Nobel Peace Prizewinner Beatrice Fihn pays tribute to Pope Francis, an all-important ally in the campaign to abolish atomic arms from the face of the Earth.
Fihn, who as head of the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons was awarded the Nobel Prize in 2017, tells me in an interview that Pope Francis helped forge “an informal alliance” with ICAN in their collective push to rid the world of weapons that could destroy the globe and its eight billion citizens.
While Pope Francis headed the smallest city-state on the planet, he took on a colossal role in pressing for the creation of a new, nuclear-arms-free world, says Fihn, who – like the supreme pontiff – has become an icon of the atomic peace movement that’s reshaped the planet over the past dozen years.
From his micro-enclave at Vatican City, Pope Francis crisscrossed the continents and forged coalitions – including the crucial entente with Fihn’s group ICAN – to outlaw the possession of nuclear weapons, and ultimately even war, which he called “barbaric and sacrilegious”.
Deriding doomsday weaponry across his pontificate, Francis once warned: “Before the danger of self-destruction, may humanity understand that the moment has come to abolish war, to erase it from human history before it erases human history!”
To supercharge his forays to Ban the Bomb, Pope Francis reached out to Beatrice Fihn, inviting her to address his Vatican Disarmament Conference in 2017 and sketch out ICAN’s crusade to promulgate a global treaty aimed at eradicating uranium bombs secreted in silos, submarines and fighter-bombers around the world.
Pope Francis, Fihn tells me, “played an instrumental role in supporting ICAN, the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons, and getting the Catholic community around the world to think about nuclear weapons, including many Catholic countries.”
“His speeches, his actions and consistent message on this issue,” she says, “really made an impact, also in Catholic communities in nuclear armed states.”
Francis told Fihn and a constellation of other Nobel laureates he invited to the Vatican anti-nuclear gathering: “The escalation of the arms race continues unabated; and the price of modernizing and developing weaponry, not only nuclear weapons, represents a considerable expense for nations.”
In light of “the catastrophic humanitarian and environmental effects of any employment of nuclear devices,” he added, “the threat of their use, as well as their very possession, is to be firmly condemned.”
Yet amid this darkness of an atomic doomsday hovering over the Earth, Pope Francis said a new ray of light and hope had appeared on the horizon, in the form of overwhelming UN support for a treaty mandating the dismantling of the world’s nuclear stockpiles.
“In a historic vote at the United Nations, the majority of the members of the international community determined that nuclear weapons are not only immoral but must also be considered an illegal means of warfare.”
Fihn attributed ICAN’s victory in persuading more than 100 UN members to sign the nuclear ban treaty partly to Pope Francis’ early backing and guidance for the breakthrough accord.
“Through these decades,” she told peace activists from across the globe who convened at the Vatican, “people of faith have been a consistent light, a constant voice pulling us back from the brink of annihilation, a steady guide out of this prison of fear that we have created.”
“And this pope and his predecessors have continued to appeal to hope in the face of this fear, light in the face of darkness, life in the face of death.”
“So who better to lead us out of the reliance on weapons of mass destruction than the pope and people of faith?”
Fihn also revealed she asked Pope Francis to compose a special prayer tied to their joint campaign.
“Today, I made a humble request of Pope Francis that I now extend to all of you. On December 10, in Oslo, Hiroshima survivor Setsuko Thurlow and I will accept the Nobel Peace Prize—it is actually awarded on that day every year, and it happens to fall on a Sunday this year.”
“I asked today the Holy Father to lead the global Catholic community in praying for the end of the threat of nuclear weapons, and I ask the same of you.”
“And let the prayers of the people around the world on December 10 appeal for peace.”
Expanding his alliance with Fihn and ICAN, Francis ended his December 10th Angelus at Saint Peter’s Square with a call-out to more than a billion Catholics scattered across the continents.
“Today the Nobel Peace Prize will be awarded to the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons,” Pope Francis declared.
“This recognition coincides with the United Nations’ Human Rights Day, and this underscores the strong ties between human rights and nuclear disarmament. Indeed, committing oneself to protecting the dignity of all people, in a particular way those who are weakest and most disadvantaged, means also working with determination to build a world without nuclear arms.”
In synchrony, at the Nobel Peace Prize summit in Oslo, Fihn sketched out the life-and-death race to obliterate atomic warheads before they obliterated human civilization: “We represent those who refuse to accept nuclear weapons as a fixture in our world, those who refuse to have their fates bound up in a few lines of launch code.”
“At dozens of locations around the world – in missile silos buried in our earth, on submarines navigating through our oceans, and aboard planes flying high in our sky – lie 15,000 objects of humankind’s destruction.”
“The story of nuclear weapons will have an ending,” she prophesied.
“It is up to us what that ending will be. Will it be the end of nuclear weapons, or will it be the end of us?”
Only by recreating the Earth – through universal adoption of the treaty banning atomic weaponry, and then tearing apart every last warhead – could humanity rescue its collective future for eons of Eden-like peace, she predicted.
Pope Francis repeatedly pressed forward his sacred quest to annihilate atomic weapons of annihilation, and to restore the paradisiacal era chronicled in Genesis, before humans invented arms.
During a wintry mass he led at the heart of the Eternal City in January of 2021, the Bishop of Rome hailed the nuclear ban treaty’s coming into force and called on the established nuclear powers to recognize the new global zeitgeist by abolishing their atomic arms caches.
The initial stream of states signing and ratifying the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons – Vatican City was the first to join – included a torrent of Catholic-majority countries, and Catholic prelates continue to press for adopting the accord even in the holdout nuclear-armed nations.
As their anti-nuclear crusade gained ground globally, Fihn tells me, “Pope Francis’s work spread throughout Catholic communities worldwide.”
“It also inspired other religious leaders – such as the Archbishops of Canterbury and York – to support the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons, ICAN and nuclear abolition.”
Although Pope Francis was pivotal to promoting the first UN treaty aimed at preventing – for all time – thermonuclear warfare, Fihn says, he actually launched his holy war against these weapons of mass destruction before the treaty was even conceived.
Just a year after being elected head of the Holy See, “Pope Francis moved the Catholic Church into a new position on nuclear weapons already in 2014.”
He outlined that new, stronger stance against any form of atomic weaponry, Fihn says, “through a video message and a written paper at the Vienna Conference on the Humanitarian Impact of Nuclear Weapons in December 2014.”
Pope Francis warned the world that nuclear weapons “have the potential to destroy us and civilization.”
“Nuclear deterrence and the threat of mutually assured destruction,” he added, “cannot be the basis for an ethics of fraternity and peaceful coexistence among peoples and states. The youth of today and tomorrow deserve far more. They deserve a peaceful world order.”
It was this Vienna gathering, and Pope Francis’ doomsday predictions, that ultimately led to the development of the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons, Fihn says.
Meanwhile, although Beatrice Fihn has stepped down as head of the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons, she continues her incredible world-changing drive to create a new-millennium globe, purged of atomic bombs, as director of the philanthropic group Lex International.
Her one-time colleague at ICAN, International Treaty Coordinator Tim Wright, seconds the stance that Pope Francis played an essential role in “bringing the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons into force.”
“He helped convince other leaders that joining the treaty was a moral and humanitarian imperative,” Wright tells me in an interview, and consistently persuaded other states to join, “in particular nations with large Catholic populations.”
Wright says that across ICAN, which has members in more than 100 countries, “We will continue to work closely with the Holy See to advance the goal of a nuclear-weapon-free world.”
One of the co-founders of ICAN, Wright adds that Pope Francis’ role as a virtual patron saint of the movement to ban nuclear bombs should be recognized into the future with a special kind of homage.
“The best way for national leaders to pay tribute to the pontiff would be to heed his calls for peace through disarmament. This should include signing and ratifying the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons.”
