The Russian Orthodox Church said the Pope’s comments were “regrettable,” in a statement Wednesday. “But now, he too agrees: let’s stop, it could be an ambiguous signal.” “It would be our second face-to-face meeting, nothing to do with the war,” the Pope said. “The Patriarch cannot transform himself into Putin’s altar boy,” the Pope said.įrancis said the conference call with Kirill took place on March 16, and that both he and the Patriarch had agreed to postpone a planned meeting on June 14 in Jerusalem. “Brother, we are not clerics of state, we cannot use the language of politics but that of Jesus.” “I listened and told him: I don’t understand anything about this,” said the Pope. “The first 20 minutes he read to me, with a card in hand, all the justifications for war.”
“I spoke to him for 40 minutes via Zoom,” the Pope told Italian daily Corriere della Sera in an interview published Tuesday.
