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.
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.”
The original article contains 768 words, the summary contains 205 words. Saved 73%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!
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.
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.
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.
Here is an alternative Piped link(s): https://piped.video/watch?v=RZAq-_gz_W8
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I’m open-source, check me out at GitHub.
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 (primarily Ukraine). 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 if the Catholics succeed, because they’re tied to the Russian Orthodox.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/2018_Moscow%E2%80%93Constantinople_schism
