VATICAN (CNS): Cautioning Russian Orthodox Patriarch Kirill of Moscow not “turn himself into Putin’s altar boy,” Pope Francis also said he would like to go to Moscow to meet Vladimir Putin in an attempt to end the conflict in Ukraine.
The pope reiterated that he would not be going to Kyiv “for now,” but “I first must go to Moscow, I must first meet Putin,” he said in an interview with the Italian newspaper, Corriere della Sera, published on May 3. Vatican News also published most of the interview.
Pope Francis said he sent a message through Pietro Cardinal Parolin, Vatican secretary of state, “20 days after the war” started, to be delivered to Putin telling him, “I was ready to go to Moscow.”
The pope said, “We still have not had a response, and we are still being persistent, even though I am afraid Putin may not be able to and may not want to have this meeting right now …I am doing what I can. If Putin were to open the door…”
He lamented, “But so much brutality, how do you not try to stop it? We saw the same thing with Rwanda,” referring to the genocide against members of the Tutsi minority ethnic group in 1994, when at least 500,000 people were killed in about 100 days.
Pope Francis also provided more details about a video call he had with Russian Kirill in mid-March [Sunday Examiner, March 27].
“I spoke with Kirill for 40 minutes via Zoom. He spent the first 20 minutes holding a piece of paper reading all the reasons for the war,” he said.
“I listened to him, and I told him, ‘I don’t know anything about this. Brother, we are not clerics of the state, we cannot use the language of politics, but of Jesus. We are shepherds of the same holy people of God. That is why we must seek the path of peace, to cease the blast of weapons’,” the pope said, stressing, “The patriarch cannot turn himself into Putin’s altar boy.”
Pope Francis explained that the meeting that had been planned between the him and patriarch in Jerusalem on June 14, and has since been cancelled, had nothing to do with the conflict in Ukraine. But even the patriarch now sees that any kind of meeting between them could send “an ambiguous sign.”
