The Vatican sought to defend Pope Francis on Tuesday after he sparked fury in Ukraine by praising Russia’s imperial rulers — a history President Vladimir Putin has invoked to justify his ongoing war.
The Kremlin delighted in the controversy, which stemmed from comments the pontiff made to a group of young Russian Catholics urging them to see themselves as the heirs of a “great” empire.
“Don’t forget your heritage. You are the descendants of great Russia: the great Russia of saints, rulers, the great Russia of Peter I, Catherine II, that empire — educated, great culture and great humanity,” he told them in St. Petersburg by live video Friday.
No country is great, we’re all decadent apes squating in the corpse of our ancestors. We could be great, if we didn’t squander all of our time and resources fucking each other.
But… God’s on my side not theirs!
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Were our ancestors any better?
Well, they were sustainable, but no. Not for 300,000 years.
Amen
Of course, the Pope and Vatican praise imperialism, it probably reminds them of their glory days of the Inquisition They also supported Nazism. They continue to enable and support pedophilia.
Being praised by the Pope & the Vatican is a certificate of being morally corrupt & wrong.
To say the Catholic church and they pope supported Nazism is a bit of a stretch. The Nazi Party was anti religious in ideology. They were very brave protests from within the church and contrary to the current pope the did dismiss the regime and even the anti Jewish stance.
Did Pius XII do enough, seen the circumstances of what he knew and his power? Not at all. Even the Catholic network get used for protecting nazi wat criminals. So there’s enough the church managed to screw up.
But there was at least some verbal resistance, which was braver back then, as the pope actually lived in occupied territory.
To say the Catholic church and they pope supported Nazism is a bit of a stretch.
They may not have actively supported the Nazis the whole time, but all in all I would count them as supporting, rather than opposing or being neutral. The main goal they worked for in Germany during the Third Reich was to legally secure their special institutional rights.
The Nazi Party was anti religious in ideology.
As any totalitarian thought system must see other such systems as competitors, National Socialism too saw Religions as a competittion and began working to supplant it as soon as it was entrenched enough in Germany. Before that though, Hitler took care to be especially friendly with the Catholic Church, even praising them as “the most important factor in sustaining our nations identity” in his Declaration on Governmenance in March of 1933. Even late in the war, Hitler always declared himself sent and guided by Divine Providence, without going into detail about which god or gods he was refering to.
Did Pius XII do enough, seen the circumstances of what he knew and his power? Not at all. Even the Catholic network get used for protecting nazi wat criminals.
Agreed. And he and his Church never got punished for that.
But there was at least some verbal resistance, …
By the Catholic Church as a whole mainly from 1930 until the NSDAP was given power and Hitler showed himself to be friendly to the Catholic Church and again after the German Government failed to honor parts of the “Reichskonkordat” (a contract that assured the Curch many of its institutional rights and which richly compensated it for anything it did loose and which is still in force today) but evern then only in the form of one Encyclica by the Pope mostly denouncing the loss of adherence to Catholic/Christian Dogma in Germany and only in one part denouncing the Nazi Race Theory. Aside from that, there was only resistance by singular priests.
… which was braver back then, as the pope actually lived in occupied territory
… from September 1943 until April 1945. At wich time and with their already overstreched ressources no “sane” German commander would have dared attacking the Pope directly and risking public uprisings in most European (occupied and unoccupied) countries.
evern then only in the form of one Encyclica by the Pope mostly denouncing the loss of adherence to Catholic/Christian Dogma in Germany and only in one part denouncing the Nazi Race Theory.
Which is more than the current pope has done regarding the Ukrainian invasion, which was my general point.
Aside from that, there was only resistance by singular priests
This is underselling it a bit, there was quite a lot resistance from priests to the episcopal level (The Netherlands, Vichy France)
I don’t think our opinions differ too widely. My point is that the current pope could certainly do better, even compared to the low point set by Pius XII.
an interesting side to Putin’s Russia is his relationship with Christianity in Russia
Tbf there is a Russia that’s great that is unconnected to the majority of it’s leaders.
That said, it’s not the one we see today.
Russia is a country with rampant homophobia and bigotry with domestic and sexual violence are just a way of life for women and children https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Domestic_violence_in_Russia
So wherever this “great” Russia is, it goes far beyond just Putin’s cronies.
There just isn’t. It was great in the same way the British Empire, the French Empire, the Spanish Empire, the American Empire, were “great”. Big? Yes. Powerful? Yes. Forces of mass oppression and murder? Also yes. Praising Imperialists is going to win no favors.
The Bolshevik revolution was a blood bath of royals, but that was because Russia was the only major power to make it out of the revolutions of 1848 without losing their absolute monarchy. Russia still had friggin peasants prior to the Bolsheviks.
If the USSR hadn’t gone the route of “permanent revolution” (ie permanent authoritarian government), there could have been a past to look bad fondly on. But instead the boot changed color, and they decided to make their neighbors learn of their peaceful ways, by force.
It was a blood bath of leftists, too. Lennin was intent on creating state management of the factories, and he knew that anyone to the left of the party would oppose this. The first people the bolsheviks went after were menchaviks, anarchists, and socialists.
Never a better time to say I’m out of this madness called religion.
I’m convinced religion is a mental illness, albeit a very common one.
What’s religion got to do with what he said?
Of anything, he was praising the achievements of the enemies of catholicism in spite of the ancient schism.
The Pope is a bad man, in other news…
Did you also know that water is wet?
Water makes things wet.
Even though current Russia is reprehensible, he isn’t totally wrong about the achievements of past Russia.
People live in Russia and their ancestors lived there, need to give them something to be proud of that’s not the current government.
Sure - except with current worldwide climate of politicians using national pride to nurture nationalism and xenophobia (see US, Brazil, Hungary, Turkey, Russia, Poland, and I bet many other) - this is clearly going to be spun by Russian propaganda as external support for their “fight against EU and Ukraine aggression”.
just stick with encouraging and protecting pedos. its what you are good at.
Russian Orthodox broke communion with Constantinople over recognizing the autocephaly of churches the Russian one felt it was in charge of. Eastern rite Catholic churches see that schism as an in for themselves. They want to convince Russians they can keep their character while becoming Catholic. It’s not actually helpful to Russian nationalists, because they’re tied to the Russian Orthodox. Overall what the Pope is doing weakens Putin.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/2018_Moscow%E2%80%93Constantinople_schism
This is the best summary I could come up with:
The Vatican sought to defend Pope Francis on Tuesday after he sparked fury in Ukraine by praising Russia’s imperial rulers — a history President Vladimir Putin has invoked to justify his ongoing war.
The head of Ukraine’s Eastern Rite Catholic Church, Archbishop Sviatoslav Shevchuk, said in a statement that the pope’s words had caused “great pain and worry” and feared they could “inspire the neo-colonial ambitions of the aggressor country.”
“The Pope intended to encourage young people to preserve and promote what is positive in Russia’s great cultural and spiritual heritage, and certainly not to extol imperialistic logics and governmental personalities, cited to point to certain historical periods of reference,” spokesman Matteo Bruni said in a statement.
Putin has frequently mentioned Russia’s long imperial past in speeches and essays, often in an attempt to justify his contemporary foreign policy goals.
In June last year, Putin compared himself to the 18th-century tsar, Peter the Great, who expanded his nation’s borders by seizing Swedish land and several Baltic states, establishing Russia as a major European empire.
He returned to this theme in a lengthy article prior to his full-scale invasion in 2021, declaring that “Russians, Ukrainians, and Belarusians are all descendants of Ancient Rus, which was the largest state in Europe.”
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