Popes Ukraine diplomacy a political and spiritual tightrope
His appeals for an Orthodox Easter truce in
Ukraine went unheeded. His planned meeting with the head of the Russian
Orthodox Church was canceled. A proposed visit to Moscow? Nyet. Even his
attempt to showcase Russian-Ukrainian friendship fell flat.
Pope Francis hasn’t made much of a diplomatic
mark in Russia’s war in Ukraine, seemingly unable to capitalize on his moral
authority, soft power or direct line to Moscow to nudge an end to the bloodshed
or at least a cease-fire.
Rather, Francis has found himself in the
unusual position of having to explain his refusal to call out Russia or
President Vladimir Putin by name — popes don’t do that, he said — and to defend
his “very good” relations with the head of the Russian Orthodox Church, who has
justified the war on spiritual grounds.
While the long list of dead ends would
indicate a certain ineffectiveness, it is par for the course for the Vatican’s
unique brand of diplomacy that straddles geopolitical realities with spiritual
priorities, even when they conflict. And in the case of Ukraine, they have:
Francis has sought to be a pastor to his local flock in Ukraine, incessantly
calling for peace, sending cardinals in with humanitarian aid and even
reportedly proposing that a Vatican-flagged ship evacuate civilians from the
besieged port of Mariupol.
But he has also kept alive the Holy See’s
longer-term policy goal of healing relations with the Russian Orthodox Church,
which split from Rome along with the rest of Orthodoxy over 1,000 years ago. Up
until recently, Francis held out hope that he would secure a second meeting
with Russian Patriarch Kirill, even while Moscow bombed Ukrainian civilians.
Francis recently revealed that their planned
June meeting in Jerusalem had been called off, because Vatican diplomats
thought it would send a “confusing” message. But he also told an Italian
newspaper Tuesday that he had offered to go to Moscow to meet with Putin, and
wondered aloud if NATO’s eastward expansion hadn’t provoked the war.
To his critics, Francis’ continued outreach
to Moscow even amid reported atrocities harks back to the perceived silence of
Pope Pius XII, criticized by some Jewish groups for failing to speak out
sufficiently against the Holocaust. The Vatican insists Pius’ quiet diplomacy
helped save lives.
“Francis is doing what he can, with the right
priorities, to stop the war, stop people from suffering,” said Anne Leahy, who
was Canada’s ambassador to the Holy See from 2008-12 and ambassador to Russia
in the late 1990s.
“But he’s keeping channels of communication
open in every way he can. Even if it doesn’t work, I think the idea is to keep
trying,” she said.
Leahy noted that a pope must have as a top
priority this Gospel-mandated objective to unify Christians, and that relations
with the Orthodox therefore must remain at the forefront.
“Diplomacy is at the service of the church’s
mission, and not the other way around,” she said in a telephone interview.
At times, Francis’ words and gestures seem
contradictory: One day he sits down for a videoconference with Kirill that is
prominently featured on the website of the Russian Orthodox Church with a
statement saying both sides had expressed hope for a “just peace.” Three weeks
later, he kisses a battered Ukrainian flag brought to him from Bucha, where
Ukrainian civilians were found shot to death with their hands bound.
The Vatican has a long tradition of this
dual-faceted diplomacy. During the Cold War, the policy of “Ostpolitik” meant
that the Vatican kept up channels of communication with the same Communist
governments that were persecuting the faithful on the ground, often to the
dismay of the local church.
Francis’ decision to continue with the
“classic Vatican diplomacy of Ostpolitik, of dialoguing with the enemy and not
closing the door, is debatable,” said the Rev. Stefano Caprio, professor of
church history at the Pontifical Oriental Institute.
“Those who are upset that the pope isn’t
defending them more are right, but those from the diplomatic side who say ‘We
can’t throw away these relations’ are also right. They are obviously in
contradiction,” he said.
“But since we’re not talking about an
argument of faith — we aren’t talking about the persons of the Holy Trinity —
you can have opinions that differ from the pope,” he added.
In some ways, Francis’ role on the sidelines
of the Ukraine conflict can be traced to his position when Russia annexed
Ukraine’s Crimean Peninsula in 2014 and the Holy See appeared at least publicly
neutral, despite appeals from Ukrainian Greek Catholics, who are a minority in
the majority Orthodox country, for Francis to strongly condemn Moscow.
Instead, Francis described the ensuing
conflict as the fruit of “fratricidal violence,” as if both sides were equally
to blame and that the conflict was an internal Ukrainian matter.
“My experience in 2014 is that the existence
of the (Ukrainian) Greek Catholics was seemingly an embarrassment and a
frustration with the Holy Father and the Holy See,” said John McCarthy, who was
Australia’s ambassador to the Vatican at the time. “Their priority was the
relationship with the Russian Orthodox” and securing a meeting with Kirill.
Francis eventually obtained that long-sought
meeting, embracing Kirill in a VIP room of the Havana, Cuba, airport on Feb.
12, 2016, in the first meeting between a pope with the Russian patriarch since
the 1054 Schism.
The two men signed a joint statement that was
hailed by the Holy See at the time as a breakthrough in ecumenical relations.
But it enraged Ukraine’s Greek Catholics because, among other things, it
referred to them as an “ecclesial community” as if they were a separate church
not in communion with Rome, and didn’t mention Russia’s role in the separatist
conflict in eastern Ukraine.
Fast forward to 2022, and Francis again upset
the local Ukrainian church: The Vatican had proposed that a Ukrainian and
Russian woman carry the cross together during the Vatican’s torchlit Good
Friday procession at the Colosseum. The gesture, which preceded Francis’
unheeded Easter appeal for a truce, was an attempt to show the possibility of
future Russian-Ukrainian reconciliation.
But the Ukrainian ambassador objected, and
the head of Ukraine’s Greek Orthodox faithful, Archbishop Sviatoslav Shevchuk,
decried the proposal as “inopportune and ambiguous,” since it didn’t take into
consideration the fact that Russia had invaded Ukraine.
In the end, the Vatican compromised: The
women carried the cross but instead of reading aloud a meditation that had
called for reconciliation, stood together in silent prayer.
Leahy, the former Canadian ambassador, said
the outcome was a classic example of papal pastoral care bridging Vatican
diplomacy: Francis listened to Shevchuk’s complaint and modified the ritual,
while keeping his broader agenda of dialogue with Russia alive.
Recalling the word “pontiff” derives from the
Italian word for “bridge,” she said: “It’s the job of a diplomat, and certainly
of a supreme pontiff who has the word ‘bridge’ written in his name, to keep the
channels open.”
The Rev. Roberto Regoli, a professor of
church history and an expert in papal diplomacy at the Pontifical Gregorian
University, said those diplomatic channels with the Orthodox are important now,
but also in the future when eventually Ukraine will have to be rebuilt.
“The reconstruction of a country ... requires
the involvement of all forces, even religious ones,” he said. “So, keeping
these channels open is useful for the present but even more for the future,
because it will take decades to rebuild."
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