“Peace is not just a dream” – time.news

2023-06-06 07:35:56

Of Gian Guido Vecchi

The cardinal sent by the Pope visited Bucha and met with politicians. Today I will see Zelensky: The Pope helps us not to be resigned. We have to invent everything

VATICAN CITY

– Suffering and pain require the insistence of prayer, and of trying in every way to ensure that peace is not a distant dream but becomes reality. The Cardinal Matteo Zuppi arrived yesterday in Kiev as envoy of the Pope, the first trip since Francis announced his peace mission for Ukraine and, on May 20, became his assignment is official. A first stage of two days, until today, which will follow a visit to Moscow that the Holy See is organizing in agreement with the Kremlin but not yet defined, say Oltretevere. And certainly the moment could not be more difficult, while between attacks and counter-offensives the war, fifteen months after the start of the Russian invasion, is if possible more bitter. The cardinal knows this, and he made it clear away from the spotlight on the eve of his departure, Saturday evening, when he attended the Roman mass of the Community of Sant’Egidio, in Santa Maria in Trastevere, and at the end greeted the faithful: The Pope’s insistence also helps us to be less elegantly resigned, or to accept the situation in a little “creative” way, the Pope would say: in the sense that one has to invent everything. So actually, we have to try to make everything up.

The first step: praying in front of mass graves

The visit accompanied by the utmost confidentiality. But it is significant that the cardinal wanted to go first of all to Bucha, it is said, in prayer in front of the mass graves. And that the Holy See’s communiqué speaks of an initiative whose main purpose is to listen in depth to the Ukrainian authorities about the possible ways to achieve a just peace and support humane gestures that help to ease tensions. First of all, I listen to it. The Pope’s envoy does not present himself with a ready-made proposal and yesterday he began to see religious and government representatives, today a meeting with Zelensky is also planned. These are meetings whose main purpose is to listen, on the theme of peace, on humanitarian issues, says the nuncio in Kiev, Visvaldas Kulbokas: Everything else will have to be decided, it will be up to Cardinal Zuppi to decide with Pope Francis later.

The deported children

Already Cardinal Pietro Parolin

Vatican secretary of state, he explained al
Courier that the mission does not have mediation as its immediate purpose, which is currently impossible, but to change the paradigm of the logic of war, place itself in a perspective of peace and create a different atmosphere, a climate that helps to move towards a peaceful solution.
Of course, the first step for peace should be a ceasefire. But in the meantime, to lighten the climate, help from the Holy See could be needed, as has already happened for the prisoners, in the affair of the Ukrainian children deported to Russiaone of the war crimes for which the International Criminal Court in The Hague has issued an arrest warrant against Putin.
Zelensky had told the Pope about it three weeks ago. Children of war, the online platform created by the Ukrainian government, records 19,505 children deported since the invasion began. Here too it is not easy, in the nunciature in Kiev it is said that the Russians have the lists, and if some slightly older ones have managed to call home and tell where they are, nothing is known about the younger ones. It will be about talking to Moscow. Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said that he does not plan a meeting with Putin, with whom the Pope himself has never been able to speak in these fifteen months.

The deported children

A few weeks ago, Cardinal Zuppi had quoted Kissinger: An exploratory dialogue, even if only, is essential, in this nuclear atmosphere. Before leaving, on Saturday evening, he recalled the sixtieth anniversary of the death of John XXIII and his last encyclical,

Peace on Earth, written after the missile crisis in Cuba to say that war is in the age of atomic weapons it is alien to reasonalien to reason. The prayer that unites us is the real challenge to the terrible, terrible force of evil, sighed Zuppibefore reading the words of pope Roncalli: This is the peace that we ask God with the ardent sigh of our prayer… Enlighten the leaders of the peoples, so that alongside their concern for the just well-being of their citizens, they guarantee and defend the great gift of peace.

June 6, 2023 (change June 6, 2023 | 07:35)

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