ROME — Pope Francis has invited the families of two women — a Russian and a Ukrainian — to copresent the thirteenth station of the annual Good Friday Way of the Cross, provoking what some describe as a possible “diplomatic incident.”
The Vatican selected fifteen families linked to Catholic volunteer associations and communities to write the meditations for the Via Crucis, since this year marks the Amoris Laetitia Family Year celebrating the fifth anniversary of the pope’s Apostolic Exhortation, Vatican News reports. The two women and their families together wrote the meditation for the thirteenth station (the body of Jesus is taken down from the cross), and on Friday their families will carry a wooden cross and read their prayer for that station.
While sharing “general concern” about bringing together the Ukrainian and Russian women during Friday’s Via Crucis at the Colosseum, Ukraine’s recently appointed ambassador to the Holy See, Andrii Yurash, tweeted on Tuesday that “we are working on the issue trying to explain difficulties of its realization and possible consequences.”
The ambassador also cites Archbishop Visvaldas Kulbokas, the Vatican’s ambassador (nuncio) to Ukraine, who asserted that reconciliation must come once “aggression is stopped.”
Italian media have described the decision to invite representatives of the aggressor country and the one attacked to participate in Friday’s liturgy as “a real gaffe,” adding that the move has generated consternation in Ukrainian circles and institutions.
While inviting representatives of the two warring countries to walk a stretch of the Via Crucis together was intended as a sign of closeness and a common wish for harmony and peace, “a reaction was triggered on the Ukrainian side that perhaps had not been foreseen,” writes Fausto Gasparroni in the Italian daily La Gazzetta del Sud.
Others, such as Jesuit Father Antonio Spadaro, a papal confidante, have defended the decision, insisting that it must be understood that Pope Francis is a pastor and not a politician. “He acts according to the gospel spirit,” Father Spadaro wrote on Facebook, as quoted in the Italian daily, “which is of reconciliation even against any visible hope during this war of aggression.”
The two women chosen for the Way of the Cross are a Ukrainian nurse, Irina, who works in the Palliative Care Center at Rome’s Biomedical Campus University Hospital and a Russian student, Albina, studying nursing at the same university. According to Irina, the two have been “natural” friends since they first met on the ward.
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