There will be no talks and no peace until each side is convinced it has nothing to gain from further fighting. Meanwhile, there has been a flurry of Vatican diplomatic activity on behalf of peace.
Unless the Ukrainian army’s current counteroffensive ends in clear-cut victory for either Ukraine or Russia—an outcome that seems unlikely at the moment—it is possible, though hardly certain, that conditions then will finally exist for a ceasefire and peace talks leading to the war’s conclusion. Since the counteroffensive presumably will continue for another two or three months, that raises the possibility of serious developments as early as this fall.
But while early talks are not certain, something else is: There will be no talks and no peace until each side is convinced it has nothing to gain from further fighting.
Meanwhile, there has been a flurry of Vatican diplomatic activity on behalf of peace.
That was the backdrop for last month’s White House meeting between President Biden and Pope Francis’s special envoy Cardinal Matteo Zuppi of Bologna, president of the Italian bishops’ conference. Cardinal Zuppi met earlier with government and religious officials in Russia and Ukraine, and, the Vatican has announced, will next meet with Chinese government officials in Beijing.
According to Cardinal-designate Christophe Pierre, the papal nuncio in the U.S. who was also at the two-hour meeting with Biden, Cardinal Zuppi spoke about securing the return to Ukraine of children who’ve been deported to Russia during the war. He also delivered a letter to the president from Pope Francis that presumably repeated the Pope’s willingness to help mediate a settlement.
In New York the same day the Holy See’s permanent observer to the United Nations, Archbishop Gabriele Caccia, presented a statement to the UN General Assembly that quoted Pope Francis urging use of all diplomatic means, “even those that may not have been used so far,” to end the war and calling specifically for a ceasefire and peace talks. Cardinal Zuppic presumably made the same point in his meeting with Biden.
As to what a settlement might look like, the general lines are clear. Each side would remain where it is when the shooting stops. The ceasefire would be followed by UN-supervised voting in which the people of disputed territories could say whether they wanted to be part of Ukraine or Russia. Establishment of an agreed-upon frontier supervised by a UN peacekeeping force would follow, along with security guarantees (to which the U.S. would be a party) to ensure each side it had nothing to fear from the other.
Sketching the terms is easy, but actually getting an agreement will be a daunting task made more difficult by mutually reciprocated enmity and distrust between the Ukrainians and the Russians after months of barbaric violence. Given that reality, the services of an honest broker such as the Holy See could help a lot.
Cardinal Zuppi’s meeting with President Biden was recognition that the U.S., as Ukraine’s principal military and political backer, is a party to the conflict. And the rationale for Biden to put more muscle into the search for peace lies in the rise of isolationism in segments of the population eager for an end to American involvement in this foreign adventure. Better than anyone, Biden surely grasps that if the fighting persists into the new year, presidential candidates of both parties, capitalizing on neo-isolationist sentiment, will press him to support a settlement in Ukraine on the best terms available.
In short, the American government will be increasingly unlikely to sit by quietly and confine itself to merely wishing the Ukrainians would see the desirability of seeking peace, even though some of their stated goals in the war remain unmet, as may well be the case.
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Jacob Matham’s portrait of Leo XI, who reigned April 1-27, 1605. / public domain
Denver Newsroom, Sep 18, 2022 / 14:00 pm (CNA).
Blessed John Paul I did not serve as Roman Pontiff for long, but 10 other popes had shorter pontificates than he did. Their stories are a microcosm of the history of the papacy. Some were friends of saints and worked for the good of the Church, while the qualifications of others might be a bit questionable. Through all these more or less flawed men who sat in the Chair of Peter, the Catholic Church teaches that the connection to St. Peter and his profession of faith in Christ endures.
Urban VII was pope for 13 days, Sept. 15–27, 1590.
He was born Giambattista Castagna at Rome, the home city of his mother. His father was of Genoan nobility. His uncle was a cardinal, whom he served at points during his long career in the Church. He held doctorates in civil and canon law.
Castagna worked in government and diplomacy on behalf of the papacy, which at the time held civil power over parts of Italy. He led several commissions during the Council of Trent and helped organize the military alliance against the Ottoman Empire, according to the New Catholic Encyclopedia. He was appointed archbishop in 1553 and became a cardinal in 1583.
He had a reputation for genuine piety, intelligence, and ability to govern.
After his election as pope, he made sure to address the needs of the poor in Rome. His initial plans included expanded public works to employ the poor.
As God’s providence allowed, he did not have time to do much more than plan. He died of malaria at the age of 69. In his will, he left his personal fortune to support poor girls.
Celestine IV reigned for 15 days, Oct. 25–Nov. 10, 1241.
The future pope was born Goffredo da Castiglione in Milan. He spent time with the Cistercian religious order and was a cardinal bishop of Sabina. He was a nephew of Pope Urban III. He was already in poor health when he was elected, at a time when the papacy was a center of political conflict between backers and opponents of Holy Roman Emperor Frederick II.
Boniface VI reigned for 16 days, April 11–26, 896.
He was born in Rome. Not much is known about this pope, though records indicate that during his life he was canonically deprived of holy orders on two occasions: the first time as a subdeacon, and the second as a priest. His irregular past caused controversy over his election, the New Catholic Encyclopedia says.
Theodore II reigned for 20 days in December 897.
Another little-known pope, it is said that his clergy loved him, that he loved peace, and that he lived a life of chastity and charity to the poor. He came to power soon after a low point of the papacy. Pope Theodore annulled the acts of the “Cadaver Synod,” which had put on trial the corpse of his predecessor, Pope Formosus. He recovered the dead Roman Pontiff’s body from the River Tiber and gave it a proper burial. He also reinstated clergy who had been forced to resign.
Sisinnius was pope for 21 days, Jan. 15–Feb. 4, 708.
This pope was born in Syria. His health troubles included disabling arthritis, and he was unable to feed himself. The papacy was responsible for the military defense of Rome at this time, with Lombards invading from the north of Italy and Muslim armies advancing from the south. Sisinnius ordered the walls of Rome to be reinforced as his first act, the New Catholic Encyclopedia says. Before he died, Pope Sisinnius ordained one priest and consecrated a bishop for Corsica.
Marcellus II was pope for about 22 days in April and May, 1555.
He was born Marcello Cervini, at Montefano in Tuscany. Like the sainted Pope Marcellus of the fourth century, he kept his baptismal name as his papal name.
His father worked under several pontificates as a scribe and secretary.
Before Cervini was elected pope he served various roles as a secretary to popes and cardinals, including work to correct the Julian calendar. He was actively engaged with the “New Learning” of Renaissance humanism. He served as protector of the Vatican Library and helped improve and expand its collection. Cervini served the Vatican at the time of its response to the Protestant Reformation. He was a president at the Council of Trent, which continued through his short pontificate.
He gained a reputation as a Church reformer and had hoped to pursue this path during his papacy. He was not consecrated a bishop until the day after he was elected pope.
Pope Marcellus reputedly became sick from overwork during the celebrations of Holy Week and Easter, and the illness turned fatal.
The Missa Papae Marcelli of Giovanni Pierluigi da Palestrina was composed in his honor.
Damasus II reigned for 24 days in July and August, 1048.
This pontiff was named Poppo. He was born in Bavaria and was of German extraction. He served as Bishop of Brixen in Tyrol, in what is now western Austria.
Popes at the time could be nominated in an unusual manner. Pope Damasus II was named by Holy Roman Emperor Henry III. The pope, however, soon died of malaria.
Pius III was pope for 27 calendar days, Sept. 22–Oct. 18, 1503.
He was born Francesco Todeschini in Siena. He was the nephew of Pope Pius II, a famous Renaissance-era pope. His uncle took him into his household and became his patron, allowing the young man to add the pontiff’s family name Piccolomini to his own last name.
Francesco studied canon law. His uncle named him to become administrator of the Archdiocese of Siena and later made him a cardinal-deacon.
The future Roman Pontiff had a reputation of living an upright life as a cultured, gentle man, the New Catholic Encyclopedia reports. He took part in several conclaves of his time, including that which elected Alexander VI.
His service to the papacy included several diplomatic appointments to Germany, France, and Perugia.
Francesco’s own papal election took place amid ruling Italian families’ disputes over control of Rome and included an unsuccessful power play by the Borgia family.
Pius III was known to be in poor health. At the time of the papal coronation he was already suffering from a diseased leg, which developed into a septic ulcer. He died at the age of 64.
Leo XI was pope for 27 days, from April 1–27, 1605.
The Florentine-born Alessandro de Medici was a member of the famous Medici family. He was grand-nephew to Pope Leo X. He sought to become a priest from an early age, but because his mother objected he was not ordained until after she died, according to the New Catholic Encyclopedia. He served as an ambassador to Rome on behalf of Tuscany, before he began to advance in the Church. He would eventually become a bishop, then archbishop of Florence, before being named a cardinal.
He served as a papal legate to France and was head of the Congregation of Bishops.
Among his great friends was St. Philip Neri, founder of the Oratorians.
He was elected pope at the age of 69 and became sick almost immediately.
Benedict V served as pope for 33 days, May 22–June 23, 964.
He was born in Rome and had a reputation for great learning.
He reigned at a time of great turmoil in the Church. Holy Roman Emperor Otto I had interfered with the pontificates of his predecessors. The emperor had forcibly deposed a pope and installed his own nominee on the See of Peter. There were rival claimants to the papacy under Benedict V and Otto again interfered, laying siege to Rome and taking the pope away from Rome by force. Benedict either renounced the papacy or was forcibly deposed. He lived in exile in Hamburg for another year.
John Paul I served as Roman Pontiff from Aug. 26–Sept. 28, 1978, 33 calendar days.
His beatification on Sept. 4 renewed attention to his life. He had a reputation for humility and for teaching the faith in an understandable way.
The future John Paul I took part in the Second Vatican Council and was named patriarch of Venice.
As a cardinal, Luciani published a collection of “open letters” to historic figures, saints, famous writers, and fictional characters. The book, “Illustrissimi,” included letters to Jesus, King David, Mark Twain, Charles Dickens, and Christopher Marlowe, as well as Pinocchio and Figaro, the barber of Seville.
He was the first pope to have two names. He took his papal name from his immediate predecessors, Sts. John XXIII and Paul VI.
Vatican City, May 25, 2019 / 06:25 am (CNA).- Pope Francis said Saturday that abortion is never the answer to difficult prenatal diagnoses, calling selective abortion of the disabled the “expression of an inhuman eugenics mentality.”
“Fear and hostility towards disability often lead to the choice of abortion, configuring it as a practice of ‘prevention,’” Pope Francis said May 25.
“But the Church’s teaching on this point is clear: human life is sacred and inviolable and the use of prenatal diagnosis for selective purposes must be strongly discouraged because it is the expression of an inhuman eugenics mentality, which removes the possibility for families to accept, embrace and love their weakest children,” he said.
The pope addressed a Vatican conference on perinatal hospice highlighting medical care and ministries that support families who have received a prenatal diagnosis indicating that their baby will likely die before or just after birth.
“Yes to Life: Caring for the precious gift of life in its frailness,” a conference organized by the Vatican Dicastery for Laity, Family, and Life May 23-25 brought together medical professionals, bioethicists, ministry providers, and families from 70 countries to discuss how best to provide medical, psychological, and emotional support for parents expecting a child with a life-limiting illness.
“Sometimes people ask me, what does perinatal hospice look like? And I answer, ‘It looks like love,’” author and mother Amy Kuebelbeck shared at the conference.
Kuelbeck was 25 weeks pregnant when she received the diagnosis that her unborn son had an incurable heart defect. She carried her pregnancy to term and had a little more than 2 hours with her son, Gabriel, before he died after birth.
“I know that some people assume that continuing a pregnancy with a baby who will die is all for nothing. But it isn’t all for nothing. Parents can wait with their baby, protect their baby, and love their baby for as long as that baby is able to live. They can give that baby a peaceful life – and a peaceful goodbye. That’s not nothing. That is a gift,” Kuelbeck wrote in “Waiting with Gabriel.”
Dr. Byron Calhoun, a medical professor of obstetrics and gynecology, who first coined the term “perinatal hospice” spoke at the conference. His research has found that allowing parents of newborns with a terminal prenatal diagnosis the chance to be parents can result in less distress for the mother than pregnancy termination.
Many families facing these diagnoses have to decide if they will seek extraordinary or disproportionate medical care for their child after birth.
According to the Catechism of the Catholic Church, “Discontinuing medical procedures that are burdensome, dangerous, extraordinary, or disproportionate to the expected outcome can be legitimate; it is the refusal of ‘over-zealous’ treatment. Here one does not will to cause death; one’s inability to impede it is merely accepted.”
Ministries like Alexandra’s House, a perinatal hospice in Kansas City, provide counsel and grief support to parents as they face these difficult medical decisions. They also connect families with a network of other parents who have had a terminal prenatal diagnosis. “Most of the families stay in contact indefinitely,” said MaryCarroll Sullivan, nurse and bioethics advisor for the ministry.
There are now more than 300 hospitals, hospices, and ministries providing perinatal palliative care around the world.
Sister Giustina Olha Holubets, a geneticist at the University of Lviv, helped to found “Imprint of Life” a perinatal palliative care center in Ukraine that offers grief accompaniment, individualized birth plans, the sacrament of baptism, and burial, as well as respectful photos, footprints, and memory books to help families cherish their brief moments with their child.
The motto of Imprint of Life is “I cannot give more days to your life, but I can give more life to your days.”
Pope Francis met with Sister Giustina and other perinatal hospice providers in the Vatican’s Apostolic Palace on the last day of the conference.
The pope thanked them for creating “networks of love” to which couples can turn to receive accompaniment with the undeniable practical, human, and spiritual difficulties they face.
“Your testimony of love is a gift to the world,” he said.
“Taking care of these children helps parents to mourn and to think of this not only as a loss, but as a step in a journey together. That child will stay in their life forever, and they will have been able to love him,” Pope Francis said.
“Those few hours in which a mother can lull her child can leave a mark on the heart of that woman that she will never forget,” he said.
Vatican City, Oct 17, 2017 / 03:49 pm (CNA/EWTN News).- In a preface to a new book of interviews, Pope Francis outlined his approach to speaking with journalists, explaining that he thinks interviews should be like a conversation and this is why he doesn’t prepare answers in advance.
“For me interviews are a dialogue, not a lesson,” the Pope wrote.
“I do not prepare for this,” he said, stating that he usually declines to read the questions when they are sent in advance, instead opting to answer organically, as he would in an actual conversation.
“Yes, I am still afraid of being interpreted badly,” he clarified, while adding that as a pastor, it’s a risk he’s willing to take.
“Everything that I do has pastoral value, in one way or in another,” he said. “If I did not trust this, I would not allow interviews: for me it is clear. It’s a manner of communicating my ministry.”
Pope Francis gave his thoughts on interviews, and why and how he gives them, in a preface written for a book called Now Ask Your Questions.
The book, a a collection of both new and old interviews with Pope Francis, was compiled by Fr. Antonio Spadaro, SJ, editor-in-chief of La Civiltà Cattolica. It will be presented Oct. 21.
In the preface, Francis explained that for him, giving an interview is not like ascending “a pulpit” to preach, but is a meeting between him and the journalist: “I need to meet the people and look them in the eyes,” he wrote.
He said he likes to speak with people from both small magazines and popular newspapers, because he feels “even more comfortable.”
“In fact, in those cases I really listen to the questions and concerns of ordinary people,” trying to answer “spontaneously” and in a “simple, popular language,” he explained.
He takes the same approach in press conferences aboard the papal plane when returning from apostolic visits, he said, though he sometimes imagines beforehand what questions journalists may ask.
He knows he must be prudent, he said, and he always prays to the Holy Spirit before listening to the questions and responding.
Historically however, Francis wasn’t fond of giving interviews. I may be “tough,” the Pope said, but I’m also shy, stating that as Archbishop of Buenos Aires, he was a little afraid of journalists, though one eventually persuaded him.
“I’ve always been worried about bad interpretations of what I say,” he wrote. As with interviews in the past, he said he was hesitant to accept Spadaro’s request, though eventually he did and gave two long interviews, both which make up part of the book.
The compilation also includes various conversations with fellow Jesuits, which Francis said are the moments he usually feels the most comfortable and free to speak.
“I’m glad they’ve been included in this collection,” he said, since he feels like he is speaking among family members, and thus doesn’t fear being misunderstood.
Included in the book “are also two conversations with the superior generals of religious groups. I have always requested a real dialogue for them. I never wanted to give speeches and not have to listen to them,” he said.
“To me, to converse always felt the best way for us to really meet each other.”
In his meeting with Polish Jesuits, for example, the Pope said he spoke about discernment, strongly underlining the specific mission of the Society of Jesus today, “that is also a very important mission of the Church for our times.”
“I have a real need of this direct communication with people,” he said.
These conversations, which take place in meetings and interviews, are united in form to how he delivers his daily homilies at Mass in the Casa Santa Marta every morning, what is sort of his “parish,” he pointed out.
“I need this communication with people. There, four days a week, they go to find me, 25 people of a Roman parish, together with others.”
“I want a Church that knows how to get involved in people’s conversations, that knows how to dialogue,” he said.
“It is the Church of Emmaus, in which the Lord ‘interviews’ the disciples who are walking, discouraged. For me, an interview is part of this conversation of the Church with the people of today.”
Biden?
Just wondering if Russian tanks would have been so emboldened to cross the border into Ukraine if the earlier United States departure from Afghanistan had been less inept?
Did the avoidable catastrophe in Afghanistan trigger Putin’s decision to cross the Rubicon, assuming that the United States (and the West) would continue to fold? A two-week exercise, he thought. Could the most recent invasion of Ukraine have been kept on ice by less incompetence elsewhere on the globe?
And, how to possibly negotiate now in a way that won’t look like Munich?
I do not think a peace plan can be accepted by either Party to this Conflict. There have been nearly 200,000 young men of the Russian Federation fed to the war and who lost their lives. I don’t know what the Ukrainian figures are but it must be something in the facility of the Russian death figures. This war will end only when the Russian people decide enough is enough and take to the streets to attempt an overturn of the Putin Government. And then begs the question….Who will follow Putin?
How much money have we sent over to Ukraine? $160B? $260B? I really hate to say it but, there is a machine of enrichment in place and until that is dismantled the war will continue indefinitely. Think money-laundering and you’ll be far closer to the truth about the war than anything the press is selling.
Biden?
Just wondering if Russian tanks would have been so emboldened to cross the border into Ukraine if the earlier United States departure from Afghanistan had been less inept?
Did the avoidable catastrophe in Afghanistan trigger Putin’s decision to cross the Rubicon, assuming that the United States (and the West) would continue to fold? A two-week exercise, he thought. Could the most recent invasion of Ukraine have been kept on ice by less incompetence elsewhere on the globe?
And, how to possibly negotiate now in a way that won’t look like Munich?
Since the Pope wears two hats-state and church- he is hardly a neutral entity in this situation and is not a credible mediator.
I do not think a peace plan can be accepted by either Party to this Conflict. There have been nearly 200,000 young men of the Russian Federation fed to the war and who lost their lives. I don’t know what the Ukrainian figures are but it must be something in the facility of the Russian death figures. This war will end only when the Russian people decide enough is enough and take to the streets to attempt an overturn of the Putin Government. And then begs the question….Who will follow Putin?
Why not have the leading patriarchs of Russia and Ukraine share the bill in the cage with Musk and Zuckenberg (for charity)?
How much money have we sent over to Ukraine? $160B? $260B? I really hate to say it but, there is a machine of enrichment in place and until that is dismantled the war will continue indefinitely. Think money-laundering and you’ll be far closer to the truth about the war than anything the press is selling.