Exactly 100 years ago this Friday, August 1, Germany declared war on Russia to mark the start of the cataclysmic First World War (1914-1918), fittingly dubbed the "suicide of Europe" by then-Pope Benedict XV.
As it was then in the Balkans, so it is now in Ukraine: it is the relationship between Germany and Russia that holds the peace of Europe at stake.
If and when the East German-trained KGB agent Vladimir Putin, God forbid, does invade eastern Ukraine, it will only be because of a dramatic personal falling out he would have suffered with German Chancellor Angela Merkel, the Russian-speaking East German expert on the Soviet Union. The two have been likened to a married couple who have grown accustomed to each other's tricks and traps: should they actually divorce, the consequences would be catastrophic.
How fitting it is that Pope St. John Paul II, though he lies at rest in Rome, has his relics scattered throughout his native Poland, at the crossroads of the historic German and Russian empires: this battle to somehow reconcile East and West in Ukraine is truly his.
At the heart of the whole Russo-Ukrainian conflict is the ancient split between the Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox Churches: the millennial (1054 AD) division that he said was his greatest suffering as he neared the end of his life. (He had actually visited Catholic shrines in western Ukraine when it was part of interwar Poland.)
Pope St. John Paul II, pray for Ukraine, Russia, and Germany!
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