COMMENTARY: Today’s world is desperate for serious moral leadership. That power of moral witness is the only real power the Holy See has in world politics.
Archbishop Paul Gallagher, the Holy See’s “foreign minister” (Secretary for Relations with States and International Organizations, to use the official title), visited Moscow from Aug. 24-28, meeting with senior officials of the Putin regime and the Russian Orthodox Church. Reactions to the visit were mixed.
A Ukrainian-American friend, who was in Ukraine at the time, found the visit “surreal” — perhaps because the Russians marked the archbishop’s diplomatic mission, not by any gestures toward peace, but by intensifying their murderous missile and drone strikes on civilian targets in Kyiv and other Ukrainian cities.
The head of the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church, Major-Archbishop Sviatoslav Shevchuk (whom the Russians would have assassinated had their blitzkrieg of Kyiv succeeded in February 2022), welcomed Archbishop Gallagher’s call for negotiations to end Russia‘s aggression while describing the visit as akin “to a descent into Hades, when a sermon on the resurrection of the dead resounds from the depths of Hades.”
Russian foreign minister Sergey Lavrov was far more upbeat. In his remarks after meeting Archbishop
