Popes may make claims to infallibility but they certainly make mistakes, and Pope Francis is likely to get a dressing down in heaven from his predecessor-but-one, John Paul II, for what he has now said about Russian imperial greatness.
What Kyiv least needs at the moment is a blundering intervention by a well-meaning Argentinian who speaks with the supreme authority of the Holy See
John Paul was born and baptised in Poland before the second world war and rose to become Archbishop of Kraków before being elected to the Papacy. He had spent decades under communist rule and experienced the brutal ways of Soviet imperialism. He knew his Russian history. He would never have ad-libbed, as Pope Francis did to a group of young Russians, a paean to the wondrous achievements of Peter and Catherine the Great without at the very least adding some reservations.
Tsar Peter and Tsarina Catherine hugely expanded the Russian Empire.
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