To the powerful of the earth, peace be with you!

Evil does not always arrive by smashing down a door.

Sometimes it enters silently. It puts on an elegant suit.

It smiles before the cameras.

It is placed in a case, accompanied by a note, presented with all due honours.

And for a few moments, no one recognises evil any longer, because it has learnt good manners.

That is what wounds me about the gesture made in Ankara: not merely a pistol presented to representatives of the NATO countries, but death transformed into courtesy. The possibility of taking a life turned into a souvenir, an official memento, an object to be put on display.

We have tamed weapons to the point where we can give them as gifts. This is the real scandal.

You tell us that it is a symbol. But symbols are precisely what educate the world. They come before laws, penetrate more deeply than speeches, and silently teach what a civilisation considers normal.

And this gift teaches that power must recognise itself in the metal of a pistol. It teaches that an important man is an armed man; that among rulers, one can pay homage to another by handing over, with elegance, the possibility of death.

The name of the person receiving the weapon was engraved on the barrel.

But every pistol always bears a second name, invisible.

It is the name of the man at whom it might one day be pointed;

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 to return.

The true recipient of a weapon is never merely the person who receives it. It is the unknown body that one day might encounter its bullet.

That is why I cannot regard this gesture as a mere diplomatic eccentricity. It tells us something about an idea of the world. A world in which we have learnt to measure security by counting weapons, without any longer asking how much fear must be sown in order to preserve it. A world that calls mutual terror balance, and calls peace the interval during which no one has yet fired.

As a Christian, I cannot accept this.

The Gospel has given us another image of power.

Christ, on the night when everything might have driven Him to defend Himself, did not place a weapon in the hands of His disciples. He wrapped a towel around His waist. He knelt before them and washed their tired feet.

On one side, a weapon offered standing, among powerful men.

On the other, God kneeling before man.

These are two civilisations. We must choose.

We Christians are not naïve. We know violence. We encounter it in abandoned neighbourhoods, in homes where there is no bread, in the bodies of migrants, in children returned to their mothers inside a coffin.

We know that evil exists. Precisely for this reason, we refuse to make it elegant. We refuse to adorn it, to polish it, to transform it into a sign of prestige.

A weapon does not become innocent because it is given as a gift.

It does not become silent because it does not fire. It does not become human because it bears a name engraved upon it.

I therefore ask you, leaders of nations, not to keep that gift as a trophy. Do not merely leave it in a room, away from people’s eyes, as though hiding a symbol were enough to erase its meaning.

Do something more difficult.

Reject the idea that death can be a form of homage.

Say publicly that no pact between peoples needs to find its identity in a pistol. Say that the dignity of a nation does not lie in the amount of fear it is able to produce. Say that security is not the privilege of the one who can fire first, but the right of everyone not to be shot.

And at the next summit, leave one chair empty.

Not for a president, not for a general, not for a minister.

Leave it for the nameless man 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 beneath the rubble when diplomacy fails.

Look at that chair before you speak of weapons.

Perhaps then you will understand that peace is not a weakness to be corrected, but a responsibility before which we must kneel.

For the power that does not know how to kneel before life will always end up kneeling before weapons.

And on that day, however solemn the ceremonies may be, we shall already have lost everything.

See:  “Il male che impara le buone maniere”

*Don Mimmo Battaglia is the Metropolitan Archbishop of Naples