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Jamie Dettmer is opinion editor at POLITICO Europe.
Back in 2017, Pope Francis became the first pontiff to visit an Anglican church in Rome. He made no direct reference to England’s Henry VIII, who split from Catholicism in 1534 after being denied a marriage annulment. Neither did he encourage English youngsters to respect the legacy of Henry VIII — arguably one of England’s great monarchs, albeit a cruel one — or glory in the cultural history of English Anglicism.
In his homily, the Pope acknowledged that Anglicans and Catholics “viewed each other with suspicion and hostility” for centuries, but he encouraged both faiths to be “always more liberated from our respective prejudices from the past.”
Yet, last week, Francis urged young Russians, gathered for an All-Russian Meeting of Catholic Youth in St. Petersburg, not to give up their “legacy” as heirs of a “great, enlightened Russian empire.” And in a clip of his address that was posted online, he invoked Peter the Great and Catherine the Great, both of whom Russian President Vladimir Putin has cited to justify the invasion of Ukraine and whip up martial passion.
So, while Henry VIII was shunned six years ago, Peter the Great, whose reign was decisive in setting Russia on the path of imperialism and European conquest, is apparently deserving of respect.
Is this a case of a tin-eared Pope, or is there something more?
One could almost hear the chortles in the Kremlin, as Dmitry Peskov, Putin’s spokesperson, described the remarks as very gratifying. “The pontiff knows Russian history and this is very good,” he said, adding that Francis was “in unison” with the Russian government’s efforts to teach history as 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 had caused “great pain and apprehension.” Criticizing the Pope for praising “the worst example of extreme Russian imperialism and nationalism,” the Ukrainian prelate said, “We fear that these words will be understood by some as an encouragement of this nationalism and imperialism, which is the real cause of the war in Ukraine.”
Oleg Nikolenko, a spokesman for Ukraine’s foreign ministry, similarly stated it was “very unfortunate that Russian grand-state ideas, which, in fact, are the cause of Russia’s chronic aggression, knowingly or unknowingly, come from the Pope’s mouth, whose mission, in our understanding, is precisely to open the eyes of Russian youth to the disastrous course of the current Russian leadership.”
The Vatican has pushed back, arguing Francis didn’t mean to laud imperialism when urging young Russians to be proud of their heritage. And indeed, the Pope’s prepared remarks weren’t a call to imperial arms. Be “sowers of seeds of reconciliation, small seeds that, for the moment, in this winter of war will not sprout in the frozen ground, but that in a future spring, will blossom,” he counseled.
But those remarks were undercut by his ad-libbed comments in which he invoked the “enlightened Russian empire.” And being spontaneous, those comments had added power.
What’s surprising is that the Pope wasn’t more guarded, having already offended Ukraine — the victim of Russia’s aggression — before.
Francis had provoked a storm last year in interviews with the Jesuit magazine La Civiltà Cattolica and the Italian newspaper Corriere della Sera, suggesting the war in Ukraine was a consequence of NATO “barking at Russia’s gate.”
In the interviews, he also pondered whether it’s right for Western powers to arm Ukraine, explaining he had been trying to assess the roots of the conflict and the reasons pushing Putin to engage in such brutal warfare. “I have no way of telling whether his rage has been provoked,” he wondered aloud, “but I suspect it was maybe facilitated by the West’s attitude.”
Given the fury those statements prompted, one would have thought Francis would have taken greater care and been much more circumspect in his remarks last week — and at the very least avoid extolling imperial figures in Putin’s pantheon of Russian heroes. A bronze statue of Peter the Great, who fought the Swedes for mastery of Central Europe, looms large over Putin’s ceremonial desk in his cabinet room. “He will live, as long as his cause is alive,” Putin had mused to journalist Lionel Barber a few years ago.
Pope Francis is fond of saying the Catholic Church is “not a political organization with left and right wings, as is the case in parliaments.” “At times, unfortunately, our considerations are reduced to this, with some root in reality. But no, the Church is not this,” he confided to Vatican reporters in 2021.
So, is this one of the times his considerations are reduced to politics?
While the church, in his view, may not be a political organization, Francis is seen by many as a highly political pope, and it’s difficult to believe — especially considering the previous bitterness over his comments on Ukraine — that these latest remarks were misjudged as far as he sees it. He is, after all, the first Jesuit to head the Holy See and, as I noted last year, cynics might argue his interviews are exercises in the philosophical casuistry his missionary order has often been associated with.
Francis has said little about the destruction of churches in Ukraine since Russia launched its invasion. And some see his equivocations as tied up with his long-standing ecumenical outreach to the Russian Orthodox Church and its leader Patriarch Kirill. Certainly, Francis has taken care not to offend Kirill since warning him to avoid becoming a Kremlin “altar boy” last year.
Others, meanwhile, place Francis’ approach in the context of his Argentinian Peronist past and its “third world-style criticism of the West” — one more attuned to Putin and Kirill’s anti-Americanism. And that may well be at the root of what is behind the Pope’s stance on this war, as Francis has staked a position that puts him more in line with Beijing, New Delhi and Brasília, according to John Allen from the Catholic news site Crux.
“Francis is, of course, history’s first pontiff from the developing world, and he reigns at a time when the demographic center of gravity in Catholicism clearly has shifted. Today, more than two-thirds of the world’s 1.3 billion Catholics live outside the West, a share that will be three-quarters by mid-century. In such a world, it’s only logical that the Vatican’s geopolitical homing instincts increasingly will more closely resemble those of, say, the African Union, or India, or even the OPEC states, than those of Washington and Brussels,” Allen wrote. And the Pope’s equivocations aren’t helping Kyiv or its Western allies to persuade the Global South that Russia should be isolated for its invasion of Ukraine.
So, Peter the Great is extolled, and another state-building monarch, Henry VIII, is shunned as a schismatic.
On the day Francis delivered his homily to young Russians, Ukrainian ace fighter pilot Andriy Pilshchykov, nicknamed Juice, himself a Catholic, plummeted to his death when two training planes collided west of Kyiv. It is not hard to guess how he might have felt about the Pope’s remarks.
