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Jamie Dettmer is Opinion Writer at POLITICO Europe.
In 2017, Pope Francis became the first pontiff to visit an Anglican church in Rome. He made no direct reference to Henry VIII of England, who separated from Catholicism in 1534 after being denied annulment of his marriage. Nor did he encourage young Englishmen to respect the legacy of Henry VIII – arguably one of England’s great, albeit cruel, monarchs – or to glory in the cultural history of Anglicism. English.
In his homily, the pope acknowledged that Anglicans and Catholics “regarded each other with suspicion and hostility” for centuries, but he encouraged both faiths to be “always more free from our respective prejudices of the past.”
Yet last week, Francis urged young Russians, gathered for an all-Russian Catholic youth meeting in St. Petersburg, not to renounce their ‘heritage’ as heirs to a ‘great enlightened Russian empire’. . And in an excerpt from his speech, it was job Online, he invoked Peter the Great and Catherine the Great, both cited by Russian President Vladimir Putin as justification for invading Ukraine and stoking martial passion.
So, while Henry VIII was shunned six years ago, Peter the Great, whose reign was instrumental in setting Russia on the path to imperialism and European conquest, apparently deserves respect.
Is this a pope with tin ears, or is there something more?
You could almost hear the laughter in the Kremlin, as Dmitry Peskov, Putin’s spokesman, called the remarks very gratifying. “The pontiff knows the history of Russia and that is very good,” he said, adding that Francis was “in unison” with the Russian government’s efforts to teach the history written by Putin.
Unsurprisingly, the pope’s comments drew condemnation from Ukraine, including from Archbishop Sviatoslav Shevchuk, head of the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church, who said Francis’ words caused “great pain and apprehension.” Criticizing the Pope for praising “the worst example of imperialism and extreme Russian nationalism”, the Ukrainian prelate said: “We fear that these words will be interpreted by some as an encouragement to this nationalism and this imperialism, which is the real cause of the war. in Ukraine.”
Oleg Nikolenko, spokesman for the Ukrainian Foreign Ministry, also said that it was “very unfortunate that the Russian ideas of a great state, which, in fact, are the cause of Russia’s chronic aggression, come, Knowingly or unknowingly, from the mouth of the pope, whose mission it is, in our opinion, is precisely to open the eyes of Russian youth to the disastrous evolution of the current Russian leaders.”
The Vatican reacted, arguing that Francis had no intention of praising imperialism when he urged young Russians to be proud of their heritage. And indeed, the remarks prepared by the pope did not constitute an imperial call to arms. Be “sowers of seeds of reconciliation, little seeds which for now, in this winter of war, will not sprout in the frozen ground, but will bloom next spring,” he advised.
But these remarks were contradicted by his off-the-cuff comments in which he invoked “the enlightened Russian empire”. And being spontaneous, these comments had additional power.
What is surprising is that the pope was not more careful, having already offended Ukraine – victim of Russian aggression – in the past.
Francis had caused a storm last year in interviews with the Jesuit magazine La Civiltà Cattolica and the Italian newspaper Corriere della Sera, suggesting that the war in Ukraine was a consequence of NATO “barking at Russia’s gates”. .
In these interviews, he also questioned whether it was right for Western powers to arm Ukraine, explaining that he had tried to assess the roots of the conflict and the reasons pushing Putin to engage in a such a brutal war. “I have no way of telling if his anger was provoked,” he wondered aloud, “but I suspect it may have been facilitated by the attitude of the West. »
Given the furore over these statements, one would have thought that Francis would have been more cautious and much more circumspect in his remarks last week – and would have at least avoided touting imperial figures from Putin’s pantheon of Russian heroes. A bronze statue of Peter the Great, who fought the Swedes for control of central Europe, dominates Putin’s ceremonial desk in his cabinet. “He will live as long as his cause is alive,” Putin said. thoughtful to journalist Lionel Barber a few years ago.
Pope Francis likes to say that the Catholic Church is “not a political organization with left and right wings, as is the case in parliaments”. “Sometimes, unfortunately, our thoughts boil down to this, with some roots in reality. But no, the Church is not that,” he said. entrusted to Vatican journalists in 2021.
So is this one of the times her Are the considerations reduced to politics?
Even though the Church, in his opinion, may not be a political organization, Francis is considered by many to be a highly political pope, and it is hard to believe – especially considering the bitterness aroused by his comments about Ukraine – that those last remarks were mistakenly taken as being as much as he sees it. He is, after all, the first Jesuit to lead the Holy See and, as I noted last year, cynics might argue his talks are exercises in philosophical casuistry with which his missionary order has often been associated.
Francis has said little about the destruction of churches in Ukraine since Russia launched its invasion. And some see his ambiguities as linked to his longstanding ecumenical action with the Russian Orthodox Church and its leader, Patriarch Cyril. Admittedly, Francis has been careful not to offend Kirill since he warned him last year to avoid becoming a Kremlin “choirboy”.
Others, meanwhile, place Francis’ approach in the context of his Argentinian Peronist past and his “Third Worldist critique of the West” – one more in line with the anti-Americanism of Putin and Kirill. And that may well be behind the pope’s stance on this war, since Francis has taken a stance that puts him more in tune with Beijing, New Delhi and Brasilia, according to John Allen of the Catholic news site Crux.
“Francis is, of course, the first pontiff in history from a developing world, and he reigns at a time when the demographic center of gravity of Catholicism has clearly shifted. Today, more than two-thirds of the world’s 1.3 billion Catholics live outside the West, a proportion that will reach three-quarters by the middle of the century. In such a world, it is logical that the geopolitical instincts of the Vatican increasingly resemble those of, for example, the African Union, or India, or even the OPEC countries, than those from Washington and Brussels. Allen wrote. And the Pope’s equivocations do not help either kyiv or its Western allies to persuade the South that Russia must be isolated in the event of an invasion of Ukraine.
Thus, Peter the Great is exalted and another state-building monarch, Henry VIII, is dismissed as a schismatic.
On the day Francis gave his homily to young Russians, Ukrainian ace fighter pilot Andriy Pilshchykov, nicknamed Juice, himself a Catholic, collapsed to death when two training planes collided at the west of Kyiv. It is not difficult to guess what he may have thought of the pope’s remarks.
