Pope Francis.
By Roland Ashby
Since Pope Francis’s death on Easter Monday, much has been said about the strengths and weaknesses of his papacy. But what stands out for me is his moral leadership on the two most pressing and related issues facing humanity – war, and a reckless, unfettered capitalism, with its indifference to the suffering of others and the future of humanity and the planet, what he calls “Our common home”.
Pope Francis’s autobiography, Hope,[1] is a wonderful testament to his passionate engagement in confronting the evils of violence, hate and greed, which now seem to be in danger of engulfing the world.
The COVID Pandemic was a wake-up call which we ignore at our peril.
Pope Francis writes:
The pandemic has highlighted the errors, the imbalances, the arrogance of our global economic system. An economy that kills, that excludes, that starves, that concentrates enormous wealth in a few to the detriment of many, that multiplies poverty and grinds down salaries, that pollutes, that produces war, is not an economy: It is just an emptiness, an absence, a sickness. It is a perversion of economics itself and its vocation. In the words of the Spanish proverb, ‘If you breed ravens, they will rip out your eyes’. We have polluted and plundered, putting our own lives at risk …
He continues:
There aren’t two separate crises – one environmental and the other social – but one single and complex socio-environmental crisis that is destined to result more easily in health disasters. To restore dignity to those excluded from society, to fight poverty and exploitation, to care for the environment, and to protect our own lives are needs that certainly cannot be separated, nor even less can they be regarded as conflicting. On the contrary, they just guide us toward one single integrated approach, which must now be considered unavoidable.
The global catastrophes of Covid and of climate change are screaming out to us that we can wait no longer: The moment is now. The pandemic … should have taught us that we have the means to tackle the challenge and that we will be more resilient if we all do it together.[2]
A great evil underlying our social and environmental crises, he says, is indifference. “It is commonly said that the opposite of love is hate, and this is true, but in many people there is no conscious hate. The more everyday opposite of God’s love, God’s compassion, God’s mercy, is indifference.”[3]
Of the desire for revenge, and the savagery, barbarity, suffering and slaughter of the innocent it has unleashed in the Holy Land and Ukraine, he cries out “Enough!”:
No salvation can be built on words and actions of revenge: life can be built only on words and actions of justice that avoid humiliating the adversary … I have met the families of Israeli hostages and the relatives of victims of Gaza, and have seen the same desire for peace, for tranquillity, for justice …
I have met the fathers of two adolescent girls, an Israeli and a Palestinian who had lost their daughters because of the war, one a girl of fifteen, the victim of a bomb attack, the other of ten, killed by a soldier outside her school, and I saw an identical grief and the same resolve: to bury hatred in search of another path so that their grief would not be in vain. These two men, these two fathers who had experienced the same crucifixion, have become friends, bearing witness that another world is possible – indeed, the only world possible.[4]
His dream for the Church, he writes, is that it is:
more and more of a mother and shepherdess, in which its ministers know how to be merciful, how to take care of others, how to look after them like the Good Samaritan … This is the Gospel. A Church that reflects in this way is anxious to make clear to women and men what is the centre and fundamental core of the Gospel, namely ‘The beauty of the saving love of God made manifest in Jesus Christ who died and rose from the dead’ (Evangelii Gaudium n.36).[5]
Hope will be born in the world he says, “When the Gospel truly exists”, because then “there is always revolution. A revolution in tenderness.”
Tenderness means nothing other than this: It means love that becomes close and concrete. It means using your eyes to see the other, using your ears to hear the other, to hear the cry of the young, of the poor, of those who fear the future; to listen also to the silent cry of our common home, of the sick and contaminated earth. And after seeing, after listening, there is no saying. There is doing.[6]
“Tenderness is not weakness. It is true force.
“It is the road that the strongest and bravest men and women have taken. Let us take it … May you take it … I am just one step.” [7]