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Pope Francis discussed family values, religious freedom, and the Ukraine war with Hungary’s President Katalin Novák at the Vatican on Friday.
Veteran Vatican diplomat Archbishop Paul Richard Gallagher last week defended what he described as Pope Francis’ “strong and courageous” push for peace in Ukraine in the face of criticism from some who have said the Holy Father should take a harder line against Russia as the aggressor in the conflict.
Pope Francis’ envoy to Ukraine Cardinal Matteo Zuppi on Tuesday finished a “brief but intense” two-day visit to Kyiv, which included a meeting with President Volodymyr Zelenskyy.
Ukraine’s prime minister told journalists Thursday that he has asked Pope Francis for help getting back children forcibly deported to Russia.
In his public diplomatic efforts in the war in Ukraine, Pope Francis has repeatedly said that he is ready to go to Kyiv, but only if that trip can be combined with a trip to Moscow.
Speaking with ACI Prensa, CNA’s Spanish-language news partner, Father Kirill Gorbunov, who is also vicar general of the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of the Mother of God at Moscow, said that “the majority of the people are suffering” and that “after a year of war [with Ukraine], there is no foreseeable solution.”
Pope Francis raised the spectre of nuclear war at an interreligious appeal for peace at the Colosseum on Tuesday.
"Before the danger of self-destruction, may humanity understand that the moment has come to abolish war, to erase it from human history before it erases human history," Pope Francis said in another plea for peace more than one month after Russia's invasion of Ukraine.