“Pope Francis without warm cloths: ‘It’s not a special military operation, it’s war!'”
The headline in the Portuguese version of Aleteia, a Catholic portal with a global reach, is a good translation of the recurring assessment of the 266th leader at the head of the Vatican: Francis is willing to buy fights in international diplomacy. The statement, made on Sunday (6), was a reprimand to the government of Vladimir Putin, which is trying to put on a euphemism about the war aggression in the neighboring country.
“Rivers of blood and tears flow in Ukraine. This is not just a military operation, but a war that sows death, destruction and misery,” said the pontiff.
Francis’ political resourcefulness has already been tested on other occasions. He had little mileage at the head of the Roman Curia when he became one of the main intermediaries in the dialogue between the US and Cuba, an ex-Soviet jerk, then led by President Barack Obama and leader Raúl Castro.
Two years later, in 2016, he took a historic step by meeting with the Patriarch of the Russian Orthodox Church, Cyril. The meeting ended the thousand-year schism that split Christendom between East and West — leaders of these two wings of Catholicism had not accepted sharing the same room since the split in 1054.
Even earlier, in 2014, in his second year in the Holy See, the pope said he had spoken with Cyril, in a phone call in which he made the following proposal: “I will go wherever you want. Call me and I will.”
When he relaxed in his political stance, Francisco tried to explain himself.
Five years ago, he went to Myanmar in what would be the first visit by a pope to the Buddhist-majority country. It is estimated that there, in that same 2017, a military repression killed 10,000 Muslims from the Rohingya Muslim minority. Local bishops advised him not to touch the wound, at least not on Myanmar soil. He complied and did not directly quote the people under threat.
“Francis is very persuasive, but he does not have the power to resolve all conflicts,” Vatican spokesman Greg Burke said at the time, who would later amend: here is a pope who is not afraid of “minefields.”
Days later, in neighboring Bangladesh, the compensation. The pontiff held the hands, one by one, of 16 survivors of ethnic cleansing and promised: “We will not close our hearts or look away. God’s presence today is called Rohingya.”
“The Holy See, in its diplomacy, does not have the power of persuasion as the mechanisms that other countries have. What it has is soft power, power of influence, rather than convincing”, says Vaticanist Filipe Domingues, PhD Pontifical Gregorian University in Rome. “It’s kind of sewing relationships. And [o atual papa] He is very diplomatic, he tries with all his might to reach every corner.”
It was Francis who ordered the opening of the secret archives that the Vatican kept on the pontificate of Pius XII (1939-58), a demand that Jews have been making for decades. Part of the Jewish community accuses Pius 12 of having been silent about the Holocaust, for not having made any emphatic condemnation of the extermination carried out by Nazis in World War II.
Nothing pacified is the debate over that pope’s involvement with anti-Semitism. Some Vaticanists argue that the more neutral stance was intentional — it would be the best protection it could offer Jews and the integrity of the German Catholic Church, given the dangerous anti-religious wave of those times. There are also reports that he would have silently helped Jewish families.
The case against alleged sympathy for Nazi principles is also strong. In “Hitler’s Pope: The Secret History of Pius 12”, the English journalist John Cornwell reproduces letters from when the Italian Pius 12 was apostolic nuncio to Germany – a kind of ambassador to the Holy See -, before becoming pope. In them, he describes a division of the German Communist Party as “chaotic, corrupt and full of Jews” and calls Communist leader Max Levien “a pale, dirty, dull-eyed, hoarse-voiced, vulgar, repulsive Jew”.
During World War I, Benedict 15, the pope at the time, made active gestures to broker a peace between the warring parties. He even proposed, in December 1914, a Christmas truce: “May the guns be silent at least on the night the angels sang.” Officially ignored, the appeal was informally echoed in some trenches, with reports of enemies who even exchanged drinks and cigarettes as a gift.
Benedict 15 sought to remain neutral in the dispute, which led to him being excluded from the 1919 Treaty of Versailles, the formal end point of that war. Still, a speech he released two years earlier ended up being incorporated into the peace plan suggested by then US President Woodrow Wilson.
João 23 gave his collaboration to try to appease the Cold War, which followed the two World Wars. He published the encyclical “Pacem in Terris” (Peace on Earth) on Easter 1963, months after the Cuban Missile Crisis, the 13-day US-Soviet standoff that brought the world to the brink of nuclear war. In writings, he called for a ban on atomic weapons — he was not heard.
He had already spoken on October 24, 1962, in the midst of the turmoil involving the two greatest powers of the time. In French, considered the language of international diplomacy, John 23 begged “all rulers not to be deaf to this cry of humanity”.
Criticism of communism lasted throughout the pontificate of John Paul II, who saw the Catholic Church persecuted by the Soviets in his native Poland. In 1998, he visited Cuba and politicized the discussion even before he landed in Havana. On the plane, he told reporters his position was crystal clear. “Human rights are fundamental rights and the basis of all civilization. I took this belief to Poland in my struggle with a totalitarian communist system.”
“John Paul II had a very great capacity for influence”, says Domingues, from the Pontifical Gregorian University in Rome. “He said that neither capitalism nor communism fully responds to human needs. But in practice, he was much more vocal against communism.”
It came from Saint Augustine, one of the most important theologians of Christianity, who lived between the 4th and 5th centuries, the thesis that some wars would be morally more just than others. The concept was diluted, especially in the face of the invention of arsenals as devastating as nuclear weapons.
“An atomic bomb, as we know, destroys everything, it also destroys life for the future and, therefore, nothing can justify the use of such powerful weapons,” Father Giulio Cesareo, professor of moral theology, told Vatican Radio in 2020. He was commenting on a papal address given days earlier.
In our times, Francis lamented, “the world, politics and public opinion run the risk of getting used to the evil of war, as a natural companion of the history of peoples”. God forbid.
