Answering a question from America's Vatican correspondent, Pope Francis indicated he has not spoken directly to President Putin since the war started.

Francis has long desired to visit Malta where, according to the Acts of the Apostles, St. Paul was shipwrecked in 60 A.D. while en route to Rome, where he had asked to be judged.

“If Putin says something on Tuesday, the Russian Patriarch has to say the same thing on Wednesday but just putting the word ‘God’ into the sentence,” David Nazar, S.J., said in an exclusive interview with Gerard O’Connell.

On Day 32 of the war in Ukraine, Pope Francis made another passionate appeal to political leaders “to understand that every day of war makes worse the situation for everyone.”

The pope recorded the messages in the spur-of-the-moment when he received the new bishop of Hong Kong, Bishop Stephen Chow Sau Yan, S.J., in a private audience at the papal library in the Vatican’s apostolic palace.

Some commentators have called this  “revolutionary,” but others say it has deep roots in church tradition.