On Wednesday, February 12, Pope Francis decided to speak again at the end of the general audience. In front of thousands of pilgrims gathered in Paul VI Hall in the Vatican, and while he was unable to read his catechesis due to breathing difficulties, the Argentine pontiff raised his head to urge Catholics to pray for peace.
“We were not born to kill but to make peoples grow,” the Pope said, his voice breaking. "Please, in your daily prayer, ask for peace. Tormented Ukraine … how it suffers,” he added, before listing the names of other countries in conflict. And he concluded: “Please, let us pray for peace. Let us do penance for peace.”
This was Pope Francis' last public improvisation before his hospitalization at the Gemelli Polyclinic in Rome, two days later.
Closeness to the “martyred Ukrainian people”
On Sunday, in the text of the Angelus that the Vatican gave to journalists, the Pope mentioned the “painful and shameful” third anniversary of the large-scale war against Ukraine. As he has done every week for nearly three years, he assured the “suffering Ukrainian people” of his closeness.
At the start of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, the Pope tried to intercede to silence the guns. In an unprecedented move in the history of Vatican diplomacy, he went in person to the Russian embassy to the Holy See the day after the invasion to speak with Russian ambassador Alexander Avdeev.
“My knee was still acting up,” he says in his latest autobiography (Hope); “so it was therefore a limping pope who presented himself to Ambassador Avdeev.”
In the weeks that followed, he offered to travel to Moscow to meet with President Vladimir Putin and promote peace. To no avail.
After a first year of all-out attempts to resolve the Russian-Ukrainian conflict, the Pope concluded 2022 in tears in Piazza di Spagna during a prayer to the Virgin Mary on December 8.
“Immaculate Virgin, today I would have liked to bring you the thanks of the Ukrainian people…” he said, before breaking down in tears, applauded by a crowd gathered in this square in the heart of Rome.
“The Lord will call to account”
In 2023 and 2024, Vatican diplomacy focused mainly on the humanitarian aspects of the conflict in Ukraine. The Pope dispatched Cardinal Matteo Zuppi, president of the Italian Episcopal Conference, to mediate between Russia and Ukraine to enable the repatriation of Ukrainian children. Although he went to Kiev, Moscow, Beijing and Washington, this mission led to only a few releases.
Despite the limits of the diplomacy of the Holy See — evident in periods of major military conflicts — Pope Francis never tires of inviting people to pray for an end to the fighting.
He has called for people to do penance for this intention, as he did a fortnight ago during the general audience, and also to fast, as on March 25, 2022, the day on which he consecrated Ukraine and Russia to the Immaculate Heart of Mary.
In his autobiography, published in January, the Pope warned everyone, “The Lord will call us to account for all those tears shed in Ukraine.”
