The Pope on Ukraine seems a bit Trumpian to me
What Pope Francis said and what he implied about Ukraine, Russia and beyond. Damato's Scratches
In the modest wait of many to see what flag will fly tomorrow in Abruzzo, that of Giorgia Meloni with the confirmation of the outgoing center-right regional president, or that of Giuseppe Conte, rather than Elly Schlein, with the victory of the competitor from a field that 'one calls it "fair" and the other "large", reality forces us to see another flag waving on the international scene. And it is surprisingly the white one of surrender recommended in an interview by the Pope to Ukrainian President Zelensky to negotiate with Putin, rather than preparing another counteroffensive with the aid requested by the West after the essentially failed or failed one last year,
With the mercilessness of cartoonish irony, Stefano Rolli makes the same figure of the Pontiff wrapped in his cassock of the same color wave like a white flag.
At the same time, L'Osservatore Romano features on its entire front page a Lenten Pope who confesses dominated by the headline about God who "never tires of forgiving". And the forgiveness this time concerns not the penitent reported by the Holy See newspaper but Putin . Which at the outbreak of the conflict two years ago, the Pope seemed to consider responsible for the aggression and decided, with the support of the Patriarch of Moscow, to "denazify" and moralize a Ukraine too attracted to the Western model of life. Evidently the Pope has changed his mind, as Putin has not changed his mind in the meantime, and he continued his war, even threatening to resort to nuclear weapons to resolve it.
In the "four steps of peace" on which Avvenire headlines, also dealing with the words and interventions of the Pope, one can glimpse, in addition to Zelensky's white flag, that of Israel in Gaza to interrupt the offensive in reaction to the pogrom of the Palestinian terrorists of Hamas of October 7.
Faced with an America tempted by the international disengagement of former President Donald Trump, who was ahead in the polls over the outgoing Joe Biden, Europe seemed tempted instead by a greater commitment against dictators and terrorists. “Europe this time – writes Paolo Mieli in the Corriere della Sera – cannot afford idle chatter, it cannot allow itself to say and then deny, it must take immediate decisions that allow Zelensky to take back the initiative. Or at least not to succumb. But he must do so by November 5th, the day on which Biden will perhaps be forced to leave the scene., Not later."
But the Pope does not seem to be in tune with this Europe desired by Mieli. Far from it. He seems like a rather Trumpian Pope. The opposite perhaps of what the late John Paul II would have been in his place, the Polish Pontiff who wanted and knew how to push the still Soviet Union into a corner.
This is a machine translation from Italian language of a post published on Start Magazine at the URL https://www.startmag.it/mondo/papa-ucraina-trumpiano/ on Sun, 10 Mar 2024 06:48:13 +0000.