There is an image in the coat of arms of Pope Leo XIV that captures the measure of the man whom the Holy Spirit has chosen to guide the Church. On a white field, ivory to be precise, there burns a heart pierced by an arrow, borne up by an open book. It is the emblem of the Augustinian Order, and it points back to a famous phrase from the Confessions: “Sagittaveras tu cor meum charitate tua.” “You pierced my heart with your love.” Lower down, set upon a scroll, is the motto of the new pontificate: In Illo uno unum. “In the one Christ we are one.” Exactly one year after his election, on 8 May 2025, it is from these two images, the wounded heart and unity, that we must begin again if we are to understand who Robert Francis Prevost truly is, and what has happened in these three hundred and sixty-five days that have passed so swiftly since the evening when he appeared at the Loggia of the Blessings with a greeting that many, at the time, heard absent-mindedly, almost as a ritual formula: “Peace be with you! This is the peace of the Risen Christ, a disarmed peace and a disarming peace, humble and persevering.”
A disarmed and disarming peace. For days, observers wondered about that doubled adjective and the reasons behind so unusual a choice. Twelve months later, we can say it without hesitation: it was already the programme of his pontificate.
Not so much with empty words addressed to others, outside the Church, but within it: peace.
Some, at the time, were surprised to see him appear at the Loggia with a sheet of paper in his hands, on which he had written parts of his address. Yet that detail too revealed a style: a man who reflects, weighs, evaluates, lets thought settle before entrusting it to words. When, in the enclosure of the Sistine Chapel, he began to understand that the votes of his brother cardinals were converging on his name, he did not pretend not to see it. He allowed fear to pass through him, gathered himself, pondered. And, as is natural for a man of his temperament, he asked himself what he should say to the world: he thought about it, and he wrote it down. Partly because Italian is not the language in which he learnt to pray, partly because, quite simply, he did not want to forget anything that mattered to him. And the first thing he wanted to say was precisely that greeting of the Risen Christ which the world, even today, finds so hard to hear. Why return to those words now? Because in those four words the thread is knotted which runs, with almost unsettling coherence, through the entire magisterium of these first three hundred and sixty-five days of Petrine ministry. And because in them one reads, above all, a clear and firm idea of what it means to love in a time such as ours. The thread is one, and it sinks deep into the marrow of the Augustinian lesson: there is no authentic tenderness without fidelity to truth, nor any truth that does not find its fulfilment in unity. Everything else is rhetoric.
The arrow: the primacy of truth
The most demanding address of this first year was, without any doubt, the one delivered to the Diplomatic Corps on 9 January 2026. There emerges in it, openly and almost fully unfolded, the entire architecture of De Civitate Dei. Leo XIV invokes the sack of Rome in 410, the famous Augustinian dialectic between the two cities, the earthly and the heavenly, and pride as the ultimate root of every conflict. But the centre of the address, its most pressing core, lies elsewhere. It lies in the passage dedicated to words.
“Rediscovering the meaning of words is perhaps one of the first challenges of our time,” the Pope tells the ambassadors. “When words lose their adherence to reality, and reality itself becomes debatable and ultimately incommunicable, we become like those two people of whom Saint Augustine speaks, who are forced to remain together without either of them knowing the language of the other.”
From that premise came a sharp diagnosis: “In our day, the meaning of words is increasingly fluid and the concepts they represent increasingly ambiguous. Language is no longer the privileged means of human nature for knowing and encountering, but, in the folds of semantic ambiguity, increasingly becomes a weapon with which to deceive, strike and offend adversaries.” And then, with a courage that did not go unnoticed by the more attentive cardinals, came the thrust: there is developing “a new language, Orwellian in flavour, which, in its attempt to be ever more inclusive, ends up excluding those who do not conform to the ideologies that animate it.”
The observation brought a decisive link into focus. Without true words, the very possibility of dialogue dissolves, and without dialogue every hope of peace vanishes. Freedom of expression, Leo recalled, is guaranteed “precisely by the certainty of language and by the fact that every term is anchored in truth.” When language breaks down, it carries with it the possibility of encounter. We become strangers to one another to such an extent that, according to an Augustinian page which Leo has slowly helped the contemporary world to rediscover by stitching it into his speeches, “a man is more willing to be with his dog than with a stranger.” Read again in the light of what is happening in these hours, with the President of the United States bending reality to his own use and turning the Pope into an improbable “promoter of the atomic bomb”, that passage reveals an almost disturbing foresight. Leo XIV is not at all surprised by it, and this can be stated calmly: he had already denounced, word for word, this same dynamic months ago, and had even done so in the presence of the American ambassador. Augustine’s arrow, the one that pierces the heart in the coat of arms, is first and foremost the arrow of truth. A truth that hurts because it cuts, and that in that very cut reveals itself as loving: it wounds you in order to heal you. This is the first thing that must be understood about Leo XIV. His tenderness does not resemble softness; it has its temperature, but rejects its vice. It is a tenderness of precision. It loves enough to refuse to lie. Confirmation of this comes from rereading, in counter-light, the address of 12 May 2025 to media professionals, delivered just four days after his election. In it there is a request which today, after the address to the ambassadors and many other interventions, sounds like the other side of the same coin: “Let us disarm communication of all prejudice, resentment, fanaticism and hatred; let us purify it of aggression. We do not need loud, muscular communication, but rather communication capable of listening, of gathering the voice of the weak who have no voice. Let us disarm words and we will help to disarm the Earth.” To disarm words, here, must be understood in its deepest sense: it means restoring them to truth. A disarmed word is a word that has ceased to strike, because it knows exactly what it is speaking about; it has ceased to shout, because it does not fear an answer. It is the word of those who seek encounter more than victory in debate, knowing well that truly meeting someone requires the courage to call things by their name. It is the word of the “peacemakers” of whom Leo would speak months later in Beirut, choosing as the inspiration for the whole journey to Lebanon the Gospel Beatitude: Blessed are the peacemakers.
Precisely in Beirut, on 30 November 2025, before the Lebanese authorities, one sentence sums up his whole vision: “Weapons kill; negotiation, mediation and dialogue build. Let us all choose peace as a path, not only as a goal!” Dialogue is not a sign of weakness, but the only creative gesture possible. War destroys; peace builds. But this is the point: only if words return to being true words.
The book: tenderness as method
The other element that appears in the coat of arms is the book. It supports the wounded heart; it holds it up. It is the Word of God, which can transform the heart of every man, as it did with Augustine. But it is also, explicitly, a reference to the enlightened works which the Doctor of Grace gave to the Church and to humanity. Thought, then. Study. The effort to understand before intervening.
It is a trait we have been able to appreciate over the course of this first year of pontificate, in which Leo XIV has redesigned the Secretariat of State and brought order back to many dossiers left open: the Diocese of Rome, the economic bodies, a discreet sequence of appointments, transfers, reallocations, and the removal of figures who had become cumbersome. Before us, then, stands a Pope of considered judgement, alien to any temptation towards improvisation. For Leo XIV, tenderness takes the form of care, and before that of taking care of words, as well as people.
We found the same attitude when he addressed the Curia. The first address, on 24 May 2025, was essentially an act of humility: “This first meeting of ours is certainly not the time for programmatic speeches, but rather it is for me an opportunity to say thank you.” And then that phrase, quoted from Peter on the lake of Tiberias, which is almost a self-portrait: “Lord, you know everything; you know that I love you.” Yet already there appeared what would mature in the Christmas greetings of 22 December 2025: the idea that the Church, and the Curia with her, lives by two inseparable dimensions, mission and communion. Going out towards the world, but going together. Proclaiming the Gospel, but first of all being a credible sign of unity. And here the Christmas address reaches a frankness which, months later, deserves to be read again in full. Leo does not pretend that the Curia is an idyllic place. On the contrary: “At times, behind an apparent tranquillity, the ghosts of division are stirring.” And again, with a question that visibly costs him something: “Is it possible to be friends in the Roman Curia? To have relationships of friendly fraternity?” He does not answer with a proclamation. He answers by describing, almost tenderly: “In the daily effort, it is beautiful when we find friends whom we can trust, when masks and subterfuges fall, when people are not used and bypassed, when we help one another, when each person’s value and competence is recognised.”
“When masks and subterfuges fall.” It is an Augustinian phrase, the “authentic conduct”, the transparency of the soul, but it is also the programme of a man who knows very well where he lives. For Leo XIV, unity in the Church is not decreed from above: it is built by ceasing to pretend. Tenderness, once again, is not sentiment: it is the courage to remove the mask. It is relational sincerity, a word that ought to be restored to the vocabulary of politics, of the press, and also of many of our presbyterates. The same register emerges in the other major speeches of the first year. In Monaco, on 28 March 2026, before the “Catholic” community of the Principality, one of the places most marked by opulence in the world, the Pope delivered a homily unprecedented in its clarity. The Catholic faith, he said, “commits Christians to becoming in the world a kingdom of brothers and sisters, a presence that does not crush but lifts up, that does not separate but connects, ready always to protect every human life with love.” A presence that does not crush. Perhaps the most precise image Leo has found to describe himself and what he asks of Christians.
And in the same cathedral, another phrase: in the Church, social and economic differences “never become an occasion for division into social classes but, on the contrary, all are welcomed as persons and children of God.” In a city-state where the value of a person is calculated from his bank account, the Pope went to say that the Church is the place where this logic collapses, or should collapse. Not through ideological denunciations, but through an appeal to a more ancient truth.
The fire: from unity to peace
And here we come to the heart. Literally: to the burning heart of the coat of arms. Because there is a point at which arrow and book touch, and it is fire: the love of Christ, which is fire and which, by wounding us, unites us. The entire pontificate, in this first year, can be read as a variation on the motto: In Illo uno unum. In the Christmas greetings of 2025, Leo returns to it explicitly: “We, however, are the Church of Christ, we are his members, his body. We are brothers and sisters in him. And in Christ, though we are many and different, we are one: In Illo uno unum.” But he repeats the same thing, in different forms, everywhere.
In Beirut: “May you all make one single language resound: the language of hope that brings everyone together in the courage to begin again, always anew. May the desire to live and grow together, as a people, make every group the voice of a polyphony.” Not homogeneity: polyphony. One voice made of many voices. It is exactly the opposite of the totalitarianism of language criticised before the ambassadors; and it is also the opposite of the individualism denounced in Monaco. In İznik, on 28 November 2025, commemorating with Patriarch Bartholomew the 1,700 years of the Council of Nicaea, unity is the visible unity of Christians: the great wound still open. Back in Rome, in the press conference on the return flight, he speaks of the idea of celebrating together, in 2033, the two thousand years of the Resurrection, possibly in Jerusalem. This is not a utopia: it is a trajectory. Peace among Christians as an anticipation of peace among peoples. At his farewell from Lebanon, on 2 December 2025, came another phrase worth remembering: “Leaving is harder than arriving. We have been together, and in Lebanon being together is contagious: I found here a people who do not love isolation, but encounter.” They do not love isolation but encounter: this is the exact opposite of the grammar of the fortress, of the enclosure, of the border raised as a wall. Encounter, not homologation, not fusion, is the very form of Christian charity.
And then there is peace, conjugated through every tense and form of the verb to disarm. Disarmed: like Christ on the Cross, who, as the Pope would say at the General Audience of 3 September 2025, “does not appear as a victorious hero, but as a beggar for love.” Disarming: because whoever sees this goodness is changed by it. Disarming as an action: in the gerund of daily commitment, the participle of the journey. Peace, for Leo, is not a state: it is an action. One disarms by doing, choosing, speaking well, ceasing to humiliate the other. “What must be disarmed first of all is the heart,” he said at the Marian Vigil for Peace on 11 October 2025, “because if there is no peace within us, we will not give peace.” Here the thread closes. Because the disarmed heart is exactly the wounded heart of the coat of arms: a heart that no longer defends itself, because it has already been pierced by an arrow that has opened it to love. Saint Augustine had understood it: only one who has been loved knows how to love. Only one who has been disarmed by the goodness of Another can in turn disarm the world.
The legacy of a year
One year after his election, Leo XIV gives us an idea of the Church, and of the papacy, that is both classical and entirely new. Classical because it is rooted in the great tradition: Augustine, certainly, but also Leo XIII, whose name he chose, evoking Catholic social doctrine; Saint Paul VI, cited on several occasions, from Evangelii nuntiandi to Populorum progressio; John Paul II, Benedict XVI, Francis. Entirely new because, in a world that seems to have lost trust in the very possibility of truth, and therefore in the possibility of dialogue, this Pope rejects both cynicism and sentimental escape. He does not take refuge in nostalgia; he does not promise restorations. Nor does he yield to the temptation of a Church which, in order to please the world, ceases to be herself. His gesture is another: to return to true words, true relationships, true faith. In Illo uno unum: not in an ideology, not in a party or an ecclesial faction, not in an acronym. In Christ. It is a unity that asks for humility, because it requires renouncing the claim to be right against someone else; but it is also a unity that asks for courage, because it obliges us to call things by their name.
The challenges are countless. Internally, faith thinning out in daily lives; families crossed by ever deeper fractures; a clergy exhausted and at times torn within itself by restless figures, skilled at sowing discord; and again, the lukewarm attention that pastoral work gives to vocations; a seminary formation that shows subtle but extensive cracks; the reluctance to abandon structures that are now inadequate; the mirror temptation of loading increasingly cumbersome burdens onto the clergy; the liturgy transformed into a trench rather than a place of communion. Externally, the advent of artificial intelligence, to which Leo will dedicate his next encyclical; the war in Ukraine, which drags on; the Holy Land, where the truce shows wider cracks every day; the persecutions striking Christians in many corners of the world; the crisis of religious freedom which now affects Western democracies too; and finally the tensions with Washington, where an American president has attacked the first American Pope in history with an unprecedented harshness. And yet, in the meantime, a year has passed. And what remains, in those who have known how to listen with due attention, is the sense of standing before a man who has grasped something essential: in this age of armed words and hardened hearts, tenderness emancipates itself from sentimentalism, escapes the private rooms where too many would like to confine it as though it were an inheritance to be ashamed of, and assumes the rank of a form of truth. It is the way in which truth reaches the other without killing him: wounding him only where necessary in order to heal him. Like an arrow. Like that arrow which, in Augustine’s account, God shot into the heart of a young rhetorician from Tagaste, and from that wounded heart has then come down, century after century, to all those who have allowed themselves to be pierced.
“Sagittaveras tu cor meum charitate tua.” “You pierced my heart with your love.” In the end, it is in this ancient Augustinian prayer that the first year of Leo XIV could be condensed: a Pope who has tried to remind the world that it is still possible to be wounded by love, persuaded that without that wound every discourse on peace, justice and fraternity is destined to decline into yet another empty word.
In Illo uno unum. In the one Christ we are one. More than a slogan, it is the programme of an entire life, and, God willing, of a pontificate.
Marco Felipe Perfetti
Director, Silere non possum