There are times when words cease to be instruments of truth and become objects of veneration. They no longer designate reality: they replace it. They do not illuminate facts: they cover them. It is then that what we might call, with an expression that is perhaps not canonical but profoundly adherent to a long Christian spiritual tradition, the ‘idolatry of words’ is born.

The idol, in biblical reflection, is not just a stone or metal statue. It is something constructed by man that man himself ends up worshipping as absolute. In this sense, even a word can become idolatrous: when it loses its relationship with the concrete truth of human experience and is transformed into an untouchable formula, a sacralised slogan, a moral simulacrum. The word then ceases to refer to reality and claims to take its place.

Christian tradition has always viewed this danger with suspicion. Already the prophet Jeremiah denounced those who repeated ‘Peace, peace’ when there was no peace at all. The formula outlived the truth; the language continued to proclaim an order that real life belied every day. This is one of the oldest criticisms of verbal idolatry: the use of just words to cover unjust situations.
Even Augustine of Hippo, in De civitate Dei, recalled that authentic peace does not coincide with the simple absence of conflict, but with ‘tranquillitas ordinis’, that is, with a just order. A peace achieved through absolute domination, terror or the suppression of freedom is not true peace: it is only the immobilisation of violence. Sometimes even tyranny can appear outwardly ordered. But order without justice, for Augustine, easily degrades into a refined form of violence.

Later Thomas Aquinas would insist that the good of peace cannot be separated from the good of justice. Peace is not an abstract absolute before which every other value must dissolve. If it were, any stable oppression could be called peace. Even silence imposed on the vanquished would become peace. Even permanent fear could be mistaken for order.
And it is precisely here that one of the great moral contradictions of our time emerges. In much of contemporary public discourse – and not infrequently in ecclesiastical discourse as well – the word ‘peace’ sometimes seems to be reduced to the simple cessation of visible military hostilities.

But is it really peace when a people continue to live under occupation, coercion, capillary control, arbitrary imprisonment, torture, disappearances, administrative terror and deprivation of fundamental freedoms? Can one call it peace a situation in which war continues in quieter and less spectacular forms?

Modern warfare does not only take on the face of bombardment. There is also a deaf, bureaucratic, psychological, police war. A war that does not always produce immediate television images, but which continues to slowly consume human dignity. There are territories where weapons are silent and yet men live in daily fear, in constant surveillance, in the impossibility of really deciding their own destiny. In these cases, the cessation of military operations does not necessarily coincide with the end of violence.

The Christian tradition itself is well aware of this ambiguity. The Second Vatican Council, in its constitution Gaudium et spes, clearly states that ‘peace is not the mere absence of war’ but ‘the work of justice’. It is a decisive definition, too often forgotten. Because if peace is separated from justice, then it risks becoming just the noble name given to the stabilisation of power relations.

Of course, the contemporary Church also insists on a ceasefire for understandable reasons. Today’s wars have an immense destructive capacity; civilian populations pay appalling prices; escalation can lead to uncontrollable catastrophes. There is therefore, in the words of the recent Magisterium, a genuine fear for the very survival of the human being. It would be unfair to ignore it. But can situations be considered ‘Peace’ where civilians are imprisoned, tortured, re-educated, forced to change their worldview and fight against their own country as is the case with the Ukrainian population deported to Russia? Can any situation be considered ‘Peace’ where political opponents suffer the same fate, where they are – as is happening in Gaza by the same murderers who carried out 7/10 – clubbed until their bones are broken, causing them excruciating suffering and permanent infirmity, or where they are systematically stoned to death, or hanged, as is customarily done in Iran? Is peace only that which can be established between two belligerent countries, or is it also that which prevents the systematic use of murderous violence even within the same country?

Yet the demonstrations parading behind rainbow banners seem to refer only to the first and most common meaning of the word ‘Peace’, and rarely make any mention of the second. And yet, the two most recent Roman Pontiffs themselves refer to ‘Peace’ almost always in the first sense, and seem to prefer a peace that is agreeable even to the invaders of a free country and the massacrators and torturers of a people to any war, even to those wars that are actually wars of liberation fromdecades or even centuries of oppression and that have over time led to more deaths and suffering than the war of liberation itself.

And here the deepest philosophical and moral knot emerges: if the word ‘peace’ is absolutized to the point of becoming independent of the concrete fate of men, then it risks becoming a linguistic idol. And idols, in the biblical perspective, always have a terrible characteristic: they demand human sacrifice. In our case, the required sacrifice could be that of freedom, dignity and even the concrete historical truth of oppressed peoples.

Perhaps the problem of our age is not just lies. It is something even more subtle: the sacralisation of just words emptied of their real content. Freedom, democracy, rights, peace: lofty terms that can, however, become ideological masks when they cease to confront the concreteness of human suffering.

And it is then that the Christian critique of idolatry regains all its original force. Because the true biblical God never coincides with formulas that can be used as mantras, or slogans. He continually interrogates the words spoken by men. He judges them. He unmasks them. And it relentlessly questions whether there is really justice behind them, or only the attempt to give a morally reassuring name to the perpetuation of criminal domination.