Pope: love defends the common good, not power
Speaking to participants in a conference organised by the Gravissimum Educationis Foundation, Francis urged everyone to examine their conscience about their personal attitude towards the conflict in Ukraine. “Do I pray?” he asked. “Do I fast? Do I do penance? Or do I live carefree, as we normally live through distant wars?” In a message for the opening of the European Catholic Social Days, the called for an urgent review of “the style and effectiveness of the ars politica.”
Vatican City (AsiaNews) – Pope Francis met in the Clementine Hall participants in the international conference on “Educating to Democracy in a Fragmented World”, organised by the Gravissimum Educationis Pontifical Foundation and currently underway at Rome’s LUMSA University.
In his address, the pontiff spoke about the conflict in Ukraine, noting that “The war is not far away: it is at our doorstep.” Such awareness raises questions about what can be done vis-à-vis the “defeat of humanity”.
For Francis, the war especially represents a challenge to educational institutions. “We think of so many soldiers who are sent to the front, very young, Russian soldiers, poor things. Think of the many young Ukrainian soldiers; think of the inhabitants, the young people, the young girls, boys, girls... This is happening close to us. The Gospel only asks us not to look the other way, which is precisely the most pagan attitude of Christians: the Christian, when he gets used to looking the other way, slowly becomes a pagan disguised as a Christian.”
The pope noted that “in Rome, at the ‘Bambino Gesù’ Hospital, there are children wounded by the bombings.” In view of this, we urged us to ask ourselves what we are personally doing about this tragedy. “Do I pray? Do I fast? Do I do penance? Or do I live carefree, as we normally live through distant wars?”
Addressing educational institutions, he said that “totalitarianism and secularism [. . .] are degenerations of democracy.” [. . .] By exercising ideological oppression, the totalitarian State strips fundamental rights of the person and society of their value, to the point of suppressing freedom.” Even “Radical secularism, which is itself ideological, deforms the democratic spirit in a more subtle and insidious way: by eliminating the transcendent dimension, it weakens, and little by little cancels, any openness to dialogue.”
For this reason, educational institutions are called to nurture love for democracy in young people. “It is a question of helping them to understand and appreciate the value of living in a democratic system, always perfectible but capable of safeguarding citizens' participation (cf. Centesimus Annus, 46), freedom of choice, action and expression. And to go down the road of universality versus uniformity. The poison is uniformity. And that young people learn the difference and also practice it.
We must “Teach young people that the common good is formed with love. It cannot be defended by military force. A community or nation that wants to assert itself by force does so to the detriment of other communities or nations, and becomes a fomenter of injustice, inequality and violence. The path of destruction is easy to take, but it produces so much rubble; only love can save the human family. On this, we are living the ugliest example close to us.”
We must also teach young people to view authority as service because “When authority goes beyond the rights of society, of people, it becomes authoritarianism and ultimately becomes dictatorship.”
This morning Pope Francis sent a message to the archbishop of Vilnius, Mgr Gintaras Grušas, president of the Council of European Bishops' Conferences (CCEE), on the occasion of the opening of the European Catholic Social Days underway in Bratislava, Slovakia.
“The heartbreaking cry for help of our Ukrainian brothers and sisters urges us as a community of believers not only to reflect seriously, but to cry with them and to do something for them; to share the anguish of a people whose identity, history and tradition have been wounded. The blood and tears of children, the suffering of women and men who are defending their land or fleeing from bombs rattle our conscience. Once again humanity is threatened by a perverse abuse of power and partisan interests, which condemns defenseless people to suffer all forms of brutal violence.”
This tragedy makes it more “urgent to review the style and effectiveness of the ars politica.” [. . .] “War, which ‘leaves our world worse than it was before’ and is ‘a failure of politics and of humanity, a shameful capitulation … before the forces of evil’ (261), may in this sense provoke an opposite reaction, a commitment to re-establish an architecture of peace at the global level (cf. 231), in which the European house, born to guarantee peace after the world wars, has a primary role.”
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