VATICAN CITY (CNS) — Pope Francis sharply criticized the global “hypocrisy” of nations advocating for peace while profiting from war, calling for renewed efforts toward dialogue and reconciliation.
“In the case of Ukraine there is a great hypocrisy,” he said in an interview with Orbe 21, the TV channel of the Archdiocese of Buenos Aires, Argentina. Both Russia and Ukraine are sending many men to the front lines, “but when one begins to talk of peace, they dance (around it) with secondary things.”
“There is a fundamental hypocrisy; we talk of peace, but we arm wars,” he said in the interview released Dec. 20, noting that in Europe weapons manufacturing has become the industry “with the best return on investment.”
Leaders attend “peace conferences and meetings on peace, and we keep manufacturing arms to kill,” the pope said.
The pope highlighted the wars in Ukraine and the Holy Land as examples of conflicts marked by atrocities. “In both, there are criminal war actions,” he said, underscoring their toll on civilians, including women and children.
Dialogue, he added, is the only avenue toward peace. “If there is not dialogue there is no peace.”
That principle applies to nation-states as well as to the Catholic Church, he said.
Pope Francis said that the church’s synodal process attempts to resolve problems “always in the line of dialogue.”
Gathering members of the church to reflect together on its issues “helps a lot because it is no longer a top-down church: bishops, the pope, priests, nuns, but the church from below that expresses itself and creates community,” he said.
The pope also turned his attention to the challenges and opportunities presented by artificial intelligence, warning against its potential to deepen inequalities and erode human dignity.
“Artificial intelligence is a challenge. Either we control it, or it overwhelms us,” he said, warning of its potential to “dehumanize” society.
Pope Francis linked this challenge to the broader issue of education, criticizing economic policies that undermine education.
Budget cuts to education are the “planned suicide of a country,” he said, calling cuts to education “criminal.”
Days before inaugurating the Holy Year 2025, Pope Francis said that “the Jubilee, to live it well, needs to come from inside and must in some way fix our personal histories.”
“In that sense, it is a moment of forgiveness, a moment of joy, a moment of rearranging so many personal and social matters,” he said.
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