John L. Allen Jr.
Pope Francis meets Russian President Vladimir Putin during a private audience at the Vatican in this 2019 file photo. Photo: CNS/Paul Haring Yesterday Crux carried two stories which, at first blush, appear unrelated. The first concerned the latest Ukrainian backlash against Pope Francis’s praise of “Great Mother Russia,” while the second covered the discovery of a previously unnoticed bit of anti-fascist graffiti from the WWII years in the Vatican’s Secretariat of State. Yet pushing beyond the headlines, the two stories do actually…
