Popes may make claims to infallibility but they certainly make mistakes, and Pope Francis is likely to get a dressing down in heaven from his predecessor-but-one, John Paul II, for what he has now said about Russian imperial greatness.
What Kyiv least needs at the moment is a blundering intervention by a well-meaning Argentinian who speaks with the supreme authority of the Holy See
John Paul was born and baptised in Poland before the second world war and rose to become Archbishop of Kraków before being elected to the Papacy. He had spent decades under communist rule and experienced the brutal ways of Soviet imperialism. He knew his Russian history. He would never have ad-libbed, as Pope Francis did to a group of young Russians, a paean to the wondrous achievements of Peter and Catherine the Great without at the very least adding some reservations.
Tsar Peter and Tsarina Catherine hugely expanded the Russian Empire. Peter pushed the Swedes out of the southern Baltic region and built St Petersburg with the labour of hundreds of thousands of ill-fed dragooned peasants. He had a vicious temperament, often strolling around his court with a cudgel. He had his son Alexei tortured to death. Catherine, German by birth, came to the Russian throne through the murder of her witless husband Tsar Paul. Almost certainly she was complicit in the plot. She sent her armies south to conquer the Ukrainian-inhabited lands through to the Black Sea.
No Ukrainian patriot remembers her with affection. All over present-day Ukraine the residues of Russian culture are being erased. The process started in 1991 when the country gained its independence. Lenin statues were toppled, Lenin Prospects were re-named. When the Russo-Ukrainian relationship turned violent in 2014 with the annexation of Crimea, Ukrainians asked why they were still expected to show respect for past authors who wrote in Russian. There are calls for the Bulgakov Museum in Kyiv to be closed – Bulgakov, who wrote the great novel The Master and Margarita, spent his childhood in the city and penned warm pictures of its residents. But although he fell out of favour and feared for his life under Stalin, he spent his adult years in Russia. This is no longer widely approved by many Kyivans.
A country at war because of unprovoked invasion is likely to show intolerance for the cultural achievements of the national enemy. Beethoven and Wagner ceased being popular at the BBC Proms between 1939 and 1940. One of Putin’s involuntary accomplishments, as surely even his close associates recognise by now, has been to spread and deepen nationalist sentiment among Ukrainians. Probably Kyiv’s need to keep the Poles on their side is helping to mitigate the process – conflict between Polish and Ukrainian military and political groups was one of the gruesome fag ends to world war two.
What Kyiv least needs at the moment is a blundering intervention by a well-meaning Argentinian who speaks with the supreme authority of the Holy See but has only a limited knowledge of European history. It is all the more reprehensible because millions of Ukrainian Orthodox Christians – the Uniates – have traditionally accepted the Vatican’s authority. They continued to do this in the Russian Empire as a way of staying out of the clutches of the Russian Orthodox Church, and they suffered at the hands of both tsars and communists.
Pope Francis wasn’t talking to them last Friday but to young Russian Roman Catholics. Getting carried away, he said things about the Russian Empire that were not in his planned script, and the Vatican has excluded them from its published record. Throughout his pontificate Francis has campaigned for peace in the world’s conflicts. Last year he pleaded with Ukrainian President Zelensky to have talks with Russian President Putin if a realistic peace proposal were to be put on offer. The Pope obviously feels a genuine pain about war on the European continent and offered his services as a mediator.
Whether he has placed himself appropriately to play this role is in doubt. His speech attracted eulogies from the Kremlin. Putin’s spokesperson Dmitri Peskov has praised his comments as ‘very, very gratifying’ and added: ‘The pontiff knows Russian history and this is very good.’
Pope Francis’s oral performance was marked more harshly in Kyiv and Vilnius. Zelensky stopped short of giving him a reprimand but his aide Mykhailo Podolyak forthrightly stated that Francis had become ‘a tool of Russian propaganda’. In Lithuania, a predominantly Roman Catholic country, the Papal Nuncio has been called in for a discussion. The ancients two millennia ago used to say that ‘if you want peace, prepare for war’. Catholic diplomacy is being warned that if it hopes to achieve a peaceful settlement in Ukraine, then the gentle, beaming head of its Church needs to go easy with the ad-libbery and take a humble lesson in history.
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