Roberto de Mattei, historian and former vice president of the National Research Council, directs the Fondazione Lepanto, the monthly Radici Cristiane, and the press agency CorrispondenzaRomana.
After recalling that no one can sing victory over a pile of rubble, Pope Francis reiterated that war destroys both winners and losers. These are the positions of the realist school of international relations: war may be legitimate, but it is “a form of moral failure,” as for example George Kennan wrote.
“The pope has never been a Tolstoyan pacifist. Over Leo Tolstoy he has always preferred Fyodor Dostoevsky, an author who shows the tragic aspect of reality. My impression, however, is that the war has definitively dissolved the utopia of human brotherhood set out in the encyclical Fratellli tutti.”
Do you see a change of perspective?
“War is like death. It is an indelible part of man’s destiny. The idea of a universal brotherhood is absent from the Gospel and is not a Christian value.”
But Christ asked us to love one another.