Pope Francis on Thursday asked North Korea to invite him to visit the country. In an interview with the South Korean television channel KBS, the pontiff said he would not waste any opportunity to work for peace.
“I’ll go there as soon as they invite me. I’m saying they should invite me. I’m not going to refuse,” he said. “The goal is nothing but brotherhood.”
A possible visit by Francis to Pyongyang would mark the first trip by a pope to North Korea, which does not allow priests to be permanently stationed in the country. Due to restrictions, little is known about the number of Catholic citizens or how they practice their faith.
The possibility of a visit by the religious leader to North Korea had already been studied in 2018, when then South Korean President Moon Jae-in, who is Catholic, established contacts with North Korean leader Kim Jong-un. At the time, he said that Francis’ visit to the neighboring country would help build peace on the Korean peninsula.
According to Moon, the North Korean dictator would have said during a summit that Francis would be received with enthusiasm in his country.
At the time, Vatican officials said the pope, who has made many calls for rapprochement between the two Koreas, could consider the trip under certain conditions and if he received an official invitation. However, contacts between Pyongyang and Seoul were interrupted after the failure of the second meeting between Kim and then US President Donald Trump in February 2019.
In 2021, Moon met Francis again and presented him with a cross made of barbed wire from the demilitarized zone that divides the two sides. On that occasion, he again asked the pontiff to visit the northern country.
The expression of interest in visiting North Korea is another sign of the traffic that the Catholic leader has been building in international diplomacy. Francis had already been testing a certain “soft power” of the Vatican by getting involved in geopolitical issues, especially with the War in Ukraine.
Recently, the pope warned of the risk of nuclear disaster at the Zaporijia power plant, which has gained centrality in the current phase of the conflict between Moscow and Kiev. At the time he called the wars madness and mentioned the death of Daria Dugina, daughter of the ultranationalist ideologue Aleksandr Dugin, referring to her as one of the many “innocents who pay for the war”.
The comment displeased the Ukrainian government, which expressed displeasure and said the pontiff equated “aggressor and victim”.
This Friday (26), the country’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs summoned the Vatican’s Apostolic Nuncio to Ukraine, Monsignor Visvaldas Kulbokas, to express his disappointment at the pope’s statement.
According to Italian news agency Ansa, a statement released by Kiev’s embassy to the Holy See says Ukraine is deeply disappointed by the pope’s words.
“On August 25, the Vatican Nuncio to Ukraine, Visvaldas Kulbokas, was invited to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs regarding Pope Francis’ words, delivered during the general audience of August 24, Ukraine’s Independence Day and day that coincides with six months since the full-scale armed invasion of Russia,” he says.
Also according to the official note, the Ukrainian chancellor drew the attention of Kulbokas to the fact that, since the beginning of the invasion, the pontiff never paid special attention to the Ukrainians and child victims of the war.
“The Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Ukraine expressed the hope that in the future the Holy See will avoid unfair statements that cause disappointment in Ukrainian society,” the statement concludes.
