Great timing, Your Holiness

Pope Francis has extolled Russian imperialism just as thousands of people are being killed in its name.

His remarks would have been ill-advised at any time. At this time, they are abominably offensive.

During a live video address to young Catholics in St Petersburg, the pontiff delivered a prepared anodyne speech about the virtues of peace. However, speaking from the heart, he then went off script to glorify Russia’s imperial past:

“Never forget your heritage. You are the heirs of the great Russia. The great Russia of the saints, of the kings, of the great Russia of Peter the Great, of Catherine II, that great imperial Russia, cultivated, with so much culture and humanity… Thank you for your way of being, for your way of being Russian.”

The way of being Russian currently involves military aggression, mass murder, torture, looting and rape, all in the name of “that great imperial Russia”. In fact, the Pope’s speech is a carbon copy of countless orations delivered by Putin and his henchmen.

I wonder how well His Holiness knows Russian history, including the periods he mentioned specifically. Quite apart from their general beastliness, all Russian tsars, emphatically including Peter and Catherine, mercilessly persecuted Catholics.

Peter ordered that the most offensive anti-Catholic calumnies be disseminated throughout Russia. He expelled the Jesuits in 1719, issued ukases to force Catholics into Orthodoxy, prohibited the children of mixed marriages from being raised as Catholics, staged monstrous orgies mocking Catholic rites – and even murdered a priest, Theophanus Kolbieczynski, with his own hand.

Throughout the imperial period of Russia, Catholics were hit with discriminatory legislation, some Russian noblemen (such as Alexei Ladygenski and Mikhail Galitzin) were brutally executed for converting to Catholicism, Catholic priests were banned from entering various parts of Russia and so forth, ad infinitum.

This is to say that, by extolling Russian imperialism, His Holiness pushes ecumenism rather too far. He would have done better to reserve his praise for countries less inimical to the confession other Popes have tended to see as special.

Between 1772 and 1795, under Catherine, Russia took part in three partitions of Poland, the stronghold of Catholicism in Eastern Europe. That was done with characteristic brutality, especially when Gen. Suvorov (about to be canonised in the Russian Church) drowned the 1794 Kościuszko Uprising in blood.

Also during this period, in 1783, Prince Potemkin, of the villages fame, conquered the Crimea, which most Russians, thoroughly brainwashed by Putin’s propaganda, believe has always been Russian. In fact, give or take a couple of years on either end, the Crimea was Russian during exactly the same period as India was British.

As to “Russia, cultivated, with so much culture and humanity”, this is a popular misapprehension entirely based on the merited international popularity of a dozen or two Russian writers, half a dozen composers and perhaps as many painters.

However, during much of the period the Pope singled out as an exemplar of culture and cultivation, some 90 per cent of the Russians were illiterate and hence unable to appreciate the fine points of Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky (both, incidentally, virulently anti-Catholic, especially the latter). And most of those who were literate spoke French at home.

The humanity part doesn’t quite tally with facts either. Between 70 and 40 per cent of the population were, not to cut too fine a legal point, slaves whose status was no higher than that of livestock. Peasants were beaten, tortured, taken advantage of sexually (Leo Tolstoy is a prime example), sold away from their families.

Serfdom was abolished in 1861, but the peasants’ lot improved only marginally. That’s why throughout its existence the Russian Empire was torn apart by non-stop uprisings, ranging from minor rebellions to full-blown wars. The deadliest of them, the Pugachev uprising during Catherine’s reign, was supressed with singular brutality by the same busy saint-to-be Suvorov.

During the 19^th century, “the great imperial Russia” acquired the richly deserved soubriquets of ‘the gendarme of Europe’ and ‘the prison of nations’. These, one suspects, weren’t references to her culture, cultivation and humanity.

However, even assuming that the Russian Empire was every bit as wonderful as the Pope seems to think, extolling it at this time would be a horrendous misdeed falling in the range between grossly insensitive and downright criminal.

That’s how the Ukrainians took it, along with all those who support their cause (which is to say all decent people). Archbishop Sviatoslav Shevchuk, leader of the Eastern Rite Catholic Church in Ukraine, said the Pope’s remarks “refer to the worst example of Russian imperialism and extreme nationalism… We fear that those words are understood by some as an encouragement of precisely this nationalism and imperialism which is the real cause of the war in Ukraine.”

This is exactly how Putin’s gang understood them. Referring to Russia’s aggression against the Ukraine, Putin’s spokesman Dmitry Peskov gloated: “The fact that the pontiff, let’s say, sounds in unison with these efforts is very, very gratifying.” Anything that’s gratifying to that lot ought to be horrifying to everyone else.

The Vatican has issued some hasty disclaimers that disclaimed nothing. Thus the papal nuncio in Kiev insisted that Pope Francis is an “opponent and critic of any form of imperialism or colonialism”.

True, the Pope isn’t averse to making general bien pensant noises to that effect. But when it comes specifically to the on-going war, he invariably repeats, often verbatim, the Kremlin line. The war, says the pontiff, was provoked by NATO’s eastward expansion, poetically described by His Holiness as “the barking of NATO at the door of Russia”.

I shan’t repeat what I have said about this many times before (for example, in my piece of 30 August, 2022). Suffice it to say now that His Holiness is in default of his mission of providing moral guidance to Catholics and other Christians.

For a start, he could benefit from a crash course in Russian history. Once he has “read, marked, learned and inwardly digested” that material, he ought to interpret it in the light of Christian doctrine – and I can’t possibly suggest that perhaps he needs a crash course in that as well.