The Madness of War and the Weapons of the Spirit: The Catholic Church and Peace for Ukraine

Andrea Pin is Associate Professor of Comparative Public Law, University of Padua, and Senior Fellow at the Center for the Study of Law and Religion, Emory University.

The media that have been covering the Catholic Church’s handling of the war raging in Ukraine have often focused on two details. On the one hand, the Pope went to visit the Russian Ambassador to the Holy See in Rome a few days before tanks invaded Ukraine—a very unusual move for a Pontiff. On the other hand, the Church has so far avoided blaming Russia explicitly for the destruction of cities and the thousands of deaths in Ukraine. This silence, the story goes, would fit with the Catholic agenda. After the epochal meeting between the Moscow Patriarch Kirill and Pope Francis that took place in Cuba in early 2016, the Vatican would try to avoid any attrition with the Russian Orthodox Church’s leader, who seems to support Putin’s invasion. Actually, there is more than what meets the eye.

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Religion and the Russian-Ukrainian War

Kharkiv’s Freedom Square after the Russian missile attack (2 March 2022).

On 24 February 2022, Russia launched an attack on Ukraine resulting in thousands killed, destruction of Ukrainian cities, and millions of forced displaced persons. Putin’s invasion has become a new part of a bloody tragedy started in 2014 with Russia’s annexation of Crimea and the inflammation of the war in Eastern Ukraine.

The religious component of this conflict has manifested itself in a variety of aspects: from religious justification and rhetoric employed by Russian president Vladimir Putin, to the perception of the war by Russian and Ukrainian Orthodox churches, to the dramatic situation with religious freedom in the territories under Russia and its proxies’ control. These and other issues are discussed in this series.

Posts in the Series:

Dmytro Vovk. Religion and the Russian-Ukrainian Conflict

Elizaveta Gaufman. Religion, the Russian-Ukrainian War, and Social Media

Regina Elsner. The End of Unity: How the Russian Orthodox Church Lost Ukraine

Andriy Fert. Pray Against Foreign Invasion or Pray for Peace? Ukrainian Orthodox Churches and the Russian-Ukrainian War

Andrea Pin. The Madness of War and the Weapons of the Spirit: The Catholic Church and Peace for Ukraine

Kristina Stoeckl. The Use of Religious Arguments for the Justification of the Russian Invasion of Ukraine

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Religion, the Russian-Ukrainian War, and Social Media

Elizaveta Gaufman is Assistant Professor of Russian Discourse and Politics at the University of Groningen, Netherlands.

When I first discussed this post with Talk About editor Dmytro Vovk we lived in a different world. We chatted, exchanged screenshots, and I wondered whether my findings would even be interesting to the public. After all, pro-Kremlin social media users were not keen on invoking shared religion in conflict resolution and seemed to have drawn a line between Russians and Ukrainians. At the time of writing, the editor of this post is sheltering from air raids in Kharkiv with his family, and I am sending him daily messages hoping they are ok. What Putin’s regime is doing to Ukrainians is a crime. If those making decisions in the Kremlin actually did care about the common culture and religion that they claim to share with Ukrainians, they could at least remember “thou shalt not kill.”

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