Dying for the Fatherland. Those Heroes Who Trouble the Pope

But, according to Francis, the Ukrainians are fighting an unjust war in defence of their Motherland, freedom, and of their very lives!

From Settimo Cielo

By Sandro Magister

“Some historians are already calling it the ‘miracle on the Dnieper’, like the one a hundred years ago on the Vistula when the Polish army stopped the Red Army. And there are also those who have seen the archangel Michael come down from heaven to fight in defense of our people.”

The remarks come from the major archbishop of the Greek-Catholic Church of Ukraine, Sviatoslav Shevchuk (in the photo), in the messages he addresses every day to his faithful and to the world.

They are messages of intense faith and strong emotion, spoken too in words that few in the Church today dare to utter: love of country, weapons, soldiers, victory, sacrifice, heroism.

“Ukraine is resisting. Ukraine is fighting. The Ukrainian people is surprising the whole world with its courage, it feels deeply that this is a patriotic war, albeit unwanted and senseless. We believe in victory. Speaking with our soldiers I always hear only one request: pray for us. It is this faith, faith in God and trust in the power of justice and good, that helps us move forward. It is the ‘miracle on Dnieper’ which is taking place before our eyes and is revealed to be a work blessed by God.”

In his daily messages - as well as in a video link from Kyiv on March 29 with the Pontifical Oriental Institute in Rome - Archbishop Shevchuk is keeping a sort of war diary.

He tells of when, at the beginning of the Russian aggression, he suddenly found himself hosting in the basement of the Kyiv cathedral “more than 500 empty-handed people, unable to return to their homes on the other side of the Dnieper”.

He reports on the 40,000 deportees - the count is from Caritas Ukraine - from Donbas to Russia, many of whom have been “forcibly transferred to the island of Sakhalin, beyond the easternmost reaches of Siberia, without being able to leave that place of exile for two years, exactly as happened in Stalin’s time.”

He speaks of his parish priest from the city of Slavutych, “who saw his wife give birth to their third child in the midst of a terrible siege, without electricity, without water. I haven’t heard from him in days. When the war began, knowing that the baby was about to be born, I tried to get my parish priest and his family to safety. But he said to me: ‘You are my bishop and I have received a mandate from you to take care of these people. I can’t leave’.”

But what about this fighting and sacrificing oneself for the homeland, this heroism, even armed, in the dispute over just and unjust war that is dividing the Catholic Church from the top down?

Here is a commentary from Professor Pietro De Marco, the author of a previous reflection on the issues raised by the war in Ukraine.

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POPE BERGOGLIO SAYS...

by Pietro De Marco

Pope Bergoglio says: “Why wage war over conflicts that we should resolve by speaking to each other as men?” And then: “A war always sets you back. Always. In war, everyone loses.” And again: “I am ashamed at the very hypothesis of a rearmament. Conversion is the solution.”

Conversion, or repentance over one’s past life and the biblical change of heart, is certainly the absolute solution. But the irreversible conversion of every man is the end of history in the sense of a realized utopia, it is millennialism, or it is the “novissimi,” the last things of the Christian theology of history. But salvation history is another and more nuanced, more human reality. We subsist in this imperfect history and we know that we will remain in it until the end of time. It is in this, not in another, that Christ the Savior works, always given our finiteness and fault. Biblical revelation is within the history of man after the fall, and it is not Catholic to think that historical man can irreversibly emerge from that condition of sin which the words of Pope Francis so evoke and deprecate.

With no less an obligation toward reality, every statement of Catholic reason on war and peace produces judgments of fact and comes to terms with the facts. Moreover, these are on a grand scale, properly “historical,” not individual events or the actions of individuals; they are indeed irreducible to the logic of individuals.

Nothing in history confirms that “everyone loses” in wars. Let’s think about the Second World War. In the humanity of all there was perhaps “regression,” but some large entities, world democracies, although very different from each other, won, while others, such as Nazism and Fascism, lost. Rarely, then, does a war “set back” history, which indeed proceeds accordingly. We think of the last seventy, eighty years of relative peace in Europe.

Furthermore, on a grand scale, there are situations of global risk in which “speaking among men” is possible, as in the case of Cuba. In others, however, the decisions made no longer allow any reasonable exchange of opinions, since one party has immediately taken up arms. The Ukrainian case is such. Little or nothing of what Putin illegitimately requested was negotiable. Who can, while preserving his personal honor and the interests of his country, and the dignity of all, give another what he demands, simply because he demands it while displaying an armed threat? As an alternative to war, the only possibility Ukraine had was surrender. To behave “like men” was to fight.

Here it is not a question of a match decided beforehand by the two combatants, of a duel that they can call off; it is the unilateral initiative of one side, the stronger one, which establishes in the other the universally recognized right to legitimate defense. One can also discuss, with Carl Schmitt, whether it is automatically shameful to have acted first, and whether we can make a moral judgment on the crime without considering the motives of the aggressor. But the examination of the allegations has its time, and it is not the main thing: there will be time later for a Nuremberg. In the meantime, nothing exempts Western Europe and NATO from the duties of protecting Ukraine and of self-protection, against the claims and actions of a vindictive power that employs weapons in crossing the threshold of the European pacts between East and West.

Should we perhaps have, in recent years, kept the Ukrainians unarmed to dissuade them from fighting? Instead of arming and protecting them, should we have arranged, in order to avoid an onerous conflict, for them to become a nation of subjects of the stronger, and so on tomorrow, for Poles, Hungarians, Romanians? And then: without fighting, or having the chance to do so by means of the accursed weaponry, would we all have won?

What kind of men and history does pacifism have before its eyes? The mind returns to that “corpus” of reasoning and emotion which international pacifism, from the American Democrats to the Italian Catholic world, a pacifism inseparable from that always promoted by the Soviet Union, was still proposing on the threshold of 1989: weapons in the West as a risk for democracies, the rites of “denuclearization” of towns and cities, NATO as the new Hitler, peace and freedom combined and realized in unilateral disarmament. A book, “La democrazia dell’era atomica,” edited to perfection by a friend who is no longer with us, Lodovico Grassi, illustrated this pacifist plexus in 1988, for the “Edizioni della Pace” of Fr. Ernesto Balducci. The heart of this culture had been expressed years before by a much applauded quip of the moral theologian Enrico Chiavacci: “They tell us: ‘But Russia has the atomic bomb’. And if so, what does it matter to us?” In one passage of the volume was an assumption that recurs in the pope’s words: “War has left forever the sphere of rationality”; deliberately confusing between conventional wars, which were not lacking, and atomic warfare, and lulling oneself into a conception of man that I have always considered childish.

On questions of international justice as on many other fronts, with pope Bergoglio today the Church is dominated by this legacy of a conception of history at the kindergarten level. Which is moreover the absorption of the centuries-old anti-war legacy of humanitarian socialism. The pope’s statements speak to the heart, but they are his personally, they are impassioned but unreasoned. As has often happened in this pontificate, they are acts of an individual man, not of a pope. Never has the tradition of the Church supported such a thesis.

A conflict between states cannot be compared with a scuffle, such that one could say: “Enough, stop it!”, not to mention that if a scuffle between individuals were to go before a judge, there would be an evaluation of the background and circumstances. The deprecation of war and its reduction to collective sin show neither rational attention nor moral respect for the rights of the attacked, due to the different qualification - of legitimate defense - of its use of force with respect to the aggressor.

One can see and appreciate that Pope Francis aims to induce feelings of guilt and a desire for conversion in the aggressor, without explicitly putting him under accusation. But this too is a spiritual strategy that does not take into account the duty, for the Church, of a public judgment according to justice. The church of Bergoglio no longer distinguishes between internal forum and external forum. The profound page on God’s joy in lifting from the ground and forgiving the prodigal son is addressed to our consciences, with the beautiful and even risky emphasis that at the center of the “confessio peccati” is not sin but mercy. But in the setting of the external forum, of the “forum ecclesiae publicum,” it is the nature of the sin that matters most. The crime is public, its sentence is valid before all. It is of no consequence whatsoever that we are all sinners; not everyone has committed this same sin.

In addition and finally. How can Pope Francis show such indifference to those who die, truly, for their homeland? It is true that “dying for the fatherland” has been scorned by the intelligencija, as in Umberto Eco’s quintessential contempt for the little heroes of Edmondo De Amicis’s book “Cuore.” But, much more than assent to war, it is inhuman today, it is a sign of intellectual and moral cynicism, to be unable to think of the heroism and sacrifice of those who fight. Do we still have to cultivate, with the international intelligencija, this fainthearted idealism, despite the fact that it has always been known, and is now being confirmed, that the powerful will take advantage of it? Is this what the Catholic Church must do? As a baptized believer within the Catholic tradition, I will never be ashamed of those who fight in defense of their fatherland under attack. Happy is the nation that finds heroes, when it has need of them.