“Russian Aggression”. The Pope’s Newspaper Breaks the Taboo

At last!!! At least someone in the Vatican is calling it what it is, naked, illegal and immoral aggression on the part of Russia against Ukraine.

From Settimo Cielo

By Sandro Magister

If not Pope Francis, at least the official communications outlets of the Holy See have broken the taboo, calling for the first time by its real name, “the aggression of the Russian army in Ukraine,” the war that has reached its seventeenth day.

This is what it says in the editorial published this afternoon, March 12, on the front page of “L’Osservatore Romano” and on the multimedia outlet “Vatican News,” with the byline of Andrea Tornielli, editorial director of the dicastery for communication, on the day on which “Francis enters the tenth year of his pontificate”:

The editorial moves from the pope’s visit one year ago to the city of Mosul tormented by the Islamic State, to come rapidly to our day, when  (emphasis added) “the tragic consequences of the dirty war in Ukraine, hypocritically defined a ‘special military operation,’ are before the eyes of the world, with their load of pain, suffering, the bodies of innocent people torn apart, children killed, families divided, millions of refugees forced to leave everything behind to escape the bombs, cities turned into battlefields, homes gutted and burned. Not to mention the wounded hearts, which will take years to heal.”

A little further on, the editorial implicitly challenges the claims of Moscow patriarch Kirill and goes so far as to call the war by the name of “aggression of the Russian army in Ukraine”:

“This time, hatred and violence cannot be cloaked in theories about the ‘clash of civilizations’, they have nothing to do with fictitious religious motivations. This time, on the two fronts there are men and women who share the same Christian faith and the same baptism. Faced with the havoc caused by the aggression of the Russian army in Ukraine, and the escalation of a war that risks dragging the world into nuclear conflict, it is not easy to find signs of hope. Yet, just as a year ago in Mosul Pope Francis reaffirmed his ‘conviction that fraternity is more durable than fratricide, that hope is more powerful than hatred, that peace more powerful than war,’ even today, despite all, it is possible to hope. […] To call oneself a Christian means to belong to a God made Man, who allowed himself to be killed on the cross for love. Choosing to be a helpless victim, for two thousand years he has been asking us to be on the side of the oppressed, of those who are attacked.”

The whole editorial is a must-read. But it can also be added that two days earlier “L’Osservatore Romano” had opened its front page (see above) with a headline that could not have been more scathing toward the “hypocrisy” of Vladimir Putin's wooden language.

The headline was: “Special military operation,” against the backdrop of the bombing of the maternity and children’s hospital in Mariupol.

Not one word more. But he who has eyes to understand, let him understand.