US Secretary of State Marco Rubio said on Saturday that the Vatican could be a place for the peace talks in Russia-Ukraine, taking the long-standing offer from the Holy See after Pope Leo swores to personally make “all efforts” to help end the war.
Addressing journalists in Rome before meeting Cardinal Matteo Zuppi, the Vatican Point Man on Ukraine, Rubio said that he would discuss the potential means of the means that the Vatican could help, “the status of talks, updates after yesterday (Friday) and the way to follow.”
When asked if the Vatican could be a peace broker, Rubio replied: “I would not call him the broker, but that’s certainly – I think it’s a place where both sides would be comfortable.”
“So we are going to talk about all this and obviously always grateful to the Vatican for his desire to play this constructive and positive role,” he told the United States Embassy in Rome.
The Vatican has a tradition of diplomatic neutrality and has long offered its services to try to help facilitate talks, but found itself sidelined during the total war, which began on February 24, 2022.
Pope Francis, who has often angry the two sides of his comments, had told Zuppi a mandate to try to find paths of peace. But the mandate seemed to shrink to help facilitate the return of the Ukrainian children taken by Russia, and the Holy See was also able to mediate certain exchanges of prisoners.
Leo, who was elected first American pope in history on May 8, took the appeal of François to peace in Ukraine during his first blessing on Sunday noon as a pope. He called on all parties to do everything possible to achieve “authentic, fair and lasting peace”.
Leo, who as a bishop in Peru qualified the war of Russia a “imperialist invasion”, has sworn this week to “do everything possible so that this peace can prevail”.
In a discourse to the Catholics of the Eastern Rite, in particular the Greek Catholic Church of Ukraine, Leo begged teams at war to meet and negotiate.
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“The Holy See is always ready to help collect enemies, face to face, to talk to each other, so that peoples everywhere can find hope again and recover the dignity they deserve, the dignity of peace,” he said.
The Secretary of State of the Vatican, Cardinal Pietro Parolin, repeated the Vatican’s offer to serve as a place of direct talks, saying that the failure of negotiations in Istanbul to reach a cease-fire this week was “tragic”.
“We had hoped that it could start a slow but positive process towards a peaceful solution to the conflict,” said Parolin on the sidelines of a conference. “But instead, we are back at first.”
Concretely asked what such an offer would imply, Parolin said that the Vatican could serve as a place for a direct meeting between the two parties.
“We would aim to get to this, at least they talk. We will see what is going on. This is an offer from a place,” he said.
“We have always said, repeated from both parties that we are at your disposal, with all the necessary discretion,” said Parolin.
The Vatican marked what was perhaps his greatest diplomatic achievement of the François Pontificat when he facilitated talks between the United States and Cuba in 2014 which led to the resumption of diplomatic relations.
The Holy See also often organized much less secret diplomatic initiatives, as when it brought together rival leaders of South Sudan in 2019. The meeting was made famous by the image of Francis leaning on to embrace their feet to beg them to make peace.
Perhaps the most critical diplomatic initiative of the Holy See perhaps came during the summit of the Cuban missile crisis when, in the fall of 1962, the Soviet Prime Minister Nikita Khrushchev ordered a secret deployment of nuclear missiles in Cuba who were quickly detected by American Avisions.
While the Kennedy administration considered his answer, with the threat of an imminent nuclear war, Pope John XXIII pleaded for peace in a public radio address, in a speech to the Vatican ambassadors and also wrote in private to Kennedy and Khruschev, appealing to their love of their people to stand up.
Many historians have credited the calls of John XXIII to help the two parties back from the nuclear war.
& Copy 2025 the Canadian press