ANZAC Day – 25 April 2026
Each ANZAC Day we gather with both grateful hearts and heavy memories. We remember those who went to war from Australia and New Zealand—many of them young, many of them never returned, and many who returned forever marked by what they had seen and endured. We honour their courage, their sacrifice, and the cost of the freedoms which all too often take for granted.
Yet ANZAC Day is not only about remembering the past. It is also about interpreting the present in the light of that sacrifice and asking what kind of world we are now building with the legacy they left us.
Once again, our world is marked by instability and fear. The tensions between the United States and Iran, alongside other global conflicts, remind us that the logic of rivalry, retaliation, and escalation has not been banished from human history. The language of “us and them,” of deterrence and dominance, still shapes too many decisions that affect the lives of ordinary people—often the poorest, often the least powerful.
Into this world the Church speaks a different word. Drawing deeply from both the Gospel and his Augustinian tradition, Pope Leo XIV, has recently and repeatedly called the world back to the path of peace. He has reminded us that peace is not the fruit of threat or superiority, but of dialogue, restraint, and moral responsibility. As he has said in the context of escalating violence, “violence can never lead to the justice, stability and peace that peoples are awaiting” and that only a renewed commitment to dialogue can break the cycle of destruction. Peace through strength is always an illusion. Peace and control are not the same thing.
if this day means more than remembrance, it is a warning written in the cost of human life that war, once entered, rarely remains contained; that its consequences extend far beyond the battlefield; and that its wounds are carried across generations. The Gallipoli campaign itself was marked by courage, confusion, suffering, and endurance. But it also stands as a symbol of the tragic complexity of war in which bravery and futility often stand side by side. Therefore, to remember ANZAC is not to glorify war, but to acknowledge its reality and to renew our resolve that peace must always be sought more fervently than conflict is entered.
In this light, the Gospel challenges us even further. Christ does not bless violence. He absorbs it. He transforms it. On the cross, he refuses to respond in kind, and in his Resurrection he reveals that love is stronger than death and that peace is not merely an ideal, but a possibility grounded in God’s own life.
This is why the Church’s voice today, echoed by Pope Leo’s appeal for peace in our fractured world, is not naïve idealism but moral realism. For every generation that forgets the cost of war, risks repeating it. And every generation that learns to name peace as a responsibility, helps to prevent its recurrence.
On this ANZAC Day, then, we remember with gratitude. We mourn with honesty. But we also commit ourselves anew: to resist the easy normalisation of conflict; to pray and work for reconciliation where division reigns; and to believe, even amid today’s global tensions, that another path is possible. May the sacrifice of those we remember not be in vain. May their memory deepen our hunger for peace. And may God—who is the source of all justice and reconciliation—guide our world from the logic of war to the patience of peace.
