From time to time I am invited to a baptism. I hope to go to another in a few days because there is a new baby in the family. I like the rite, especially when the priest asks: “Do you renounce Satan?” and the congregation answers: “Yes, yes, I give it up.”
I like it for the moral freshness that the words exude. Life is complex and confusing, and so is the world, but there are times when the fog disappears and evil is seen with great clarity, like when you stop to contemplate the figure of Vladimir Putin.
I went to Google to see if the highest Catholic authority, Pope Francis, had elaborated on the meaning of the sacrament of baptism. I found out that it does. Sitting on the throne, addressing the faithful in Saint Peter’s Square, he declared that one cannot profess the faith without renouncing Satan. “These two facts are closely linked”, he explained, “because you cannot follow Christ with conditions, but you have to get rid of all evil to start the new life of Christ”.
This brings me back to Putin, his war in Ukraine, and some statements the Pope made by video conference a couple of weeks ago to a gathering of young Russian Catholics in St. Petersburg. The Kremlin was delighted; Ukrainians, not so much.
“The Pope knows Russian history, and that is very good,” said Dmitry Peskov, Putin’s spokesman. And he goes: “We are working to bring this legacy to our youth… that the Pope speaks in unison with these efforts is very gratifying.” The Government of Ukraine reacted with anger, as did the Ukrainian Orthodox Church, whose leader lamented that the Pope’s words would serve as “support for Russian nationalism and imperialism, which are the real cause of the war in Ukraine”.
This is what the Pope said to young Russians: “Never forget your heritage. You are the heirs of the Great Russia: the great Russia of the saints, of the kings, the great Russia of Peter the Great, of Catherine II, that great Russian empire, cultured, of so much culture, of so much humanity. Do not give up this inheritance. You are the heirs of Great Mother Russia, go ahead”.
Well, yes, Great Mother Russia has a lot to celebrate, although more in the cultural field than in the human field, one could argue. Russia is the country of Tolstoy, Chekhov, Tchaikovsky and Rachmaninoff, but also that of Stalin, Hitler’s worthy rival for the title of bloodiest dictator of the 20th century.
As for the two historical figures the Pope cited as role models, Catherine was the empress who subjugated the Ukraine to Russian rule, who enslaved vast numbers of Ukrainian peasants to the Russian nobility, and who try to eliminate the Ukrainian language. Peter the Great – known, by the way, as Putin’s idol and historical reference – banned the publication of books in Ukrainian, but that’s okay. Under his command, on November 2, 1708, Russian troops massacred the entire population of Baturin, at that time the capital of Ukraine. But it would be unfair to accuse Peter the Great of cruelty only against the neighbors. He personally directed a torture session against his own son and then ordered his death.
Presumably this was not what Pope Francis had in mind, nor the carnage of Stalin, when he celebrated the “humanity” of Russian culture. To be fair, the Pope admitted to journalists that what he had said may not have been “completely correct”.
That’s better than nothing, but maybe, too, it could have gone further. He could have given up on the satanic Vladimir Putin. No, I don’t use the adjective lightly. I will try to define it, recognizing, of course, that there will be other interpretations, that I do not possess the word of God.
A satanic person is someone who systematically makes other human beings suffer without any remorse. Putin has ordered assassination after assassination for more than a decade. The most recent was that of one of his demons for hire, the mercenary Yevgeny Prigozhin. In Ukraine, it has caused the death of 545 children since February last year, according to the UN, not to mention the hundreds of thousands of adults, Ukrainians and Russians who have lost their lives in a war born of their historical resentment and personal, like that of Satan when he was cast out of heaven.
Remorse, I repeat, zero; just like the Argentine military who in the seventies killed and made thousands of people disappear. Pope Francis was the head of the Jesuits in Argentina at that time, and he also “did not renounce” Videla, Galtieri and company, for which he has been criticized. Argentine Nobel Peace Prize laureate Adolfo Pérez Esquivel said that if the Catholic Church had denounced the generals “it would have had a great force to save lives, but this did not happen in Argentina”. Even with the protection he would have enjoyed thanks to his high religious position, today the leader of the Catholic Church remained silent.
And today sepulchral silence regarding Putin. After all, Francis laments the cruelty of the war and – thank you, Your Holiness – makes “calls” for “the nations” – not the aggressor Russia, alert – to end the conflict by negotiating peace.
How can you explain the Holy Father’s reluctance? It is said that he intends to one day act as a mediator for the end of the war. Well, if there was ever such a possibility, it is no longer there, given the Ukrainian perception that he has become a propagandist for the Kremlin. The only other explanations that come to mind are either that he is a coward, as he seems to have been in his country, or that he is ignorant (though it would be surprising in a Jesuit), or that he puts forward the calculated equidistance of a politician in the execution of the role that is supposed to be a spiritual guide.
There are certain miscreants on social media who have pointed out the physical resemblance between Pope Francis and the late Prigozhin, another one of God’s curious jokes. This is in bad taste. No, they are not, not even remotely, moral twins. The Pope is a man of good will who sincerely renounces the biblical figure of Satan. But it would not be superfluous, perhaps, for the good of his flock, of the Ukrainians and of humanity, that he “dispossess” himself of evil, as he says, and renounces the demons of flesh and blood here on Earth as well.
