Pope wants to bring kidnapped Ukrainian children home
Pope Francis hugs a child refugee from Ukraine. Photo AFP, Tiziana Fabi
Southern Europe
According to the Pope, the Vatican wants to help reunite Ukrainian families. It is also working on a secret mission to end the war.
The Vatican is ready to help return Ukrainian children taken to Russia. The Pope said this on Sunday during a press conference aboard the plane that flew the papal party back from a three-day visit to Hungary.
Thousands of Ukrainian children have been held in Russian re-education camps since the start of the war, US investigators reported in February. The International Criminal Court in The Hague has issued an arrest warrant against President Putin on suspicion of deportations. Russia denies the allegations and claims the children were relocated for their own safety.
However, the Roman Catholic Church does not buy this. After the Ukrainian Prime Minister Denys Shmyhal requested the help of the Vatican in returning Ukrainian children, the Pope said he was open to the request. “The Holy See is available to do it because it’s the right thing,” he argued. “We have to do all that is humanly possible.”
Repatriation
Earlier, the Council of Europe called the forced transfer of Ukrainian children to Russia genocide. “The documented evidence of this practice corresponds to the international definition of genocide,” it said after the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe (PACE) voted in favour of a resolution demanding the repatriation of the children.
By the term genocide, the council is not necessarily referring to mass murder. The qualification is also justified because, according to the council, the deportations of Ukrainian children were “clearly planned, organised and carried out systematically”. Russian state policy allegedly aims to “destroy any connection of the children with their Ukrainian identity”. The resolution adopted on Thursday also states that there is evidence that the deported children were subjected to a process of “Russification” through re-education and immersion in the Russian language, culture and history. The resolution demands that the UN and the Red Cross be given access to Russia to gather information on deported children.
In a conversation with journalists, Ukrainian President Zelensky stated that currently, no organisation is capable of returning children who belong to Ukraine. In addition, Zelensky said to believe that the only way to solve the problem is political pressure on Russia.
Secret
Pope Francis also announced a “secret mission” was underway to negotiate for peace between Russia and Ukraine. However, he refused to share any more details. ‘A mission is now at work but is not yet public. As soon as it is public, I will reveal details,’ the Pope said.
The Pope added that he had discussed the situation in Ukraine with Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán and Bishop Hilarion, a representative of the Russian Orthodox Church in Budapest. ‘During these meetings, we didn’t just talk about Little Red Riding Hood. We talked about all these things. Everyone is interested in how we can bring about peace.’
Nationalism
Earlier that Sunday, Pope Francis presided over an open-air mass in which he called on Hungarians not to close the door to asylum seekers and people who are “foreign or different from us”, in contrast to Prime Minister Viktor Orban’s anti-immigrant policies. Tens of thousands of people had gathered behind Budapest’s iconic parliament building for this mass.
The Pope continued a theme he had started on Friday, the first day of his visit to Hungary, when he warned of the dangers of rising nationalism in Europe, but put it in the context of the gospel by saying that closed doors are painful and contrary to the teachings of Jesus. In his homily, the 86-year-old Francis said that if Hungarians want to follow Jesus, they must break away from “the closed doors of our individualism in a society of increasing isolation; the closed doors of our indifference to the less fortunate and those who suffer; the doors we close to those who are foreign or different from us to migrants or the poor”.
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