for the nameless human who always pays the price for your decisions.
For the one who does not attend summits, does not sign treaties, does not appear in photographs, but ends up under the rubble when diplomacy fails.
Look at that chair before you talk about weapons.
Perhaps then you will realize that peace is not a weakness to be corrected,
but a responsibility before which we must kneel.
For power that cannot bring itself to kneel before life will always end up kneeling before weapons.
And on that day, however solemn the ceremonies may be, we will all have already lost.”
Cardinal Domenico “Don Mimmo” Battaglia is the Metropolitan Archbishop of Naples. Elevated to the College of Cardinals by Pope Francis in December 2024, he is widely known as a “street priest” for his lifelong advocacy for the poor, marginalized, and victims of organized crime.
