During the audience, I asked Pope Francis: "Do you know what they say about you in Ukraine?». He asked, "what?" I answer: "That you have not read Dostoevsky properly." "But why?" he was surprised…
This was stated by Patriarch Sviatoslav of the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church in the program "Open Church" on "Live TV", reports the Information Department of the UGCC.
The Primate of the UGCC noted that he tried to explain to everyone in Rome, in particular to Pope Francis, that very often the Western world, the Roman world, the ecclesiastical, intellectual world, has romantic ideas about Russia, which were formed over the years…
"And I told the Pope," said the head of the UGCC, "that it reminded me of certain romantic ideas about Germany before the Second World War: when someone heard the word 'Germany', they imagined the German philosophy of the XIX century, high examples of German culture but the Nazis were in power. And then the whole world wondered how such a people, with such high culture, created Auschwitz, was the cause of the Great Holocaust."
"This is exactly what is happening in Russia," the Patriarch said. There are criminals in power there, the Nazis. And the whole world today observes the facts of crimes against the Ukrainian people, their genocide. We see these mass graves. And the pope simply could not believe that such alleged models of humanism could commit such a crime."
His Beatitude Sviatoslav stressed that the hybrid war against Ukraine is connected with Russian propaganda: "Today our people look like a diseased child who sees the world in black and white. And he believes that when someone is not with us, he is against us. If someone speaks positively about those who kill us, it starts to offend us very much."
"Our people don't understand this. That's what I told the Pope. And he asked for some gesture, a word of comfort, empathy. I said: Holy Father, write a letter to the Ukrainians. And he wrote it, " the head of the UGCC said.