Pope Leo XIV offered a prayer on Sunday for the success of peacemaking efforts. The pope did not reference any conflict in particular, but the peace effort drawing the most attention over the weekend was President Donald Trump’s efforts to negotiate an end to the Russia-Ukraine war.
“Let us pray that efforts to bring wars to an end and to promote peace may bear fruit, and that in negotiations the common good of peoples may always be placed first,” the pope wrote in a post on X.
Pope Leo has called for an end to the war in Ukraine in the past. In a June phone call with Russian President Vladimir Putin, the pope offered his services to mediate an end to the conflict.
Putin thanked him for the offer, but claimed Ukraine was “banking on escalating the conflict and is carrying out sabotage against civilian infrastructure sites on Russian territory.”
Other Russian officials, including Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov, said the Vatican would not be an appropriate venue for negotiations between Ukraine and Russia, because both are predominantly Orthodox Christian.
“It would be a bit inelegant for Orthodox countries to use a Catholic platform to discuss issues on how to remove the root causes,” Lavrov said.
“I think it would not be very comfortable for the Vatican itself to host delegations from two Orthodox countries in these circumstances,” he said.
In later comments, the Russians revised their objections to using the Vatican as a venue for peace talks, claiming it could not serve as an impartial meeting ground because it is “surrounded” by Italy, which is a member of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO).
In July, Pope Leo repeated his offer to host peace talks to visiting Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, who was much more amenable to the idea than the Russians, although he couched his support in terms that were guaranteed to annoy the Kremlin.
“The proposal to hold meetings at the level of leaders at the Vatican remains open and entirely possible, with the goal of stopping Russian aggression and achieving a stable, lasting, and genuine peace,” Zelensky said.
“At present, only Moscow continues to reject this proposal, as it has turned down all other peace initiatives,” he added.
Later in July, the pope discussed the war in Ukraine and other conflicts around the world with Metropolitan Anthony of the Russian Orthodox Church.
Anthony is the head of external relations for the Orthodox Church. Its leader, Patriarch Kirill, is a public supporter of Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, describing it as the physical component of a “metaphysical battle” against evil, which Russian forces would win on behalf of his church.
“There will be no trace left of the schismatics because they are fulfilling the devil’s evil bidding of eroding Orthodoxy on Kyivan land,” Kirill predicted, offering a vision of holy war that could not be more different from Pope Leo’s call for peace.
After rejecting Pope Leo’s offer to mediate peace talks, the Kremlin actually suggested he should get involved in the war on Russia’s side, framing the invasion as a battle to secure “freedom of religion” for true followers of the Orthodox Church in Ukraine.
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