Vatican City
Reuters
Pope Francis on Wednesday said the war in Ukraine showed that humanity had to shed a strange instinct for “self-destruction” and that buying more weapons was not the ultimate solution to any conflict.
Francis asked participants at his weekly general audience to remember all the victims of the war – the dead, including “fallen soldiers on one side or the other”, the wounded, homeless and refugees.
“May the Lord send his spirit to make us understand that war is a defeat of humanity, that we have to defeat all those who make war…” he said.
“[Making war] is a need that destroys us,” he said, asking God to “free us from this ‘need’ for self-destruction”.
Pope Francis holds the weekly general audience at the Paul VI Hall at the Vatican, on 23rd March. PICTURE: Reuters/Yara Nardi.
It was the second time since the war in Ukraine began that the Pope has evoked the spectre of a nuclear war.
Francis has made a number of strong condemnations of the war, but he criticised Russia only implicitly, so far avoiding mentioning it by name.
He has used terms such as unjustified aggression, slaughter and atrocities.
Moscow says the action it launched on 24th February is a “special military operation” designed not to occupy territory but to demilitarise its neighbour and purge it of what it sees as dangerous nationalists. Francis has already rejected that terminology.
“Let us also pray that those who govern understand that buying weapons and manufacturing weapons is not the solution to the problem,” he said on Wednesday.
“The solution is to work together for peace, as the Bible says, in order to transform weapons into instruments of peace.”
Francis has in the past said funds spent on weapons should be diverted to other aims, such as fighting world hunger and developing and distributing vaccines. He has also called for a ban on nuclear weapons, saying even their possession for deterrence is immoral.
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Meanwhile, the Vatican announced that the Pope will meet representatives of Canada’s native peoples this month to listen to their concerns following the discovery of bodies of children buried in church-run schools in Canada.
A statement said the Pope will meet representatives of Inuit, Métis and First Nations communities on 28th and 31st March, before holding an audience for all groups as well as Canadian bishops on 1st April.
The schools, whose stated aim was to assimilate indigenous children, operated between 1831 and 1996 and were run by a number of Christian denominations on behalf of the government. The Catholic Church ran most of them.
Later this year the Pope is expected to visit Canada, where Indigenous people have asked that he personally apologise for the church’s role in the schools. Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau also said the Catholic Church must take responsibility.
The recurring scandal broke out again last year, when hundreds of bodies where discovered at former schools, leading to fresh demands for accountability.
Last June, Pope Francis said he was pained by the discovery of the remains of over 200 children at a former Catholic school for Indigenous students, but stopped short of the direct apology some Canadians had demanded.
The residential school system forcibly separated about 150,000 children from their homes. Many were subjected to abuse, rape and malnutrition in what the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in 2015 called “cultural genocide”.
