In the first week of this year, I watched Pope Leo officially close the Holy Door of St Peter’s Basilica in Rome. It marked the formal conclusion of the 2025 Jubilee Year of Hope, called by his predecessor, Pope Francis.
As the door was firmly sealed up with mortar and cement, it seemed audacious to speak about hope with armed conflict at its highest level for decades: a level that has only escalated in past weeks. And yet hope that there is another way to respond to today’s global crisis of death and destruction is the growing drumbeat from gatherings I’ve chaired in the last 12 months.
That drumbeat is charted in a White Paper just published called Changing the Narrative: Preparing for Peace. It speaks of a new multifaith and multistakeholder alliance which is mobilising, made up of faith-based actors, parliamentarians and grass roots peacemakers, with a clear message and a common vision: war is not inevitable; it’s time for reconciliation and healing, time to end dehumanising and polarising narratives that divide communities; time to emphasise the sanctity of life, human dignity and rights for all; and time to prioritise humanitarian action for all victims of war and violence.
This global alliance, the White Paper says, represents the development of a new kind of partnership in international politics- one which links religious and faith-based actors to civil society organisations, international practitioners and policy makers who all persist in proclaiming and working for the possibility of peace, often in quiet ways and often at the margins of power.
There’s recognition too that this commitment to peace has often lacked support from both political and religious leaders. Criticism here is forthright. Rabbi David Rosen, the International President of Religions for Peace puts it starkly: “There has been an abysmal failure of religious leadership to do more to try to prevent wars, atrocities and polarisation, and often even to be guilty of fomenting these. This is incredibly egregious when one considers that all religions preach justice and righteousness, love and peace.”
And this fierce reprimand comes from Cardinal Pierbattista Pizzaballa, The Latin Patriarch of Jerusalem:
“We need a time for reset, a moment to reframe and discover the role of faith actors in conflict. We need to rethink our language and how we refer to communities that are not our own, to challenge the political narrative of dehumanising the other, and to be present where people are suffering, where there is pain, where there is death.”
Both leaders were speaking at a Wilton Park Dialogue held a year ago on The Role and Responsibilities of Religious Leaders in Times of War , Atrocities and Polarisation. That Dialogue produced 19 clear recommendations for action – and these were taken up in a series of subsequent meetings throughout 2025 convened by the Inter-Parliamentary Union, the UN Faith for Rights programme, and Globethics alongside Wilton Park.
Perhaps surprising, threading through all the discussions is a message of hope, which the White Paper says reflects the acute yearning of billions of human beings to rebuild life and dignity and to live together again in peace. Michel Nseir of the World Council of Churches expresses it like this:
In Syria, as in Palestine, and in so many other countries of the region, ruins are everywhere- cities erased, families scattered, hearts closed. Hope does not deny the ruins; it looks at them and still chooses to act. Hope is the quiet decision not to give in to evil, but to stand up to it, with the stubborn conviction that life is still stronger than death, that dignity is still possible.
And it’s no coincidence that this series of meetings took place in the year that marked the 80th anniversary of the signing of the United Nations Charter, when the great powers of the world worked together in the hope of building a global political framework to maintain international peace and allow people to live together with one another as good neighbours. This new global alliance has its work cut out as it seeks to follow in those footsteps helping create bridges between communities of faith, international organisations and states and contribute to changing narratives of conflict into narratives of peace. Nurturing its progress is a fitting challenge for Wilton Park too as it marks its own 80th anniversary and celebrates its enduring mandate to promote peace through dialogue.