The fall of Bashar al-Assad’s regime in Syria has marked a severe defeat for the powers that supported him: Russia and Iran. But the geopolitics embodied by Pope Francis has also come away weakened.
From the first months of his pontificate, in 2013, Jorge Mario Bergoglio built up precisely with Syria and Russia the markedly pacifist image of his international policy, in opposition to the warmongering he derided on the part of the United States and the West.
In Syria, the civil war was raging between the Assad regime and its opponents, a war that had in the August 21 chemical attack on Ghouta, a rebel stronghold southeast of Damascus, one of its most atrocious moments, with countless victims.
In the following days, a United Nations investigation detected traces of sarin gas in the bombed areas, leading to U.S. president Barack Obama’s threat of armed intervention against the Syrian regime, its use of chemical weapons having crossed the “red line” drawn by the United States in 2012.
But both Russia and Iran blamed the rebels or even the West for the use of sarin gas. And this was also what Pope Francis thought, according to what he said a year later at a press conference on the flight back from a trip to Turkey: “I remember that in September of last year, there was talk that Syria possessed chemical weapons: I do not believe Syria is in a position to produce chemical weapons. Who sold them these? Perhaps those who accused them of having them in the first place?”
The fact is that a few days after that bombing, Francis dedicated the whole Sunday Angelus of September 1 to an appeal to spare the Syrian regime from an armed intervention by the United States and its allies, and set the following September 7 as a day of fasting and prayer with this in view.
And to whom did the pope look in following up on his appeal, on the terrain of international politics?
To Russian president Vladimir Putin, in a letter addressed to him and made public on September 4.
In the letter, basing himself on the upcoming meeting in St. Petersburg of the twenty largest world economies, chaired by Putin, Francis asked none other than the Russian president to “find ways to abandon any vain presumption of a military solution” to the Syrian conflict.
On the evening of September 7, until nearly midnight, in front of St. Peter’s Basilica the pope presided over the announced prayer vigil.
And on September 12 the “op-ed” page of the “New York Times” carried a statement by Putin himself – the first and last that he has published in the New York paper – that cited none other than the pope as among the “political and religious leaders” who had rightly opposed a “potential strike by the United States against Syria.”
In his “plea for caution” – the title of his statement – Putin used precisely the argument also shared by Francis:
“No one doubts that poison gas was used in Syria. But there is every reason to believe it was used not by the Syrian Army, but by opposition forces, to provoke intervention by their powerful foreign patrons, who would be siding with the fundamentalists.”
What happened was that Obama refrained from military intervention in exchange for Syria’s promise, guaranteed by Putin, to put its chemical arsenal under international control, for its subsequent destruction. And this “victory of peace” – in reality the rescue “in extremis” of the bloody Assad regime – was also credited to the pope, by international public opinion.
A couple of months later, on November 25, Putin clinched his firm ties with Pope Francis with a lavish audience at the Vatican followed by an unusually detailed press release, with a whole paragraph dedicated to Syria:
“Special attention was paid to the pursuit of peace in the Middle East and the grave situation in Syria, with reference to which President Putin expressed thanks for the letter addressed to him by the Holy Father on the occasion of the G20 meeting in St. Petersburg. Emphasis was placed on the urgency of the need to bring an end to the violence and to ensure necessary humanitarian assistance for the population, as well as to promote concrete initiatives for a peaceful solution to the conflict, favouring negotiation and involving the various ethnic and religious groups, recognising their essential role in society.”
Putin was 50 minutes late for the audience at the Vatican, but made up for it by giving the pope a few sacred icons that he kissed devoutly in front of him (see photo). The final lines of the statement alluded to the regime of special protection that President Assad pledged for Christian Churches in Syria.
Again in the article in the “New York Times” Putin had written that “under current international law, force is permitted only in self-defense or by the decision of the Security Council. Anything else is unacceptable under the United Nations Charter and would constitute an act of aggression.”
But shortly thereafter, in February 2014, he attacked Ukraine, taking Crimea from it and occupying part of its eastern regions. And this with persistent silence from the pope, broken only by a feeble wish for “peacemaking” in his Easter message.
What mattered to Francis at that time, in fact, was something entirely different. It was the preparation of the meeting, the first in history, with the patriarch of Moscow and all Rus’, Kirill, who after an initial critical reservation on the annexation of Crimea had totally aligned himself with Putin, becoming his ideologue to the point of excess.
The meeting between Francis and Kirill took place on February 12, 2016, at the Havana airport, with the joint signing of a declaration that defined as “fratricidal war,” as if engaged in equally by both sides, what in reality was pure aggression by Russia against Ukraine, with the Greek Catholics of this country – foremost among them their major archbishop, Sviatoslav Shevchuk – feeling deeply wounded, indeed betrayed, abandoned by the pope.
Meanwhile, in Syria, the Russian bombings of Aleppo, surrounded by the Shiite militias of Assad, Lebanon, and Iran, reached their peak precisely in 2016, razing the rebel areas to the ground with the blessing of the patriarch of Moscow and the silence of the pope, broken only by rare and generic calls for peace.
So there was no surprise, after years of such a firm understanding with Putin, in the subservience of Francis to Russia’s new aggression in 2022 against Ukraine, which he has repeatedly justified as a reaction to the West’s menacing “barking” over the borders of the dissolved Soviet empire.
There was little they were able to do at the Vatican secretariat of state, with Cardinal Pietro Parolin and Archbishop Paul R. Gallagher, to set bounds to this papal line of conduct, supported instead by the copious parallel diplomacy of the even more pro-Putin Community of Sant’Egidio.
In Syria, the submission of the Christian Churches to the bloody Assad regime, spun as “protection,” has nonetheless come at a very high price, which the Maronite archbishop of Damascus, Samir Nassar, was free to denounce for the first time in public only last December, after Assad’s fall and flight to Moscow.
Speaking to Caroline Hayek of the Lebanese Christian daily “L’Orient-Le Jour,” the archbishop described a Syria in which everyone was “monitored 24 hours a day,” even across the border. “The intelligence services, the ‘mukhabarats’ were everywhere. It went through the cook, the doorman, the sacristan, a lot of priests were also involved in this system. One day we even found a microphone in a pen in my drawer. Hundreds of thousands of Syrians were imprisoned in indescribable conditions, killed or disappeared. And we were not brave enough to tell the truth.”
The Vatican nuncio to Syria, Cardinal Mario Zenari, also acknowledged after the fall of the regime that “more could have been done to prevent all this suffering.” But among Christians – despite the reassuring promises of the new leader of Syria, Ahmed al-Sharaa, whose fundamentalist past with the ‘nom de guerre’ Abu Mohammed al-Jolani they do not forget – the fear of undergoing reprisals because of their previous affiliation with Assad remains alive, especially in areas where the Islamist opposition was most active, as in Maaloula, one of the rare places where they still speak the language of Jesus, Aramaic.
On December 31 in Damascus al-Sharaa received the heads of the Christian Churches of Syria and had a private conversation with the vicar of the Custody of the Holy Land, the Franciscan Ibrahim Faltas, to whom he said: “I do not consider the Christians a minority but an integral and important part of the history of the Syrian people. I lived for a long time in the governorate of Idlib, where I knew of the efforts of two of your confreres, Father Hanna and Father Loai, on behalf of the population of that area. They helped and supported all those who turned to them without any distinction. I felt esteem and respect for them.”
In the same meeting, al-Sharaa also expressed “admiration, esteem and respect” for Pope Francis, “a true man of peace.”
Who, on January 9, in his New Year’s speech to the diplomatic corps, expressed his hope that Syria could go back to being “a land of peaceful coexistence where all Syrians, including the Christian community, can feel themselves to be full citizens and share in the common good of that beloved nation.”
Still, however, displaying an unchanged benevolence for another oppressive regime, the Islamic Republic of Iran, which had one of its armed wings in Assad’s Syria, in agreement with Putin’s Russia and in frontal opposition to Israel and the West.
On January 3, in fact, receiving the founder of Iran’s University of Religions and Denominations, Abu al-Hassan Navab, Francis remained completely silent, as always, on the suffocation of freedoms in that country, instead attacking Israel’s intention of “enslaving human beings,” in words made public by the official Iranian press agency, which the Vatican could not deny even though the pope was called to account by a tough letter of protest from Eliezer Simcha Weisz of the chief rabbinate of Jerusalem.
And the day before, the pope had granted an equally friendly audience to the Iranian ambassador to the Holy See, Mohammed Hossein Mokhtari, receiving as a gift a plaque with reflections on Jesus written by the supreme leader of Iran’s theocratic regime, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.
This meeting was also covered by Iranian outlets. While it was the official Vatican bulletin that told of the audience the pope had given on the same day, January 2, to Abdul Karim Paz, an Argentine Shiite imam and sheik in close contact with the hierarchs of Tehran, whom he has always defended, even after the ruling that found they were behind the 1994 anti-Jewish attack in Buenos Aires that left 85 dead and more than 300 wounded.
For Iran as for Russia, the fall of Assad in Syria has been a serious loss. But evidently the shared anti-Western vision keeps Francis from distancing himself from these dangerous fellow travelers.
(Translated by Matthew Sherry: traduttore@hotmail.com)
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POST SCRIPTUM — In reality, on closer inspection it turns out that Pope Francis met with the three exponents of Shiite Islam not separately but together, on the morning of Thursday, January 2.
The official Vatican bulletin of that day said the pope had received in audience “Mr. Sheij Abdul Karim Paz, and entourage.”
And making up the “entourage” were none other than the founder of Iran’s University of Religions and Denominations, Abu al-Hassan Navab, and the Iranian ambassador to the Holy See, Mohammed Hossein Mokhtari.
In the photo from Vatican Media, dated January 2, the academic official is beside the pope, the ambassador is in the middle, and on the right is the Argentine Shiite sheikh, the only one whose name was made public.
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Sandro Magister is past “vaticanista” of the Italian weekly L’Espresso.
The latest articles in English of his blog Settimo Cielo are on this page.
But the full archive of Settimo Cielo in English, from 2017 to today, is accessible.
As is the complete index of the blog www.chiesa, which preceded it.
