Last Tuesday, Henry Kissinger, who served as the U.S. Secretary of State half a century ago, met with China’s defense minister in Beijing, and President Biden met with Pope Francis’s special envoy for Russia’s war on Ukraine, in Washington. The first encounter drew wide attention in the American press, the second much less. “Not even a photo op,” Massimo Faggioli, an Italian theologian who teaches at Villanova University and who wrote a book on Biden’s Catholicism, remarked on Twitter, after calling the meeting one that “means a lot for the Holy See…, not so much for the U.S.A. ”
Biden’s encounter with the envoy, Cardinal Matteo Maria Zuppi, who is the Archbishop of Bologna, was held at 5 P.M.; it followed a precisely calibrated series of speeches addressing the war in Ukraine at NATO’s summit meeting in Lithuania, the week before, and a controversial meeting with Israel’s President, Isaac Herzog, at the White House earlier in the day. When it was announced, just the day before, it had the appearance of a handshake welcome—a small act of courtesy on Biden’s part. The Vatican had initiated the meeting, which was the third leg of a mission in which Zuppi has met with President Volodymyr Zelensky, in Kyiv, and with Yuri Ushakov, a foreign-policy adviser to President Vladimir Putin, and with Patriarch Kirill, the Primate of the Russian Orthodox Church, in Moscow. For Francis, then, it was of real significance: the mission is his best chance to help open a space for dialogue pointed toward some sort of peace conference or settlement when the war ends.
Optics aside, there is plenty to suggest that the meeting meant a lot to Biden, too. The President took it himself, at the White House, rather than delegating it, and a report from the Vatican indicated that he spoke with Zuppi for more than an hour. So it may be that forgoing a photo session was a way to focus on the substance of the conversation. The White House’s readout indicated that this was “the Vatican’s advocacy for the return of forcibly deported Ukrainian children.” But it also stated a more general theme: “the Holy See’s efforts providing humanitarian aid to address the widespread suffering caused by Russia’s continuing aggression in Ukraine.” The phrase “widespread suffering” is broad enough to cover a range of issues: Russia’s recent withdrawal from a deal that allowed Ukraine to ship grain from its ports, thereby sustaining its economy; or Biden’s decision to ship Ukraine U.S.-made cluster munitions (a form of weaponry condemned by the Vatican and more than a hundred nations); or just the notion that the most effective way for world leaders to remedy the suffering is to find a way to help end the war.
Biden was Vice-President when Pope Francis addressed a joint session of Congress in September, 2015. As President, Biden had previously met Francis once, at the Vatican in October, 2021; after that meeting, he called the Pope “the most significant warrior for peace I’ve ever met.” Russia invaded Ukraine four months later. Now, seventeen months into the war, the meeting with Zuppi suggests that, even as Biden the Commander-in-Chief stresses that the NATO military alliance will stand with Ukraine for “as long as it takes,” Biden the statesman recognizes the prospect of peace negotiations, with Ukraine, Russia, the U.S., other nations, and the Vatican all taking part.
The Pope, too, is trying to balance leadership and statecraft, and Zuppi’s mission represents a new phase in his response to the war. In the weeks after the invasion, Francis refused to name Russia as the aggressor. Commentators said that he was acting in deference to papal precedent going back to the Second World War—when Pius XII did not name Germany as the aggressor (or castigate the Nazis for the Holocaust)—and in order to preserve an eventual role for the Vatican as something like a neutral mediator. But Francis was unable or unwilling to stick with restraint. In March, 2022, the Pope and two Vatican advisers in interchurch relations met via Zoom with Kirill—a Putin loyalist who has characterized the invasion as a holy war—and two Russian Orthodox officials. Recounting the meeting in an interview a few weeks later, Francis said, of Kirill, “For the first twenty minutes, he read from a piece of paper he was holding in his hand all the reasons that justify the Russian invasion. I listened to him and then replied, ‘I don’t understand any of this. Brother, we are not state clerics, we shouldn’t speak the language of politics, but rather the language of Jesus. . . . A Patriarch can’t lower himself to become Putin’s altar boy.’ ” In the same interview, however, he also considered the possibility that “the West’s attitudes” had “facilitated” the invasion, through “barking at Russia’s gate” on the part of NATO, which in the past quarter century has welcomed as members countries from the former Soviet bloc.
Since then, Francis has become increasingly forthright. Last May, expounding on wars taking place in various nations, he noted that the war in Ukraine has drawn more attention than others because it is “closer to us,” and he added, “A few years ago it occurred to me to say that we are living the Third World War piece by piece. For me, today, World War III has been declared. This is something that should give us pause for thought.” In August, he finally described the war in Ukraine as “initiated by the Russian Federation,” and condemned it as “morally unjust, unacceptable, barbaric, senseless, repugnant, and sacrilegious.” On the first anniversary of the invasion, he said, “Let us remain close to the tormented Ukrainian people, who continue to suffer, and ask ourselves: Has everything possible been done to stop the war?” In March, he said that the war is driven by “imperial interests, not just of the Russian empire, but of empires from elsewhere.” After a trip to Budapest in April, when a reporter asked about the prospect of negotiations, he said, “I am willing to do whatever needs to be done.” He named Zuppi as his envoy three weeks later.
The Cardinal has a deep affinity with the Pope’s approach. A Roman, born in 1955, as a young man Zuppi took part in the Community of Sant’Egidio, a Rome-based Catholic N.G.O. founded in 1968 that now has a presence in seventy countries. It has drawn recognition for its annual gathering of leaders of the world religions (called the Prayer for Peace) and its conflict-mediation efforts in Mozambique and Burundi, and its leaders have come to serve as a kind of kitchen cabinet for Pope Francis on humanitarian issues, including immigration. Zuppi, a lanky, unassuming man, trained as a parish priest and eventually became the pastor of the Basilica of Santa Maria in Trastevere—where the group holds a nightly prayer service—and worked with the poor living on Rome’s outskirts, often getting around by bicycle.
He had a key role in Sant’Egidio’s conflict-mediation efforts, which were long and complex. A 1992 accord for Mozambique was developed across eleven meetings, over twenty-seven months, involving the government, the resistance group RENAMO, the governments of neighboring Zimbabwe and South Africa, and the United Nations. A 2000 accord for Burundi, which had been racked by civil war between Tutsis and Hutus since 1993, was advanced by secret meetings in Sant’Egidio’s Rome headquarters, in 1997, and ultimately involved nineteen parties to the conflict, among them six distinct Hutu resistance groups. Zuppi speaks Portuguese and Spanish, and he has known Pope Francis since he was the Archbishop of Buenos Aires. In 2015, two years after Francis was elected Pope, he appointed Zuppi as the Archbishop of Bologna, a progressive university city; in 2019, he made him a cardinal. Last May, he chose him as the president of the Italian bishops’ conference, known as the Episcopal Conference of Italy. This series of appointments marked Zuppi not only as a member of Francis’s inner circle but also as papabile—a possible future Pope.
Zuppi’s connection with Sant’Egidio has prompted George Weigel, who has a high view of the papacy and a low view of the current Pope, and whose many books include a two-volume biography of Pope John Paul II, to denigrate Francis’s peace effort in Ukraine. In a piece titled “A Misguided Papal Mission in Moscow,” published earlier this month in the Wall Street Journal, Weigel called Zuppi “a papal dream candidate of Catholic progressives” and described Sant’Egidio’s dialogue-focussed approach to peacemaking as “gelatinous” and unsuited to “a neocolonial war of aggression,” intimating that it is playing into the hands of Putin and his propagandists, notably Kirill.
In fact, Francis’s mission builds on a precedent set by John Paul, who, in 2003, sent envoys to both Baghdad (Cardinal Roger Etchegaray, who met with President Saddam Hussein) and Washington (Cardinal Pio Laghi, who met with the then President, George W. Bush) in the hope of preventing a second Gulf War. Zuppi’s peacemaking experience was gained in multilateral conflicts involving the warring parties, other governments, and humanitarian and civil-society groups; and the structure of his current mission is taking a similar pattern, involving Kyiv, Moscow, Washington, Beijing—which is said to be his next stop—and Paris, in addition to religious leaders and the Vatican’s Secretariat of State. (This past fall, the French President, Emmanuel Macron, addressed a Sant’Egidio peace conference in Rome, where he said that, although it is up to Ukraine to decide when peace is an option, any eventual peace “will be built” with Russia, “who today is the enemy, around a table, and the international community will be there.”)
The Pope’s decision to ask his special envoy to meet a range of foreign leaders underscores that, though he recognizes Moscow as the aggressor, he sees the war in Ukraine as a grave escalation of a world war developing “piece by piece” in long-running conflicts around the world that have produced a “famine of peace.” President Biden’s decision to meet with Zuppi suggests that on some level he, too, sees the conflict that way—not yet speaking of peace but speaking with a peacemaker. ♦
