Pope Francis recently spoke to Russian youth, and the words he made were slammed by Ukrainian officials as “imperialist propaganda.”
On Friday in St. Petersburg, the pope gave a video speech to the 10th All-Russian Catholic Youth Assembly, encouraging them to think of themselves as descendants of the Russian empire.
“Never 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. Never give up on this heritage,” the pope said.
“You are descendants of the great Mother Russia, step forward with it. And thank you – thank you for your way of being, for your way of being Russian.”
Oleh Nikolenko, a spokesman for the Ukrainian Foreign Ministry, criticized the pope’s remarks on Monday.
“This is the kind of imperialist propaganda, ‘spiritual bonds’ and the ‘need’ to save ‘Great Mother Russia’ which the Kremlin uses to justify the murder of thousands of Ukrainians and the destruction of hundreds of Ukrainian towns and villages,” Nikolenko said in a Facebook post.
The pope’s mission should be “precisely to open the eyes of Russian youth to the devastating course of the current Russian leadership” and instead he is promoting “Russian great-power ideas, that are, in fact, the reason for Russia’s chronic aggression,” Nikolenko said.
During an exhibition honoring the first Russian emperor, Russian President Vladimir Putin compared himself to Peter the Great. He used this connection to defend Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
“Peter the Great waged the Great Northern War for 21 years,” Putin said at the time. “On the face of it, he was at war with Sweden taking something away from it … He was not taking away anything, he was returning. This is how it was.” He added that it didn’t matter that European countries didn’t recognize Peter the Great’s seizure of territory by force.
These comments were immediately denounced by Ukrainians, who regarded them as a blatant acknowledgment of Putin’s imperial intentions. This week, following the pope’s address, they came to light once more.
Sviatoslav Shevchuk, the head of the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church, said in a statement that Peter the Great and Catherine the Great are the “worst examples of imperialism and extreme Russian nationalism,” warning that the pope’s words “could be perceived as support for the nationalism and imperialism that has caused the war in Ukraine today.”
“As a Church, we want to state that in the context of Russia’s aggression against Ukraine, such statements inspire the neocolonial ambitions of the aggressor country,” Shevchuk said.
The Vatican denied the idea that the pope was endorsing imperialism on Tuesday.
“The Pope intended to encourage young people to preserve and promote all that is positive in the great cultural and Russian spirituality, and certainly not to exalt imperialist logic and government personalities, cited to indicate some historical periods of reference,” the Vatican statement said.
