Pope Francis has taken some unusual steps in the past two weeks. First, he crossed Rome to the Russian embassy where he personally ‘expressed his concern about the war’ then just begun in Ukraine. Second, he called Ukraine’s President Zelenskyy to communicate his ‘most profound pain’ for the country’s suffering.
More recently, on 6 March, he went further: ‘In Ukraine, rivers of blood and tears are flowing. This is not just a military operation but a war which sows death, destruction, and misery…In that martyred country the need for humanitarian assistance is growing by the hour…War is madness, please stop’, he implored.
In the past few days Pope Francis has taken to twitter, writing with greater frequency and more urgency in both English and Russian. ‘Never war! Think first about the children, about those who are deprived of the hope for a dignified life: dead or wounded children, orphans, children who play with the remnants of war…In the name of God, stop!’
These several acts have marked an important break with Vatican diplomatic protocol. Ambassadors normally come to the pope, not he to them. Equally, popes since Benedict XV during World War One have strived to inculcate an impression of their neutrality. Much of the Vatican’s diplomatic nexus has been built up and tolerated by Catholic and non-Catholic powers on the basis of that apolitical ideology.
Yet, here, Francis, even as he sustains the papacy’s now traditional opposition to all forms of war and its emphasis on the extreme suffering war brings, especially to the innocent, has taken a different, more partisan approach which he and others must feel is justified. His consolatory words to Ukraine’s president and his implied rejection of Russia’s description of its actions as a mere ‘military operation’ will have been inflammatory to President Putin.
'His consolatory words to Ukraine’s president and his implied rejection of Russia’s description of its actions as a mere ‘military operation’ will have been inflammatory to President Putin.'
The effects of that are unpredictable. Neither Francis, nor the rest of us, can know how his words or gestures will shape the fate of any Catholics who come under Russian control, nor how they might impact his advocacy for humanitarian decency and compassion.
Nor can he know their effect on the fragile oecumenical rapprochement between the Catholic and Orthodox leaderships which has consolidated since Paul VI’s historic meeting with the Greek Patriarch Athenagoras in Jerusalem in 1964.
In the short