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Pope Francis mourned all the children killed in Ukraine on Friday and called on kyiv to make “farsighted decisions for peace” in a letter sent to the Ukrainian people nine months after the outbreak of the war.
“How many children have been killed, injured or orphaned, torn from their mothers! (…) How not to feel anguish for them and for the young and old who were deported. The pain of the Ukrainian mothers is incalculable”, says the leader of the Catholic Church in the letter published by the Vatican press office.
“The duty to govern the country in tragic times and to make far-sighted decisions for peace is rigid,” he adds. The pontiff also writes that he “cries” with all Ukrainians “for every little one who, because of the war, lost his life.” “Now they are in the bosom of God, they see his anguish and pray for it to end,” Francis observed.
The Pope, at another point in the letter, also reminds young people that “in order to defend the homeland with courage”, they had to “put their hands on weapons instead of the dreams they cultivated for the future”.
Then the Vatican head of state cited the women who lost their husbands and the elderly who were thrown into the “dark night of war.”
On Saturday, Rome’s Hagia Sophia will commemorate the Holodomor, the Stalin-ordered Great Famine that caused millions of deaths in Soviet Ukraine between 1932 and 1933.
In the general audience on Wednesday, the Pope recalled the genocide of some seven million Ukrainians, Kazakhs and North Caucasians.
After the crime was recognized by the UN in 2003 and by the European Parliament in 2008, the Ukrainian parliament defined it as genocide and decided to officially commemorate it on the fourth Saturday of November.
Source: Observadora
