Andrea Morigi April 07, 2022
When he says goodbye to the faithful, the Pope gets up and unrolls a yellow and blue banner in the Nervi Hall with a painted cross and numerous Cyrillic writings: “Yesterday they brought me this flag from Bucha, it comes from The War, directly from this tormented city, explains Francesco and invites the little witnesses of the horror onto the stage, “some Ukrainian children who will accompany us. Let us greet them and pray together with them ». And he gives out Easter eggs. Usually it is not the Wednesday general audience at the Vatican, but the recitation of Sunday’s Angelus, the preferred mouthpiece for the Holy See’s diplomatic appeals to rulers and belligerents. But yesterday, a benevolent urgency urged the Pope to go to the rescue of the weakest, wounded Ukraine, leading to slaughter at the hands of the Russian invader.
Ideological reloads
There are instead those who want to silence the victims, those who surrender, those who spread the intruder’s version, who deny massacres and accuse the press of being subservient to the Western conspiracy that the White House used against the world and concocted about it all, against the orthodox Christians. Even in parts of the Catholic world, there is a temptation to see the Kremlin as the final defender of pure and authentic faith, resisting the spread of gender ideology and passing off the cannonade of Mariupol, Kharkiv almost as a defense of the Decalogue, of Odessa. They say that Ukraine is home to rented wombs and that this justifies military aggression and the extermination of innocent people. What is happening now, with some Catholics seeking hospitality from the Moscow Patriarchate and genuinely believing in the false myth of the Third Rome, happened to Islam after 9/11 as well. There were those who became Muslims in response to the West’s moral corruption, accused of racism and Islamophobia by the most bloodthirsty terrorists known at the time. Gradually, the theocracy of the Iranian ayatollahs came to be preferred to “American imperialism,” right down to the “crimes” committed by the Yankees in Vietnam, Hiroshima, and even Wounded Knee. Now they also call it Cancel Culture, but it’s always an expression of a West that hates itself. Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger had said so at least a year before taking office as Pope Benedict XVI. remarked when he said before the Senate of the Italian Republic on May 13, 2004: “There is a hatred of the West here that is strange and can only be considered as something pathological; the West, laudably, tries to open itself sympathetically to foreign values, but it no longer loves itself; of his own history he now sees only what is deplorable and destructive, while he can no longer see what is great and pure ». On the other hand, if, as soon as the enemy is at the gates, calls for dialogue are launched in the hope of saving one’s skin, one is mistaken. Pope Francis does not give in to temptation. At best, he notes the “powerlessness of the UN. And it doesn’t confuse the attacker with the attacked. On the contrary, he earnestly demands that “this war be ended, the guns silenced, and the sowing of death and destruction stopped.”
APPLES FOR PEACE
According to the Christian view, the sick are not killed but treated, as Jesus Christ teaches in the parable of the good Samaritan. Whoever finds a dying person abandoned on the side of the road, instead of passing by, helps him and gives him the first therapies, then entrusts him to a nurse, pays for the hospital stay, the medication, the care. They do that from the Polish border to the rest of Europe. Thus was born Western Christianity of which Russia did not belong, creating support structures for the weakest, but also defending itself militarily in Vienna and Lepanto. So if secularism prevails in the European and American institutions, that is not a good reason to encourage the suicide of the West or its bombing by Putin. We are the West. And Russia too will have to convert, according to the Message of Fatima proposed by the Holy Father on the occasion of the Consecration to the Immaculate Heart of Mary last March 25th.
