"Euphemistic dressing up, as you try to do in your letter, does not really help."

On the way back to Kyiv from Borodyanka, a town that had been under control of Russian forces, Cardinal Konrad Krajewski prayed amid the ruins and bodies of those killed, including by an unmarked mass grave, he told Vatican News on April 15.

The new meditation read April 15 called for a moment of silence: “In the face of death, silence is more eloquent than words. Let us pause in prayerful silence and each person pray in their hearts for peace in the world.”

Pope Francis traveled to a prison near Rome to wash the feet of a dozen inmates, a Holy Thursday ritual that symbolizes humility and attention to those on society’s margins.

The head of the Ukrainian Catholic Church asked Pope Francis to scrap plans to have a Ukrainian woman and a Russian woman carry the cross together during the pope’s Way of the Cross service.

“In its effect, the Synodal Path displays more submission and obedience to the world and ideologies than to Jesus Christ as Lord and Savior,” the letter said.