‘His words have survived him, but it is so convenient to bury them as we have buried his body. Yet it cannot be said that Pope Francis didn’t warn us…’
THE more I read the book Let Us Dream, the more I am mesmerized – and left in awe by its author, who, by the way, is the late Pope Francis.
I’m halfway through the book, but already I’ve used my highlighter so many times. The first half is filled with passages that are so relevant to our times, yet for sure have been read by so few, even among the clergy, I will bet. Who, for example, is aware that Pope Francis wasn’t too approving of the tearing down of statues – maybe referring to the toppling of Civil War monuments in the southern US? (See pages 28-29 of the book).
Indeed, many of the passages are warnings about the cancel culture, an “overly woke” attitude results in, bred in what he described as a public arena, “increasingly dominated by the beleaguered self-anxious, controlling, quick to take offense, self-justifying” (p. 76). “How do we act in contexts of tribal division when our politics, our society, our media seem at times to be one long shouting match, in which opponents seek to ‘cancel’ each other in a game of power?” he asked.
The rest of the paragraph is powerful: “The growing verbal violence reflects a fragility of selfhood, a loss of roots, in which security is found in discrediting others through narratives that let us feel righteous and give us reason for silencing others. The absence of sincere dialogue in our public culture makes it ever harder to generate a shared horizon toward which we can all move forward.”
And he warned of the “temptation of a simplistic reductionism that sees only good or evil, or the righteous and sinners.” In this type of mindset, it’s always the “other guy” who is the sinner or doing evil.
“To dream of a different future we need to choose fraternity over individualism as our organizing principle,” Pope Francis continued. “Fraternity, the sense of belonging to each other and the whole of humanity, is the capacity to come together and work together against a shared horizon of possibility” (p.68).
Wherever you look – into your local community, into the greater Philippine society, or news reports about other countries – it seems the world is more and more descending into that “shouting match” that Pope Francis described. And yes, worse is that tendency to “cancel” those of a different worldview. It is a tendency we all are prone to when (as I mentioned in a previous piece in this space) we are confronted with a person or an issue toward which we have a very gut reaction. For me, Donald Trump and all that he stands for is what can trigger me most; for others, it can be LGBTQ rights; yet for others, it could be mining!
Confronted by these individuals or issues, we become deaf to the necessity of coming together with those who see things differently in the hope of – no, for the purpose of! – seeking workable solutions to a shared future. The Jesuit in Pope Francis described this effort as “a unity that allows people to serve as a body despite differences of viewpoint, physical separation and human ego. Such a union preserves and respects plurality, inviting all to contribute from their distinctiveness, as a community of brothers and sisters concerned for each other.”’
On page 78 of his book, the Pope wrote: “We need the humility to dispense
with what we see as wrong, and the courage to take on board points of view other than our own that contain elements of truth.” A paragraph above, he had this to say: “Faced with huge challenges that must be tackled on many fronts at the same time, we need to practice the art of civic dialogue that synthesizes different views on a higher plane.”
His words have survived him, but it is so convenient to bury them as we have buried his body. Yet it cannot be said that Pope Francis didn’t warn us, because he did. In fact, he gave us very clear suggestions on what we need to do to craft that better future as a union of diverse individuals respectful and welcoming of each other’s contributions.
The question now is: will we pay heed?
