“Brother, we are not clerics of the state,” Francis was said to have replied. “We cannot use the language of politics, but of Jesus. For this reason, we must seek roads to peace, to cease the firing of weapons.”
“The Patriarch cannot be transformed into Putin’s altar boy,” Francis said, adding that Kirill now agrees on the need to find a road to peace.
Since the beginning of his pontificate, Francis has been a strong voice for disarmament, be it while praying at the sites of the nuclear bombings in Hiroshima and Nagasaki in Japan or begging for peace in war-torn Yemen. Asked about his position on sending weapons to assist the Ukrainian people against Russia, the pope appeared ambivalent.
“I can’t answer, I am too far away,” he said. “What is clear is that in that land, weapons are being tested. Russia now knows that tanks are not very useful, and they are thinking about other things. That is why you make wars: to test the weapons we have created.”
Francis said that while rarely contested, “arms sales are a scandal.”
During the Via Crucis procession at Rome’s Colosseum on April 15, Francis spoke about his concerns about a third world war fought piecemeal in every corner of the world, and those concerns were still on his mind in the interview. “In Syria, Yemen, Iraq, Africa, one war after another,” the pope said. “In every little piece there are international interests.
“One cannot think that a free state can make war with another free state,” Francis continued, adding that “in Ukraine it was others who caused the conflict.”
Francis said that Ukrainians are “a martyred people,” deeply wounded from the aftermath of the Second World War and Soviet occupation.
The conflict in Ukraine seems to have bettered the Vatican’s relations with Hungarian leader Viktor Orban, who told the pope of Russia’s plan to somehow resolve the conflict May 9. “I hope that’s the case and it would explain the quickness of the escalation these past days,” Francis said.
“I am a pessimist,” the pope added, “but we must do every possible gesture to stop the war.”
This article originally appeared here.
