By Alessandro Gisotti
Many of the images from these first two months of Pope Leo XIV’s pontificate are full of meaning.
Some will remain in the collective memory for years to come—like the emotion he choked down on the central balcony of St Peter’s Basilica as he looked out at the joyful crowd in St. Peter’s Square on the afternoon of May 8, during his first Urbi et Orbi after being elected.
There is also another image, far less known, that quietly carries with it a message and a vision for the future: Pope Leo sits on his heels next to a little girl from the Vatican summer camp who is showing him a drawing.
What strikes us are their smiles: the Pope is clearly looking toward the person taking the photo, while the girl, captivated by the moment, doesn’t look at the camera but keeps her smiling gaze fixed on Pope Leo XIV.
Why is this image so striking? Because in that simple act of bending down, the Pope points us toward a direction that all people—especially those who hold the fate of the world in their hands—should follow: to meet children at their level, to look at the world through their eyes.
How much would the course of humanity change if each of us had the courage to lower ourselves, just as Jesus did when He rebuked the disciples who tried to shoo away the “bothersome” children, saying the immortal words: “Let the little children come to me.”
Today, how often do we truly let children come to us? More importantly—how often do we go toward them?
Do we make an effort to care for those children caught in the crossfire of war, those starved by others’ selfishness, those abused in countless ways.
Reason—before even emotion—should demand that the strong protect the small. Instead, the opposite happens: in wars decided by adults, the first to suffer are the children.
What would we see if we bent down to the level of the children in Gaza, in Kharkiv, in Goma, and in the countless places torn apart by armed conflict? Perhaps, if we did, something would change.
“If we are to teach real peace in this world,” Mahatma Gandhi once said, “and if we are to carry on a real war against war, we shall have to begin with the children.”
Imagine, just for a moment, if children from the nations of the Great Powers sat on the UN Security Council. Who knows how international relations might change.
Sadly, we must admit with bitterness that the reality of war is instilled in us like poison from the earliest years of life.
Bertolt Brecht put it with chilling precision in a poem written as the shadow of the Second World War loomed: “Children play at war. Rarely do they play at peace, because adults have always made war.”
This is why, perhaps, the only true way to change the course of history is the one that seems least likely: to stoop down, to step away from our adult convictions and interests, and to look (and even more so, to feel) with the “low” gaze of children.
As a missionary and bishop in Peru, Pope Leo bent down many times to meet children at their level. There are countless photos of him doing just that.
Now that he is Bishop of Rome, his style hasn’t changed, as that photo from the Vatican summer camp in the Paul VI Hall reminds us.
To become small, then, is to enlarge our humanity. This is a lesson we are in desperate need of today. – Vatican News
