Queried about the Holy See’s less-than-vigorous response to Russian aggression in Ukraine, senior Vatican officials are given to saying (often with a dismissive tone, as if the question came from a dim-wit), “We take the long view.”

On the diplomatic side, that “long view” seems to be a reprise of the Ostpolitik of Agostino Casaroli, who was Paul VI’s chief diplomatic agent behind the iron curtain. As a warrant for current policy, Italian curialists continue to insist that the accommodating approach of Casaroli’s Ostpolitik made John Paul II’s role in the collapse of communism possible. (I thought I had demolished that claim, using documentation from communist secret police agencies in central and eastern Europe, in the second volume of my John Paul II biography, The End and the Beginning—which is available in an excellent Italian translation—but evidently some people were unpersuaded.)

As for the ecumenical part of the equation, the Holy See seems to accord highest priority to avoiding anything that might give offense to the Russian Orthodox Church, which it perceives to be one key to advancing a broader agenda of ecclesial reconciliation between Christian West and Christian East. On this theory, dominant in the Pontifical Council for Promoting Christian Unity for decades, keeping the peace between Rome and the Russian Orthodox patriarchate of Moscow now will make good things happen later.

But “later” never comes.

Read the article “Is Pope Francis Dangerously Squishy on Putin?” on eppc.org.