Pope Francis made a direct reference to the war in Ukraine in his Easter Sunday speech, in what he called a “War Passover”, but avoided mentioning Russia and Vladimir Putin.

Instead, he referred to the war in the passive tense, saying, “Peace reign for war-torn Ukraine, so hard-hit by the violence and destruction of the cruel and senseless war in which she was trained.

“Let there be a decision for peace. May there be an end to flexing muscles while people suffer. Please, please, let’s not get used to war,” Francis pleaded during his speech in St. Peter’s Square, to the applause of thousands, some waving Ukrainian flags. .

The pope has been criticized for avoiding directly saying that Russia invaded Ukraine and blaming the Russian president for the attack.

Francis spoke of the millions of refugees who have fled Ukraine since Russia invaded on February 24. He spoke of internally displaced people, elderly people left to fend for themselves and, without explicitly naming an author, “lives shattered and cities razed to the ground”. .”

The pope previously called the invasion “sacrilege” and blamed it on “a potentate, sadly caught up in anachronistic claims of nationalist interests, [who] provokes and foments conflict, while ordinary people feel the need to build a shared future or not at all.

On Sunday, the Pope also called for peace between Palestinians and Israelis, as well as in other countries around the world, including Yemen, a country he described as suffering from “a conflict forgotten by all”, and to “healing the wounds” of abuse of Indigenous peoples in Canada.

However, during Sunday’s speech, the spotlight was on the crisis in Ukraine, with the head of the Catholic Church raising concerns about nuclear war.

“May [the leaders of nations] listen to this disturbing question posed by scientists almost 70 years ago: “Are we going to end the human race, or should humanity give up war?” he said, quoting a statement of scientists from 1955, dubbed the Russell-Einstein Manifesto.

The war in Ukraine played into what was – and was not – said throughout the Easter celebrations.

Earlier this week, Ukrainians protested against a Pope-led Good Friday procession in which a Ukrainian and a Russian woman carried a cross together. The two women, a Ukrainian nurse and a Russian nursing student, are friends, and the idea was to highlight the need for people to come together to end conflict. However, the gesture was condemned by Ukrainian religious authorities as “inappropriate and ambiguous”.

Eventually, as the procession unfolded, the meditation the two women had written was cut short considerably.