by Father Raymond J. de Souza.

The feast of the "Apostles of the Slavs" - Saints Cyril and Methodius" - is observed liturgically on 14th February and not at all culturally, as schoolchildren draw valentines instead and their fathers buy flowers. No harm done.

If the feast of the holy brothers had an octave, this year's would be remembered as bringing much harm to the Slavic lands. As the world rubbed its eyes in disbelief, the president of the United States offered his thoughts, analysis, and proposals regarding Russia's war on Ukraine, the third anniversary of which falls on Monday.

In 2022, Catholics in Ukraine prayed that President Vladimir Putin of Russia might have a change of heart. This year they beseech God for the same regarding President Donald Trump. The two presidents see the world in similar ways, in which great powers dominate their "near abroad." St. John Paul the Great, a proud Slav himself, had a different view, which he laid out in some detail in the 1980s. The contrasting views are apparent before the Christian world now.

In 2014, when Putin invaded Ukraine and annexed Crimea, U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry was distressed, muttering that it was a "19th-century act in the 21st-century." He must have been totally flummoxed when Putin then gave his Crimea address to the Russian Duma, and went back not to the 19th century, but nine hundred years earlier, to the Crimea where "Prince Vladimir was baptized", noting that "his spiritual feat of adopting Orthodoxy predetermined the overall basis of the culture, civilization, and human values that unite the peoples of Russia, Ukraine, and Belarus."

"We are one people," Putin continued. "Kyiv is the mother of Russian cities. Ancient Rus is our common source and we cannot live without each other."

In the name of these spiritual and fraternal bonds, Putin has invaded and killed his brother Slavs. He has done this with the blessing of Kirill, the Russian Orthodox Patriarch of Moscow, who understands himself to be the spiritual father of the Ukrainians being killed by the Russian armed forces. For that reason, the "father and head" of the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church, Patriarch Sviatoslav Shevchuk of Kyiv - on a visit to the United States and Canada in these days - has referred to the war as "sacrilegious."

It is unlikely that President Trump has views on the 10th-century baptism of the Slavic peoples, but he certainly has ideas about the 19th-century. Unlike Kerry, who lamented 19th-century thinking, Trump welcomes it.

In his second inaugural address, Trump declared that the "United States will once again consider itself a growing nation - one that. . .expands our territory." It was a return to the Monroe Doctrine and "manifest destiny," words Trump deployed to rather extravagant effect, speaking of setting out for Mars. Trump did not speak of the American founding but did mention two presidents, William McKinley (1897-1901) and Theodore Roosevelt (1901-1909). Trump frequently praises that era - "tariff is the most beautiful word in the dictionary."

The Monroe Doctrine, announced in the State of the Union address in 1823, instructed the European powers to consider the American continent, north and south, as the sphere of the United States. Their colonial days were over in America's backyard. In his 1904 State of the Union address, Theodore Roosevelt noted that in certain situations "adherence to the Monroe Doctrine may force the United States. . .to the exercise of an international police power."

America reserved to itself the right to intervene in its own backyard and to acquire new territory, as it did in the McKinley-Roosevelt years. And if there are to be colonies in this hemisphere - Greenland, Panama, Guantanamo - then the United States should have them.

It is easy to imagine that he would be sympathetic to how Putin thinks about Russia's "near abroad." That term, the English translation of blizhneye zarubezhye, came to prominence after the dissolution of ...