THE Vatican Secretary of State, Cardinal Pietro Parolin, has pledged solidarity with Ukraine during a five-day tour, amid renewed moves in the country to ban Orthodox communities with links to Russia.
“It breaks your heart to think that, while we are here, fighting continues in another part of the country, and the bombings do not stop — the whole of Ukraine is experiencing the dark hour of Golgotha,” Cardinal Parolin said in a Sunday sermon. at the Marian sanctuary of Berdychiv.
“May God strengthen peacemakers and heal those who hinder peace from the hatred tormenting them, granting that those defending their fatherland are protected from evil attacks, prisoners of war returned to their loved ones, and the dead welcomed into the Kingdom of heaven.”
Speaking later at the Greek Catholic cathedral in Kyiv, above a crypt serving as an air-raid shelter, the Cardinal said that he had come to “pray with Ukrainians” and bring a “message of closeness” from the Pope, who had described Ukraine as a “martyr country” and had shown “compassion for the pain and suffering of its people”.
The Cardinal was the most senior Vatican official to visit Ukraine since Moscow’s February 2022 invasion, and was widely seen as repairing damage from past controversial remarks by Pope Francis — most recently in March, when he urged the country in a media interview to “raise the white flag” and negotiate peace with Russia.
Besides the western city of Lviv, Cardinal Parolin visited the Orthodox Transfiguration Cathedral, in Odesa, currently being rebuilt after Russian missile strike last year, and the Okhmatdyt Children’s Hospital in Kyiv, which was hit by a missile earlier this month.
Meeting on Tuesday with the All-Ukrainian Council of Churches and Religious Organisations, which brings together Catholic, Orthodox, and Protestant leaders as well as Jews and Muslims, he said that the Holy See’s mission consisted of “doing everything” to ensure that the war was not forgotten, besides providing humanitarian assistance, seeking the release of POWs, and “promoting a just peace” through diplomacy.
An official Ukrainian communiqué said that President Zelensky had welcomed the visit during talks on Tuesday as “a strong signal from the Holy See”, whose envoy, Cardinal Matteo Zuppi, conducted an unsuccessful peace mission in 2023.
The communiqué said that Mr Zelensky, who has held two meetings and four phone conversations with Pope Francis since the invasion, had thanked Cardinal Parolin for backing Ukraine’s current proposals to end the war, while “discussing in detail the consequences of Russian aggression” and the “continuing aerial terror”.
The five-day visit coincided with fresh demands for a ban under Draft Law 8371 on Ukrainian Orthodox communities that maintain links with Russia , which has been repeatedly amended since first being approved last October.
MPs have threatened to blockade the Verkhovna Rada parliament in Kyiv if the law is not put to a new vote by 20 August. They referred to Moscow’s closure of Ukrainian Churches in Russian-occupied territory, as well as its dismantling of memorials to victims of Stalinist repression and the Great Famine of 1932-1933.
However, up to one fifth of the Rada’s 450 members have so far not given their support to the proposed law. Its expanded Article 3 prohibits activities by the Russian Orthodox Church as an “ideological continuation of the regime of the aggressor state, complicit in war crimes and crimes against humanity”.
In a statement on Sunday, the Moscow Patriarchate said that Patriarch Porphyry (Peric) of Serbia had deplored the Moscow-linked Orthodox Church’s “open persecution” of Orthodox communities, “mercilessly carried out by the Ukrainian authorities”, in a letter to Patriarch Kirill, although this was not mentioned on the Serbian Church’s website.
In a rare acknowledgement of the war’s human cost, the chairman of the Russian Church’s Synodal Department for Interaction with the Armed Forces, Metropolitan Kirill (Pokrovsky) of Stavropol, thanked military chaplains for their “pastoral duties in the combat zone”, but warned that Russian soldiers were “very tired”, and more likely to call for their mothers when facing death than praise their country’s rulers.
“There is a view that one shouldn’t talk to soldiers about death, but how can one not talk about it, when death is everywhere — killed brothers, torn off limbs?” Metropolitan Kirill told a meeting at Kazan on Monday.
“We were created by God for eternity, and our soldiers are going to their deaths with subconscious faith in immortality and hope for eternal life. It is this hope that gives them strength”.
In a ruling last weekend, the Ukrainian Supreme Court said that “belonging to a religious organisation” could not be used to evade conscription, and that the national constitution provided “a wide range of opportunities to protect the state’s territorial integrity and sovereignty from military aggression” via “other functions not related to the use of weapons”.