Pope waves white flag on Ukraine

Indulging authoritarian regimes perpetrating gross human rights abuses should have no place among leaders of the Catholic or any other church. That, unfortunately, is what Pope Francis, 87, has done with his call in a Swiss radio interview for Ukraine to “raise the white flag” and “negotiate before things get worse” in its battle against Vladimir Putin’s invasion. He made the call as Kyiv faces a crossroads in its two-year battle for survival and needs support. In a religious nation such as Ukraine, it was a demoralising assertion, certain to play into the hands of the Russian despot. Ukrainians deserve better.

The Pope is at odds with the head of the Catholic Church in Ukraine, Archbishop Sviatoslav Shevchuk, who preached on Sunday at St Patrick’s Cathedral in New York. New York’s Catholic Archbishop, Cardinal Timothy Dolan, was the first US bishop to visit Ukraine after the Russian invasion. Hope, and generous support, Archbishop Shevchuk said, was sustaining Ukrainian “soldiers in their foxholes” defending the freedoms of their fellow citizens. Hope also was sustaining civilians under occupation, grieving parents, widows, orphans and children enduring daily air-raid sirens at school. Earlier in his visit, he told Americans the people of Ukraine were “crying out to God and to the consciousness of the good people of the Earth: Please don’t give up Ukraine”.

The Vatican may claim, as spokesman Matteo Bruni did on Sunday, that the Pope “picked up the image of the white flag, proposed by the interviewer, to indicate (support for) a truce reached with the courage of negotiation”, and Francis had made it clear “negotiations are never a surrender”. But as Ukrainians wage one of the great moral battles of our times, between good and evil, the white flag imagery was potent – and far from the spirit of St John Paul II and Solidarity that laid the foundations 40 years ago for the destruction of the Soviet Union. Many who have followed the 2018 pact between Francis’s curia and the Chinese Communist Party – twice renewed since – that gave the CCP effective control over the appointment of Catholic bishops in China are aghast at the extent to which the church is accommodating China’s oppressive regime.

As Joe Biden said in his State of the Union address, if anybody thinks “Putin will stop at Ukraine, I assure you he will not”. Yet only Putin stands to gain from Francis’s cajoling. Ukrainian Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba got it right rebuffing the Pope when he said: “Our flag is a yellow and blue one. This is the flag by which we live, die and prevail. We shall never raise any other flags.”