Ukrainian ambassador to Vatican explains Pope's position in Russia's war against Ukraine
In a conversation with Glavkom, the Ukrainian ambassador to the Vatican Andriy Yurash explained the recent statements of Pope Francis regarding the war unleashed by Russia on the territory of Ukraine.
"There is a conscious approach to wars, according to which the Catholic Church tries not to take sides, but to provide a moral assessment of what is happening. And we definitely see this now. The Church is also doing everything possible to stop the war. And this fully explains the approach of the Pope, who wants to be a peacemaker. In my opinion, it is illusory, idealistic and, unfortunately, will not lead to any results," Yurash said.
Speaking about the Vatican's attempts to reconcile Ukrainians and Russians, the ambassador noted that for many years the Catholic Church considered Moscow its strategic partner.
"Several generations of people who now significantly influence many processes in the Catholic Church were educated at the time when the Russian Church was deemed a strategic partner," the Vatican ambassador believes.
However, recently, the relations have cooled to some extent, and Pope Francis is not as favorable to Patriarch Kirill as he was before. "The Pope has called Kirill ‘Putin's altar boy’, which is an overt insult. He also ironically and completely denied all the arguments provided by Kirill to justify the Russian aggression. He noted that out of 40 minutes of their conversation, he listened to Kirill's unrealistic explanations for half of them.
In addition, while the Pope avoids talking about certain things, people from his entourage clearly began to speak out against the Russian Church. The Vatican is already openly saying that Putin's war makes impossible the dialogue that took place between the Catholic Church and Russian Orthodoxy. Catholic theologians cannot find an excuse for the Russian Church's stance, and neither they can deem it Christian. This is the tendency that Putin and Kirill achieved by this war," Yurash said.
