Cardinal Matteo Maria Zuppi, Archbishop of Bologna and chairman of the Italian Conference of Catholic Bishops, has been Vatican envoy for peace in Ukraine. Answering a question from EIR's Claudio Celani at a June 10 public event in Italy, Zuppi stressed the importance of the phone call on June 4 between Russian President Vladimir Putin to Pope Leo XIV.
Zuppi said that that phone call is “a very important act in my opinion, because it is not only an act of courtesy, which is due in relations between states and towards an authority, therefore recognizing it by calling it. So, it is important in itself and then because it allows dialogue.”
Dialogue is still “the way that the doctrine of the Church from Benedict XV onwards has insisted on, and all the popes have insisted on this, on the futility of war, on the tragedy that is war, and so if we believe in it, and Pope Francis believed in it so much that he sought every possible avenue to reactivate or re-establish dialogue to allow for dialogue.
