Ukraine: Pope urges concerted effort to avert nuclear war

Pope Francis has led leaders of world religions in a peace appeal to politicians to avert the threat of nuclear war in Ukraine.

Francis presided over the ceremonial closing of a three-day inter-religious peace prayer conference organized by Italy’s Sant’ Egidio Community, a worldwide peace and charity group, at Rome’s Colosseum on Tuesday.

In his address to several thousand people, delivered after various religious groups prayed separately, Francis compared the current world situation to the Cuban missile crisis 60 years ago.

“Today peace has been gravely violated, assaulted and trampled upon, and this in Europe, on the very continent that in the last century endured the horrors of two world wars,” Francis said.

He decried today’s “bleak scenario, where, sad to say, the plans of potent world leaders make no allowance for the just aspirations of peoples”.

Referring to the possibility of the use of nuclear weapons in Ukraine, Francis said: “Today, in fact, something we dreaded and hoped never to hear of again is threatened outright: the use of atomic weapons, which even after Hiroshima and Nagasaki continued wrongly to be produced and tested.”

Francis recalled how on October 25, 1962, at the height of the Cuban missile crisis, Pope John XXIII delivered a radio message appealing to leaders of the time to bring the world back from the brink.

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“Sadly, since then, wars have continued to cause bloodshed and to impoverish the earth. Yet, the situation that we are presently experiencing is particularly dramatic,” he said.

The conference, most of which took place at a center on Rome’s outskirts, was opened on Sunday by French President Emmanuel Macron and Italian President Sergio Mattarella.

At the opening on Sunday, Macron said the Russian Orthodox Church, whose leader Patriarch Kirill is an ally of Russian President Vladimir Putin, was allowing itself to be manipulated by the country’s authorities to justify their war in Ukraine and urged it to resist such pressure.

The meeting’s final appeal, read by a Syrian refugee, called for a ban on the production of nuclear weapons.

The closing ceremony was attended by Christians, Jews, Muslims, Sikhs, Buddhists and representatives of other religions.

Zainab Sa’id