Entire passages about the war against Ukraine have been removed from the Russian edition of the late Pope Francis’s autobiography, Hope.

The Belarusian human rights activist Natallia Vasilevich wrote about this, according to the resource Christians Against the War.

Both the print and electronic versions of the book were censored. Almost an entire chapter about Ukraine was removed.

In it, Francis directly describes the events of February 24, 2022 as the invasion by Russian troops, speaks about Ukrainian children deported to Russia, and about the “monstrous cruelty” in Bucha, Mariupol, Kharkiv, Izium and Kyiv. The Pope also calls the Holodomor a “genocide by starvation” and writes that imperial interests cannot be placed above the lives of hundreds of thousands of people.

Francis also recounts his visit to the Russian Embassy the day after the invasion. According to him, he asked for the bombing to stop, offered Vatican mediation and was ready to travel to Moscow, but Lavrov replied that the time was not right.

As LF reported, the Russian Orthodox Church is coordinating with the FSB the persecution of anti-war clergy. Evidence of this was published by religious studies scholar and former editor of the Journal of the Moscow Patriarchate Sergei Chapnin in his book Religious Communities Under Pressure: Documenting Religious Persecution in Russia in 2022–2026.

According to Regina Elsner, a researcher of Eastern Christianity and ecumenism and a Doctor of Theology at the University of Münster, the Russian Orthodox Church has become one of the key institutions of mobilization and propaganda.

We previously reported that Pope Leo XIV and Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew I condemned attempts to use religion to justify violence.