Vatican City, Feb 27, 2022 / 04:21 am (CNA).
Pope Francis appealed on Sunday for an end to the Ukraine conflict.
In his first direct public comments since the Russian president Vladimir Putin ordered a full-scale invasion of Ukraine on Feb. 24, the pope called for humanitarian corridors to be opened to allow Ukrainians to flee the intense fighting.
“In these days we have been shocked by something tragic: war. Many times we have prayed that this road would not be taken. And we do not stop praying, indeed, we beg God more intensely,” he said after reciting the Angelus on Feb. 27.
Referring to his appeal to people around the world to pray and fast for peace, he said: “That is why I renew the invitation to everyone to make March 2, Ash Wednesday, a day of prayer and fasting for peace in Ukraine. A day to be close to the suffering of the Ukrainian people, to feel that we are all brothers and sisters and to implore God to end the war.”
He continued: “Those who wage war, who provoke war, forget humanity. They do not start from the people. They do not look at the concrete life of people, but they put partisan interests and power before everything. They rely on the diabolical and perverse logic of weapons, which is the farthest from God’s will. And they distance themselves from ordinary people, who want peace; and who in every conflict are the true victims, who pay for the follies of war on their own skin.”
In his live-streamed address, he pope said that he was thinking “of the elderly, of those who are seeking refuge in these hours, of mothers fleeing with their children. They are brothers and sisters, for whom it is urgent to open humanitarian corridors and who must be welcomed.”
As pilgrims in St. Peter’s Square held up large Ukrainian flags, the 85-year-old pope said he was “heartbroken” by the scenes in Ukraine and urged people not to forget ongoing conflicts in other countries, such as Yemen, Syria, and Ethiopia.
“Silence the weapons: God is with the peacemakers, not with those who use violence, because those who love peace, as the Italian Constitution states, ‘repudiate war as an instrument of offence against the liberty of other peoples and as a means for settling international disputes.’”
Pope Francis had been due to visit Florence on Sunday but was forced to postpone the trip due to knee pain.
Since the launch of the full-scale invasion Ukraine, the pope has engaged in behind-the-scenes efforts to help end the conflict.
On Feb. 25, he visited the Russian Embassy to the Holy See. The Catholic author George Weigel told Catholic World Report that the pope spoke with Putin via a secure telephone line during the visit. The Holy See press office said that the pope went to the embassy “to show his concern for the war,” but did not mention a phone call to the Russian president.
On the same day, Pope Francis called Major Archbishop Sviatoslav Shevchuk, the leader of the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church, who is based in the Ukrainian capital Kyiv. The pope promised to do everything he can to help end the war.
On Feb. 26, Pope Francis expressed his sorrow at the situation in Ukraine in a phone call with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy.
At the end of his Angelus address, the pope referred to the many Ukrainian flags in the square below and said: “Slava Isusu Christu” (“Glory to Jesus Christ”), a traditional Ukrainian Catholic greeting.
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Without detracting one iota from the Holy Father’s remarks (“tragic”), there’s an irony in this: “Those who wage war, who provoke war, forget humanity. They do not start from the people. They do not look at the concrete life of people, but they put partisan interests and power before everything.”
FIRST of all, volcanoes and earthquakes are “tragic,” military invasion is at the same time criminal and anachronistic.
SECOND, coming from the very soil of Russian history—a history of the people (!)—was a messianic energy which Lenin brilliantly fused into his socialist world revolution. Moscow had been the Third Rome ever since the conquest of Constantinople by Islam in A.D. 1453. It is not simply “partisan interests” or disregard for “the concrete life of people” or “humanity” that inhabits the dark side of the Putin mind.
“This is the deepest meaning of the Third Rome, underlying and surviving all the corrupt earthly form in which the Third Rome seeks to assert itself. Such, to echo the Russian phrase, is the promise. This bears directly on the peculiarly Russian cult of the narod as the God-bearing part of mankind; for that peculiarly Russian concept, God-bearing, Russian has a special word: begonesets. In Russian, the peasants are felt by other Russians to be God-bearing in a way that sets them apart from the rest of mankind” (Whittaker Chambers, “The Third Rome,” in Cold Friday, 1964).
The apparent alliance of the Third-Rome Russian Orthodox Church with Putin’s aggression is cut from this same cloth.
THIRD, but, in his “Memory and Identity,” while Pope St. John Paul II celebrates also the history and depth of the Polish memory (“the concrete life of the people,” yes?), he ALSO appeals to a “non-exclusive” identity and solidarity…
So, without inadvertently lapsing into the post-Christian language of “partisan interests,” truly what is it that the perennial, non-sectarian (e.g., German?) and universal Catholic Church—as a hierarchical communion and with its distinctive and absolutely unique sensus fidelium (!)—now should be signaling, proclaiming and even hollering (Hollerich???) in, say, the synod on synodality?