This year, the final report of Pax Christi International carries with it the living testimony of a shared journey, marked by close accompaniment of communities and concrete commitment to Just Peace. The year 2025, now concluded, also marked the eighty years of our Movement which, even after all this time, continues to work with confidence in the transformative power of active Nonviolence.

As we look toward the new year through the words of our Secretary General Martha Inés Romero, we reflect together on all the milestones, goals, and key insights achieved this year, in the hope that 2026 may bring with it new horizons of hope, rooted in our shared experience and open to the challenges of our time.

Our Heritage, Our Mission, Our Florence Commitment!
Message by Martha Inés Romero, Pax Christi International Secretary General

 

For 80 years, Pax Christi International has been a prophetic global movement, mainly because of many Prophetic local voices around the world has count in our history, voices living the Togetherness, that sense of belonging to a good cause: the cause of justice, human rights, and the nonviolence loving Gospel. Today, I want to share briefly with you all what made proud us for this 2025, in accomplishing our mission as it was stated 80 years ago, through the following actions:

 

🔹 We accompany those who are on the margins and continue to connect with grassroots communities, listening with care to their stories and learning from their experience about possible, practical routes to enduring peace and, at the same time, developing insights into other pathways to peace. At the community level, integration already happens naturally. Our partners in Colombia, the Philippines, Iraq, and DR Congo combined reconciliation, livelihood work, human rights monitoring, interreligious dialogue, and humanitarian action every day this year.

🔹 We are deepening our understanding of sustainability, as we have come to see the interconnections between war and preparations for war, environmental damage, climate change and scarcity of essential resources, advocating for human and environmental rights, and accompanying communities in Latin America affected by extractives, such us the project.

🔹 While war, preparations for war, the proliferation of arms and violent conflict seem to be omnipresent, we promote nonviolence (active nonviolence, Gospel nonviolence) through our new Catholic Institute for Nonviolence, nurture communities and Church leaders and work for a world where human rights and international law are consistently respected. At the local level, we trained Religious Sisters and young people in Burundi, South Sudan and Kenia.

🔹 The articulation of Pax Christi’s spirituality, peace education and peace politics will become even more important to our movement; this year, we implemented the first online Course on The Power of Nonviolence in Spanish, with participants from Latin America and the Caribbean, and Spain. And the online Training for Lasallian Institutions in English.

🔹 The pathway we seek is defined by the practice of active nonviolence as a powerful alternative to extremist violence and militarisation including those contexts where Catholics are minority, but a powerful community. We accompanied the Pax Christi Asia-Pacific Members for their monthly News Brief, Webinars on Myanmar, on Nonviolence and Pope Francis, the Piece for Peace Campaign with the youth community, amongst other actions.

🔹 We support the full implementation of UN Security Council Resolutions on Women, Peace and Security, honouring those women peace-makers, and accompanying efforts to create a gender-inclusive route to peace; in our cicle of webinars Sudan Speaks and in a process with grassroots women leaders in the project Women and Water Governance for Peacebuilding in Colombia, defending land and water from a nonviolent approach.

🔹 We maintain our multifaceted work for peace, sustain our work for arms control and disarmament, and develop our focus. As people of faith, we continue promoting nuclear, conventional and domestic disarmament, an end to the international arms trade, economic conversion to a nonmilitary economy, conscientious objection, and nonviolent alternatives to war. Our teams at the UN level in Geneva and New York, and at the European Union contributed to that goal through statements, webinars and advocacy meetings with decision-makers. We participated in the Commemoration of Hiroshima and Nagasaki 80 years of Witness and Action for Peace with our presence in solidarity with the Japanese peacemakers; our Co-Presidents and the Secretary General wrote a heartfelt message of remembrance, solidarity with the Hibakusha, and hope for a future free from the threat of nuclear weapons.

🔹 In 2025, Pax Christi International, Parents Circle-Families Forum, and Action for the Mediterranean representatives met with King Philippe of Belgium to highlight the humanitarian crisis in Gaza and urge principled international action. A month later, in his speech on the occasion of the National Day of Belgium, by recalling that meeting, he was the first king to define the situation in Gaza as “a shame for humanity”. Collaborations with other networks, such as the Global Solidarity for Peace in Palestine Coalition, and initiatives like the “Embracing Our Faith” campaign, encourage religious leaders across Europe to advocate for ceasefires, humanitarian access, and the protection of holy sites.

🔹 For 2025, Pax Christi promoted inter-religious dialogue, advocacy and diplomacy: we actively participated in the Catholic Forum meetings at the Europe basis in Brussels, as well as the VI Assembly of Catholic Organisations in Rome; we also attended the Conference held in Ethiopia “The Role of Faith Communities and Ethical Organisations in Advancing Justice for Africans and People of African Descent through Reparations”, and the Catholic Peace Forum in Assisi and Nagasaki.We continue mobilising Christians and other Faith and civil society organisations in many ways, in Europe, North America and in the so-called peripheries.

🔹 In our World Gathering in Florence, we honoured Bishop Mark Seitz, of the Diocese of El Paso, as our 2025 Pax Christi International Peace Awardee, for his dedication to protect migrants in the challenging region along the United States and Mexico border.  In addition to him, a special recognition is being awarded to three organisations operating in the same area, defending and supporting the rights of migrants: Annunciation House, the Hope Border Institute and the Las Américas Immigrant Advocacy Center.

🔹 From March to November, we celebrated our 80th Anniversary, with our principle that what counts is the practice of peace, that needs “public space”, the creation of scenarios and conditions for peace; in the wake of the World Gathering in Florence, Pax Christi International released its Commitment: a compass for the years ahead for our entire global network. In a world wounded by new conflicts, we choose to respond with Hope, not as a fleeting feeling, but as a discipline lived through solidarity, active nonviolence, and the building of Just Peace, never imposed from above but born from the resilience and courage of communities affected by injustice.

🔹 At the heart of our movement, we are called to lead a new era of peace, building bridges across cultures, faiths, and generations. During the World Gathering in Florence in November, we warmly welcomed the launch of the Youth Forum, following the Bethlehem Commitment 10 years ago. This is the first space entirely dedicated to young people active within the movement. It was an opportunity for exchange, for sharing new perspectives, with a focus on peace and the new paths to be walked.

 

For the coming year, we will continue nonviolently confronting dehumanization – moving the humanity on the people, as a Global Ethic – on our commitment for Just Peace in the Holy Land, on our compassion with the people in Sudan, Myanmar or Haiti. We will continue doing efforts to build right relations for Reconciliation in our world and for promoting disarming of weapons and souls. For sure, we will continue, without fail, living, bringing, organising hope, and through our cross-cutting issue, the active Nonviolence, rooted in our spiritual bases, we will continue mobilising hope!