ROME — Ukrainian Major Archbishop Sviatoslav Shevchuk said Wednesday that the causes of Ukraine’s war “lie within Russia itself,” rejecting the thesis advanced by Pope Francis this week that external factors “provoked” Russia to act.
The light of the Holy Spirit is especially necessary today “for those who are trying to understand the causes and consequences of this full-scale Russian aggression,” Archbishop Shevchuk said in a video message. “Because we see that today the whole world is trying to deceive, to pretend that what is desired is real.”
“We see and know, experiencing here in Ukraine, that Russia’s aggression against Ukraine is completely unprovoked,” the archbishop continued. “Anyone who thinks that some external cause has provoked Russia into military aggression is either themselves in the grip of Russian propaganda or is simply and deliberately deceiving the world.”
The archbishop’s message follows hard on the heels of Tuesday’s publication of an interview in which Pope Francis declared that there are no good guys and bad guys in the Ukraine war and that Russia’s invasion of Ukraine was likely provoked.
In the interview with the Jesuit journal La Civiltà Cattolica, the pope suggested that a confluence of factors, including “barking” by NATO and the international arms trade, contributed to Russia’s aggression. He cited an unnamed “very wise” head of state who told Francis prior to the war that he was “very concerned about the way NATO was acting.”
“They are barking at the gates of Russia. And they don’t understand that the Russians are imperial and they will not allow any foreign power to approach them. The situation could lead to war,” the anonymous leader purportedly said.
The danger is that we “do not see the whole drama unfolding behind this war, which was perhaps somehow either provoked or not prevented,” the pope asserted. “And note the interest in testing and selling weapons. It is very sad, but at the end of the day that is what is at stake.”
The pope said he is “against reducing complexity to the distinction between good guys and bad guys without reasoning about roots and interests, which are very complex.”
“What is before our eyes is a situation of world war, global interests, arms sales and geopolitical appropriation, which is martyring a heroic people,” he asserted.
In Wednesday’s message, Archbishop Shevchuk sharply countered this thesis without ever mentioning the pope’s name.
The gifts of the Holy Spirit are necessary in today’s world “so that the devil’s wiles do not deceive the human person,” the archbishop said, because “we live in a world of fakes, when what is desired is presented as real; when they try to pretend untruth and falsehood to be the only truth.”
The light of the Holy Spirit is particularly necessary “for those who have special responsibilities, special types of service in the Church, society, and state,” he added.
It is so important today “to understand the causes and consequences of this war,” Shevchuk said. “Unfortunately, the causes of this war lie within Russia itself, inside it.”
“And the Russian aggressor is trying to solve its internal problems with the help of external aggression. He projects his illnesses onto others and blames the whole world for them,” he declared.
“That is why today we are praying for the Gift of the Holy Spirit for politicians, diplomats, church and religious figures,” he continued. “For the Lord God to give them this gift of reason, the ability to distinguish between causes and effects, the ability to see the depth of reality. And to distinguish truth from inspired lies and falsehoods.”
In point of fact, he insisted, “post-Soviet revanchism, which has emerged in a new guise today in such extreme Russian nationalism has clearly acquired genocidal features as the ideology of russkiy mir (‘the Russian world’). And Ukraine is its first victim.”
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