The Ukrainian Bishops and Those Papal Remarks on Russian Culture

The man is abysmally ignorant of history! He praised two of the most anti-Catholic rulers Russia ever had, major oppressors of the UGCC.

From Catholic World Report

By Christopher R. Altieri

The Ukrainian Catholic bishops know their history. They consider it part of their duty to remember with and for their people. More to the point: When they look out their windows these days, they see the Russian invader and the ruin he has wrought.

“Journalism is the first draft of history,” the saying goes, and journalists who wrote the first draft of Pope Francis’s visit to Mongolia earlier this month made some note of its genuinely historic character. Most of the story they told, however, was about other things.

That was mostly Pope Francis’s own fault.

“The idea to visit Mongolia came to me while thinking about the small Catholic community [there],” Pope Francis told journalists during the in-flight presser on the way home from the landlocked former Soviet satellite state* that had once been the seat of the largest land empire in history and is home today to some 3.48 million people, about fifteen hundreds of whom are Catholic.

Pope Francis wanted to show special solicitude for the Catholic community in Mongolia, not despite its miniscule size but because of it. He also spoke of his desire generally to “enter into dialogue with the history and culture” of the peoples he visits and to learn about the ways they live their spiritual lives.

“It is important that evangelization is not thought of as proselytism,” Pope Francis said, touching a recurrent theme of his pontificate, “because proselytism is always restricting.” He recalled his predecessor, Pope Benedict XVI, who “said that faith does not grow by proselytism but by attraction.”

“The proclamation of the Gospel enters into dialogue with culture,” the pope also said. “There is an evangelization of culture and also an inculturation of the Gospel, for Christians also express their values with the culture of their own people.”

Whatever else you want to say about the insufficient development of “proselytism” – often it appears to be a term of abuse in Francis’s lexicon, functionally equivalent to “the evangelization we don’t like” – the vision Francis offered of the Gospel penetrating and transforming culture from the inside out is powerful, bracing, heady and beautiful. “That is the complete opposite of what religious colonization would be,” Pope Francis said, hitting another of his pontificate’s bugbears.

“[T]his journey,” Pope Francis went on to say, “was about getting to know the people of Mongolia, entering into dialogue with them, experiencing their culture, and accompanying the Church on its journey among this people, with much respect for them and their culture.”

“I am satisfied with the result,” he said.

Pope Francis’s week-and-a-bit with the press in the run-up to the Mongolia visit was dismal, however, and also mostly his own fault. If Francis was hoping his visit to Mongolia would help to put that week or so behind him, he instead created the conditions for likely disappointment before he’d even arrived and almost before he even got off the ground.

The lion’s share of the trouble came from Pope Francis’s controversial take on Russia and had been stewing for years – certainly ever since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in early 2022 – and it boiled over when the pope praised Peter and Catherine the Great, the Russian imperial rulers who brutalized and enslaved Ukraine, as “bridge builders” worthy of emulation.

That scalded the long-suffering leadership of the sorely tried Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church. It also drew the attention of reporters, analysts, and commentators in both the Catholic and the secular mainstream press.

“Do not forget your heritage,” Pope Francis told a gathering of Russian young people in off-the-cuff remarks at the end of a Q&A session via video conference shared by the Catholic Archdiocese of Moscow. “You are heirs of a great Russia,” he went on to say, “the great Russia of saints, of kings—the great Russia of Peter the Great, Catherine II—that great and learned Russian Empire of much culture and much humanity.”

“Never deny this heritage,” Pope Francis said. “You are the heirs of the great Mother Russia: Carry forward.”

It’s more than likely that Pope Francis had in mind, at least in part, the willingness of those Russian emperors to learn from and adopt Western technology, social and economic policy, and cultural practice. Still, it doesn’t take a PhD political science with a focus on Eastern European history to understand why the Russians were as glad to hear the pope’s remarks as the Ukrainians were nonplussed by them. In any case, the pope’s utterances caused quite a stir.

The pope’s words garnered the attention of the worldwide secular mainstream media as well as Church figures, world leaders, and diplomats.

The head of the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church, Major Archbishop Sviatoslav Shevchuk, issued a statement noting that the pope’s examples “actually contradict” Francis’s own “teachings on peace, since he has always condemned any form of manifestation of imperialism in the modern world[.]” Shevchuk also noted how Francis has “warned of the dangers of extreme nationalism, stressing that it is the cause of [a piecemeal] third world war.”

“As a Church,” Shevchuk said, “we wish to state that in the context of Russia’s aggression against Ukraine, such statements inspire the neo-colonial ambitions of the aggressor country, even though such a way of ‘being Russian’ should be categorically condemned.”

The apostolic nunciature in Moscow – that’s the papal embassy, for those of you keeping track from home – issued a statement “firmly reject[ing]” any “interpretations” suggesting the pope “encouraged young Russian Catholics to draw inspiration from historical Russian figures known for imperialistic and expansionist ideas and actions that negatively impacted neighboring populations, including the Ukrainian people.”

The press office of the Holy See also issued a statement along the same lines, explaining that Pope Francis merely “intended to encourage young people to preserve and promote what is positive in Russia’s great cultural and spiritual heritage.”

“[C]ertainly,” the press office clarification went on to say, “[Pope Francis did] not [intend] to exalt imperialistic logics and governmental personalities, cited to indicate certain historical periods of reference.”

Read side-by-side and taken all together, the statements from the nunciature and the press office basically say the pope did not intend to say what he said, in words.

The Russians, for their part, remained pleased with the pope’s intervention, and were more than willing to take the remarks at face value.

“The pope knows Russian history,” Russian spokesman Dmitri Peskov said, “and this is very good.” Peskov noted the efforts of Russian authorities “to bring this legacy to our youth, to remind them of it,” and called it “very gratifying” to hear the pope speak “in unison with these efforts.”

Then, in remarks to reporters aboard the plane carrying him to Mongolia, Pope Francis said he relies on the music of a Russian composer to understand Mongolian culture.

“Mongolia is understood with senses,” Pope Francis said according to a report from Crux. Then, he praised Russian romantic nationalist composer Alexander Borodin as one who “was able to express [in music] this length and greatness of Mongolia.” Borodin composed his 1880 orchestral tone poem, In the Steppes of Central Asia, to celebrate the achievements of Tsar Alexander II, who expanded the Russian empire deep into central Asia, the Caucasus, and the far East.

That did not help things too terribly much.

On the plane home from Mongolia, Pope Francis tried to do his own damage control. Those efforts cost him another couple of news cycles in which he almost completely lost control of the Mongolia narrative, at least in the short term. His Russophile fawning also cost him a goodly portion of whatever bona fides he had left with Ukrainian Catholics and indeed the whole Ukrainian people. That expense of political capital may have put his hope to serve as an honest broker of peace in Ukraine permanently out of reach.

“[P]erhaps it was inopportune,” Pope Francis told journalists, “but in speaking of great Russia, not in a geographical sense, but in a cultural sense, I remembered what we were taught at school about Peter I, Catherine II.”

Francis explained that he had first spoken of young Russians’ duty to “shoulder their legacy” and own the cultural heritage of “great Russia.”

“[H]ence this third aspect came up,” Pope Francis said – i.e., his mention of Peter and Catherine – “which perhaps wasn’t quite correct.”

“Russian culture has great beauty and depth,” Pope Francis said, “and should not be cancelled on account of political problems.” It’s tough to argue with that, but it’s also a statement that stands between a straw man and a red herring. “There have been dark years in Russia, but its legacy has always remained intact,” Pope Francis said.

He’s not wrong about that, either, but all of it came to a lot of words, none of which quite succeeded in dislodging his foot from his mouth.

“I wasn’t thinking of imperialism when I spoke,” Pope Francis also said. “I was speaking about culture, and the transmission of culture is never ‘imperialistic’, never,” though one supposes that folks whose cultural memories include subjection to foreign invaders – like Ukrainians who remember Soviet rule and still sing songs from the dark days under the Czars before that – may be reluctant to take the statement at face value.

The Ukrainian Catholic bishops know their history. They consider it part of their duty to remember with and for their people. More to the point: When they look out their windows these days, they see the Russian invader and the ruin he has wrought.

Gathered in Rome this week for their synod – not the show Pope Francis has planned for next month, but the one the Ukrainian bishops hold each year, one that actually does things – the Ukrainian Catholic Church leadership had a meeting with Pope Francis in which they told him that his remarks about Russia “are painful and difficult for the Ukrainian people, who are currently bleeding in the struggle for their dignity and independence.”

“Misunderstandings,” the Ukrainian bishops’ statement said, “have arisen between Ukraine and the Vatican since the beginning of the full-scale war,” and “are used by Russian propaganda to justify and support the murderous ideology of the ‘Russian World’.”

“Therefore,” the statement continued, “the faithful of our Church are sensitive to every word of Your Holiness as the universal voice of truth and justice.”

That was a rebuke. The Ukrainian bishops, however, did not flatly refuse to accept the pope’s non-apology. They were at once forceful and diplomatic. Other statements from senior Ukrainian Churchmen recognized some of the pope’s own conciliatory gestures.

A statement from the Ukrainian bishops noted with appreciation Pope Francis’s assurance of daily prayers before an icon of Our Lady daily imploring the gift of peace in Ukraine. The man who is now Major Archbishop of the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church, the Patriarch Sviatoslav Shevchuk, gave the icon many years ago to the man who would become Pope Francis, when they were both in the pope’s native Argentina.

That’s not nothing.

Bishop Kenneth Nowakowski, who leads the Ukrainian Catholic community in Great Britain, told the Associated Press the pope’s willingness to listen to the Ukrainian bishops in “a non-rushed, non-bureaucratic atmosphere,” was for them nothing short of “amazing.”

On Thursday, as hints of a thaw were becoming discernible, Cardinal Matteo Zuppi of Bologna – Pope Francis’s personal peace envoy to both Russia and Ukraine – met with the bishops and told them that “victory” in their nation’s war to repel Russian aggression requires “peace, and never the humiliation of the enemy,” which, “only leads to future enmity and hostility.”

What Zuppi did not say is that Russia will require a significant chunk of Ukrainian territory for its trouble in order to avoid humiliation, and there’s the rub.

“There are some imperialists who want to impose their ideology,” Zuppi told the Ukrainian bishops. One supposes that became clear enough to the Ukrainian bishops no later than the day the whole Russian army invaded their country.

“When a culture is distilled and becomes ideology,” Zuppi said, “this is poison.”

Cardinal Zuppi may be faithfully rehearsing his principal’s remarks about culture, the practical upshot of which was that Russian culture is great and ought not be cancelled because of politics. That’s an odd line to take with the Ukrainian bishops, whose main concern at present is that Ukraine be not cancelled by Russian politics.

(*This article originally identified Mongolia as a former Soviet republic.)