Thu 04 July 2019:
VATICAN CITY (Reuters) – Russian President Vladimir Putin met Pope Francis on Thursday, a day before Ukraine’s Catholic leaders were due at the Vatican to discuss their country’s crisis, and amid speculation that his visit could be a prelude to the first trip by a pope to Russia.
Putin, who has seen Francis twice before, arrived at the Vatican at the start of a 10-hour visit to Italy that also includes talks with Prime Minister Giuseppe Conte. His black limousine rolled into the sun-soaked Vatican City more than 50 minutes behind schedule. He was 50 minutes late for his first meeting with Pope Francis in 2013 and was more than an hour late for their second encounter in 2015.
Ukraine, which remains a difficult issue in relations between the Vatican and Russia, was expected to be a main topic of discussions in the official papal library in the Vatican’s Apostolic Palace. When they last met in 2015, the pope urged Putin to make a “sincere and great effort” to achieve peace in Ukraine and help bring an end to fighting between Ukrainian government forces and pro-Russian separatist rebels in the east.
On Friday, leaders of Ukraine’s Catholic Church and Vatican officials begin two days of meetings to discuss various problems in their country, a former Soviet republic. Ukraine’s religious world was made tense last year when the country’s Orthodox Church, which for centuries effectively had been under control of the Russian Orthodox Church, declared its independence and set up a national Church. Russia opposes the Ukrainian Orthodox Church having autocephalous, or self-governing status, saying the move had more political than religious motives.
Putin has aligned himself closely with the Russian Orthodox Church and has accused the government in Kiev of flagrantly meddling in the life of Orthodoxy in Ukraine. Putin’s encounter with the pope on Thursday comes three years after Francis held brief talks with Russian Orthodox Patriarch Kirill in Cuba — a landmark step in healing the 1,000-year-old rift between the Western and Eastern branches of Christianity.
Mikhail Gorbachev, the last leader of the Soviet Union, and Boris Yeltsin, the first president of post-Soviet Russia, had invited the late Pope John Paul to visit.
But a trip was not possible because of tensions between the Vatican and the Russian Orthodox Church, the largest and most influential in world Orthodoxy, with 165 million of the world’s 250 million Orthodox Christians. Apart from his 2016 meeting with Kirill, which was the first in history between a Roman Catholic pope and a Russian Orthodox patriarch, Francis has made a number of visits to countries with predominantly Orthodox populations.
The latest were to Romania, Bulgaria and North Macedonia earlier this year. After meeting the pope, Putin will see Italian President Sergio Mattarella and is due to hold a joint news conference with the prime minister. After a dinner in his honor, he is due to fly back to Moscow at 10 p.m. (2000 GMT).
Think your friends would be interested? Share this story!
