President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva is traveling to the Vatican in the next few days and, along with Pope Francis, will bring with him an agenda dominated by fighting hunger and climate. But it is still the situation in Ukraine that brings the two leaders together while also angering them towards the Western powers.
Francisco and Lula have had a warm relationship for a number of years. The Pope received the Brazilian before the start of the election campaign and openly criticized Lula’s arrest in interviews.
But the issue that is now on the table is different. According to Brazilian diplomats, there are similarities between the Pope’s and Lula’s stance on the war.
The Pope did not fail to condemn the invasion. But he explained that the war was being “fed by several empires,” not just the Russian one. The phrase reflects the same logic as Lula, that the West must also consider its responsibility in NATO expansion and the legitimate security concerns of the Russians.
Another point that shows overlapping views is the position of Lula and Pope Francisco on the peace plan put forward by Kiev. In May, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy met with the Pope and asked the Holy See for support for his peace plan. The points include the immediate withdrawal of all Russian troops from their territories as a condition for starting negotiations.
As revealed by sources in Rome, the pope reacted coolly to Zelenskyi’s request and even said that the issue of the territories had to be settled “through political channels”.
A month earlier, the Ukrainian made the same request to Lula. The Brazilian made a similar statement to the Pope and pointed out that there were no unilateral peace plans. That is, any action to end the war must involve the Russians.
Another aspect of Lula’s relationship with the Pope is an insistence on maintaining efforts to open channels of dialogue, despite Zelenskyy warning in Rome that attackers and victims could not be “equalized”.
Francis appointed an envoy to Ukraine known for his decades of work mediating conflicts for the Catholic Church. Cardinal Matteo Zuppi, chosen for this task, advocated the creation of a culture of peace to respond to the “deep, sometimes unspoken, often unheard fear of peoples in need of peace”.
He was sent to Kiev in the last few days in the hope of finding spaces for dialogue there. Its mission was “to contribute to the defusing of tensions in the conflict in Ukraine, in the Holy Father’s unceasing hope that this will open avenues of peace”.
Zuppi is Archbishop of Bologna, President of the Italian Bishops’ Conference and helped negotiate the 1990s peace accords that ended the civil wars in Guatemala and Mozambique. He even headed the commission that negotiated a ceasefire in Burundi in 2000.
Pope isolated or kept up to date with the new world?
The pope’s stance, like Lula’s, provoked deep unease among Western powers, who expected Francis to play a role in Moscow’s isolation.
For Vatican scholar Marco Politi, “never in the last 60 years has the Holy See been so marginalized in an international debate as it is now.”
The American John L. Allen Jr., editor of Crux and also a Vatican expert, sees things differently. In a recent article he declared: “Francis’ actions are neither arbitrary nor unreasonable.”
“They are a deliberate response to the way the Catholic Church is changing and will continue to change in the 21st century,” he warned. “More than ever, Catholics live outside the West and do not view the war in Ukraine with the same eyes as Europe and the United States. Seen in this light, Francis’ position sees the future of the church as a geopolitical force, one that…” “We’re going to be a lot less complacent about the West,” he said.
The figures confirm the Vatican official’s position.
- In 1900 there were 267 million Catholics worldwide, with over 200 million in Europe and North America.
- In 2000 there were almost 1.1 billion Catholics worldwide, but only 350 million of them were Europeans and North Americans.
Still, the move “represents a dramatic break with traditional Vatican philosophy.”
“Historically, the Holy See has practiced what scholars call a ‘great power’ model of diplomacy, aligning itself with the superpower of the moment,” he said.
“Over the centuries, this meant de facto alliances with the Holy Roman Empire, the French monarchy, and the AustroHungarian monarchy. For most of the 20th century, Rome clung to the Western powers, so much so that Pope Pius XII, Pope during World War II and a staunch antiCommunist, was nicknamed the “Chaplain of NATO” after John Paul II.
Multipolar Vatican
In his view, Francis has now “adopted the Vatican’s first multipolar geopolitical strategy.”
“Instead of following the Western consensus, Francis has turned to nontraditional allies, such as Hungary’s authoritarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, in his search for a solution in Ukraine, also to avoid angering Russia,” he said.
“In this context, the Pope and his top advisers have called for a 21stcentury version of the Helsinki Process, a diplomatic effort to deescalate tensions during the Cold War that brought together a multitude of Eastern and Western nations.”