Pope Francis, in an interview with the Italian newspaper Corriere della Sera, published May 3, the pope said that he asked Secretary of State Cardinal Pietro Parolin about 20 days into the Russia-Ukraine war to convey the message to Putin that he was willing to meet him in Moscow.
"I asked Cardinal Parolin, after twenty days of war, to send a message to Putin to say that I was willing to go to Moscow.”
Of course, affirmed the Pope, the Russian President must first offer a window for dates. “We have not yet received an answer, and we are still insisting, even if I fear that Putin cannot and does not want to have this meeting at this time. But how can this brutality not be stopped? Twenty-five years ago, we experienced the same thing with Rwanda.”
The Holy Father also said that “for now, I will not go to Kyiv,” noting that he had sent Cardinal Michael Czerny and Cardinal Konrad Krajewski as his envoys.
The pope recalled that after Russia launched a full-scale invasion of Ukraine on Feb. 24, he spoke to Ukraine’s president Volodymyr Zelenskyy on the phone.
In the interview, Pope Francis also reflected on whether statements made by NATO toward Russia prompted a worse reaction from Putin.
Pope Francis also spoke about his video conference call with the head of the Russian Orthodox Church in March. He said that in the first half of the 40-minute conversation, Patriarch Kirill of Moscow and All Russia “read me all the justifications for the war.”
“I listened and told him: I do not understand anything about this. Brother, we are not state clerics, we cannot use the language of politics, but the language of Jesus. We are pastors of the same holy people of God. That is why we have to look for ways of peace, to stop the fire of weapons,” Francis recounted.
“The patriarch cannot become Putin’s altar boy,” the pope added. “I had a meeting scheduled with him in Jerusalem on June 14. It would have been our second face-to-face meeting, nothing to do with the war. But now even he agrees: let’s stop, it could be an ambiguous signal.”
-VN/CNA