Lula and the Pope approach positions on war and prepare for the West – 06/17/2023

President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva will travel to the Vatican in the next few days, and with Pope Francis he will bring an agenda dominated by the issue of fighting hunger and climate. But the Ukrainian situation is still what brings the two leaders together and, at the same time, irritates them towards the Western powers.

Over the past few years, Francisco and Lola have maintained a friendly relationship. He greeted the Brazilian pope before the campaign climax began and in interviews openly criticized Lula’s arrest.

But the issue now on the table is something else. Brazilian diplomats consider that there are commonalities between the position of the Pope and Lula on the war.

The Pope did not fail to condemn the invasion. But he declared that the war was being “fuelled by several empires,” not just the Russian Empire. The phrase echoes the same reasoning offered by Lula, that the West also needs to consider its responsibility in NATO’s expansion and the legitimate security concerns of the Russians.

Another point that reveals the overlapping points of view is the position of both Lula and Pope Francisco on the peace plan drawn up by Kiev. In May, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky met with the Pope and asked for the Holy See’s support for his peace plan. Among the points is the immediate withdrawal of all Russian forces from its territory, as part of the condition for the start of negotiations.

Sources in Rome revealed that the Pope calmly responded to Zelensky’s request, going so far as to say that the question of territory should be dealt with in a “political manner”.

A month ago, the Ukrainian made the same request to Lula. The Brazilian was on the same page with the Pope and indicated that there were no unilateral peace plans. That is, any measure to end the war must include the Russians.

Another aspect of the relationship between Lula and the Pope is the insistence on continuing efforts to open channels of dialogue, although Zelensky warned in Rome that the aggressors and the victims could not be “equated”.

He appointed Francis as envoy to Ukraine, known for his decades of work mediating disputes for the Catholic Church. The person chosen for the mission, Cardinal Matteo Zubi, calls for creating a culture of peace to respond to ” anxietysometimes unspoken, and often unheard of, of peoples in need of peace.”

And he was sent to Kiev in recent days, hoping to find spaces for dialogue. Its mission was to “help defuse tensions in the conflict in Ukraine, in the Holy Father’s unfailing hope that this might open pathways to peace.”

Zubi is Archbishop of Bologna, President of the Italian Episcopal Conference, and helped broker the peace accords in the 1990s that ended the civil wars in Guatemala and Mozambique. He even headed the committee that negotiated a cease-fire in Burundi in 2000.

Isolate the pope or modernize it with the new world?

The pope’s position, like that of Lula, caused deep anxiety among the Western powers, who had anticipated the weight of Francis in Moscow’s isolation.

For the Vatican’s Marco Poletti, “Never in the past sixty years has the Holy See been so marginalized in an international debate as it is now.”

American John L. Allen Jr., editor of Crux and also a Vatican expert, has a different view. In a recent article, he declared, “Francis’s actions are neither arbitrary nor unreasonable.”

“It is a deliberate response to the way the Catholic Church is changing – and will continue to change – in the twenty-first century,” he warned. “Catholics, more than ever, live outside the West and do not see the war in Ukraine in the same terms as Europe and the United States. In this sense, Francis’ position envisions the future of the Church as a geopolitical force, one that will be less satisfied with the West.”

The figures confirm the position of the Vatican official.

• In 1900, there were 267 million Catholics in the world, of whom more than 200 million were in Europe and North America.
• In 2000, there were approximately 1.1 billion Catholics in the world, but only 350 million of them were Europeans and North Americans.

However, the move “marked a dramatic break with the Vatican’s traditional philosophy”.

“Historically, the Holy See has practiced what academics call the ‘great power’ model of diplomacy, associating itself with the great power of the moment,” he said.

Over the centuries, this meant de facto alliances with the Holy Roman Empire, the French monarchy, and the Austro-Hungarian Empire. For most of the 20th century, Rome was united with the Western powers, so much so that Pope Pius XII, pope during World War II, was fiercely hostile For communism, he was nicknamed “the chaplain of NATO”, a reference to John Paul II.

The Vatican is multipolar

In his view, Francis has now adopted “what may be considered the Vatican’s first multipolar geopolitical strategy”.

“Rather than follow the Western consensus, Francis has turned to unconventional allies in his quest for a solution in Ukraine, such as authoritarian Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban, in part to avoid antagonizing Russia,” he said.

In this regard, the Pope and his top advisors have called for a 21st-century version of the Helsinki Process, a diplomatic effort to de-escalate tensions during the Cold War that brought together a variety of eastern and western nations.