In “Pope Francis Waves a White Flag at Vladimir Putin,” an op-ed published in The Wall Street Journal, George Weigel contrasts the Ukrainian bishops’ invocation of just war theory with the Pope’s call, in an interview with a Swiss broadcaster, for Ukraine to show “the courage of the white flag.”
“In the interview, there was evidently no papal call to Russia to cease its aggression, which has cost tens of thousands of Ukrainian lives and done a trillion dollars worth of damage,” wrote Weigel. “There was no papal demand that Catholics be allowed to worship freely in Russian-occupied Ukrainian territories, where Catholic rites are now banned.”
“Pope Francis seemed wholly unaware of the carefully reasoned, just-war-informed statement the Ukrainian episcopate had issued a few days before the second anniversary of Russia’s invasion, in which the bishops summoned their people to continued sacrifice in defense of their freedom and sovereignty,” Weigel continued. “By contrast, the pope seemed to place the entire burden of finding a path to peace on the victim, not the aggressor. Moral myopia of such severity should be beneath the dignity of the papacy.”