While Pope Francis is pushing hard to ban nuclear weapons, a retired Vatican diplomat wants to make it clear the Pope is not calling for unilateral disarmament - which easily could be written off, he knows, as a fairly utopian and unrealistic stance.

“Pope Francis is very prudent. He doesn’t call for one side only to disarm, but he wants a verifiable and agreed upon type of disarmament. He is pushing hard for disarmament because there is too much money invested in arms,” Archbishop Silvano Tomasi said earlier this month.

This past November, the Vatican hosted a conference on nuclear disarmament including Nobel Peace Prize laureates and representatives from the United Nations. Addressing the high-level event, Francis said, “If we also take into account the risk of an accidental detonation as a result of error of any kind, the threat of their use, as well as their very possession, is to be firmly condemned.”

That was taken in some quarters as a more radical stance than earlier popes, who had signaled a sort of grudging toleration for the idea of mutually assured destruction, although other observers saw it as little more than a logical extension of previous teaching in a rapidly changing world.

Tomasi, who was a long-serving representative of the Holy See at the United Nations in Geneva, sat down for an interview with Crux during the New York Encounter, a three-day cultural festival organized by the Catholic lay movement Communion and Liberation, where he said that the Vatican is closely following the situation with North Korea.

“The crisis in the Korean peninsula is dangerous because of the threat of the use of atomic weapons,” said Tomasi. “The Holy See has signed and ratified the agreement of last July that bans atomic weapons, both their use and their possession.”
He was referring to the U.N. Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons which has received the full support of the Holy See.

“The consequences of the use of atomic weapons is so dangerous that there is no possibility of containing the damage,” Tomasi warned. “The use of these weapons by accident or by political calculation are totally unacceptable because they destroy the innocent and the guilty, [both] the military target and the civilian target, and this cannot be accepted.”

While Tomasi did not name names, he offered what seemed to be a clear critique of both U.S. President Donald Trump and North Korean dictator Kim Jong-Un’s escalation of the tensions between the two countries through their use of name-calling and derisive language.

“The way to resolve this crisis is not by screaming and by using inflammatory rhetoric, but by dialogue. Like the bishops of South Korea have done, like the government of South Korea has opted for, and we need to dialogue not just on arms, but on the needs of the population in North Korea,” Tomasi said.

He also urged caution in using severe sanctions against North Korea, saying that such policies often do far more harm than good, especially for the general population.

“If they need food, we cannot put a limit on the food import when the people are starving. We need to be reasonable and offer honest negotiation where the needs of all the population, not just the military interests, are taken into account and facilitate the integration of North Korea into the political system of the world and the international systems so that like any other country, they can participate in dialogue and receive help and give whatever resources it wants to trade to have access to the market. It is not by building walls,” Tomasi urged.

“We have to be open to relate to other people in a friendly way because of the common humanity we have, and the quality and the dignity of every person needs to be protected,” he added.