Cardinal Pietro Parolin, Vatican secretary of state, met with Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov on the sidelines of the U.N. General Assembly in New York.

Pope Francis told the Russian Orthodox hierarchy and other faith leaders Wednesday that religion must never be used to justify the “evil” of war.

When Mikhail Gorbachev, who died on Aug. 30, first met with Pope John Paul in December 1989, less than a month after the Berlin Wall’s collapse, the two leaders “understood each other immediately.”

Although Pope Francis repeatedly has spoken out on behalf of the Ukrainian people, this was not the first time Ukrainian officials have been upset with Pope Francis for what they see as equating the actions of the aggressor with the victim.

The pope told the patriarch that “we are not clerics of the state, we cannot use the language of politics, but of Jesus.”

For the first time since the start of the war in Ukraine, Pope Francis received in a private audience this morning a top-ranking member of the Russian Orthodox Church, second only to patriarch Kirill of Moscow.