A Future of Faith

The Path of Change in Politics and Society

St. Martin's Press

Contents

PEACE AND WAR

First Interview — February 2016

I have never met Pope Francis. With the translator, Father Louis de Romanet, a friend, I step inside the modest residence at Saint Martha's House,just beside Saint Peter's Basilica. We are made to wait in a small, chilly room. Silence. A certain anxiety. All of a sudden, he comes in, warmly. Immediately, there is that deep and gentle gaze. We introduce ourselves. The discussions begin. Everything gradually becomes natural and direct. Something is happening. He replies seriously, the dialogue gets going, punctuated by laughter, which is very frequent throughout the twelve conversations. Humor, connivance, unfinished phrases and natural communication beyond words, in looks and gestures. No time limit. After an hour and a half he asks to stop because he has to go and see his confessor. I tell him he needs to. We laugh. We agree on a new date. He opens the door and leaves as simply as he came in. The intense emotion of seeing that white-clad silhouette disappearing. Obvious frailty, and the huge power of symbols. We talked about serious matters, peace and war, the place of the Church in globalization and history.

POPE FRANCIS: You go first.

DOMINIQUE WOLTON: In January 2016 in Lesbos you said something strange and beautiful: "We are all migrants, and we are all refugees." At a time when the European and Western powers are closing their doors, what can we say, apart from this magnificent phrase? What can we do?

POPE FRANCIS: There is something I said — and migrant children wore it on their T-shirts: "I'm not a danger, I am in danger." Our theology is a theology of migrants. Because we all are, since the call to Abraham, with all the migrations of the people of Israel, and Jesus himself was a refugee, an immigrant, and existentially, by virtue of our faith, we are migrants. Human dignity necessarily implies "being on one's way." When a man or a woman is not on their way, they are a mummy, they are a museum piece. The individual is not alive.

It isn't just a matter of "being" on the way, but of "making" one's way. You make your way. There is a Spanish poem that says: "you make your path by walking." And to walk is to communicate with others; when you walk, you meet people. Walking is perhaps at the root of the culture of meeting: people meet, they communicate, whether well, through friendship, or badly, through war, which is one extreme. Great friendship, and war too, are forms of communication, a communication of aggression of which mankind is capable. When I say man, I mean man and woman. When human individuals decide to stop walking, they fail. They fail in their human vocation. Walking, always being on the way, means always communicating. You may be on the wrong path, you may fall — as in the story of the thread of Ariadne, like Ariadne and Theseus, you may find yourself in a maze — but you walk, you walk, perhaps in the wrong direction, but you walk, you communicate. We have trouble communicating, but we communicate nonetheless. I say that because people who are "on their way" must not be rejected, because that would amount to a rejection of communication.

DOMINIQUE WOLTON: But migrants are being rejected and driven out of Europe?

POPE FRANCIS: If Europeans want to keep themselves to themselves, they'll have to have children! I think the French government launched actual plans, laws to give assistance to large families, but other countries didn't: they prefer the idea of not having children. For different reasons, using different methods.

DOMINIQUE WOLTON: In the spring of 2016, Europe signed a crazy agreement to close the border between Europe and Turkey.

POPE FRANCIS: That's why I keep coming back to the walking man. Man is fundamentally a communicating creature. A person who is mute, in the sense that he doesn't know how to communicate, is a person who cannot "walk," who cannot "travel ..."

DOMINIQUE WOLTON: A year and a half after those words that you said in Lesbos, the situation has got worse. A lot of people admired what you said, but afterward there was no follow-up. What would you say a year later?

POPE FRANCIS: The problem begins in the countries that the refugees come from. Why do they leave their home? Because of a lack of work, or because of war. Those are the two main reasons. Lack of work, because they have been exploited — I'm thinking of the Africans. Europe has exploited Africa ... I don't know if one can say that! But some examples of European colonization ... yes, they exploited Africa. I read that, with his first act of parliament, one African head of state proposed a law of reforestation for his country — and it was passed. The global economic powers had cut down all the trees. Reforestation. The land is dry from having been over-exploited, and there is no work. The first thing that needs to be done — and I said this when I spoke to the United Nations, to the Council of Europe, everywhere — is to find the sources of new jobs, and invest in them. It's also true that Europe needs to invest at home. Because there's an unemployment problem here too. The other reason for migration is war. If you invest, people will find jobs and won't need to leave, but if there is war, they will have to flee anyway. And who's making war? Who's giving them weapons? We are.

DOMINIQUE WOLTON: Not least the French ...

POPE FRANCIS: Really? Other nations too; I know they're involved with arms dealing on a bigger or smaller scale, with all those things. We supply them with weapons so that they destroy themselves. People complain that migrants are coming to destroy us. But we're the ones who are sending them the weapons! Look at the Middle East. It's the same thing. Who's supplying the weapons? To Daesh, to those who support Assad in Syria, to the anti-Assad rebels? Who's supplying the weapons? When I say "we," I mean the West. I'm not accusing any country in particular. The West — and some non-Western countries also sell weapons. We're the ones who supply the weapons. We cause chaos, people flee, and what do we do? We say: "Come on, sort yourselves out!" I don't want to express myself too harshly, but we have no right not to help the people who arrive here. They are human beings. A politician said to me, "The one thing that overrules all agreements is human rights." And there you have a European leader with a clear vision of the problem.

DOMINIQUE WOLTON: This attitude of rejection can also encourage hatred, because today, with the globalization of the image, the internet, television, the whole world can see that Europeans are betraying human rights and rejecting immigrants, closing themselves selfishly away, while we have been indebted to migrants for fifty years, economically, obviously, but also socially and culturally. Europe is going to be struck by a boomerang effect. Europeans say they are the most democratic, but they are betraying their humanist and democratic values! The globalization of information will rebound on itself ... and yet Europeans can't see that. Out of selfishness. Out of stupidity.

POPE FRANCIS: Europe is the cradle of humanism.

DOMINIQUE WOLTON: To come back to politics ...

POPE FRANCIS: Every individual, every institution, throughout the whole world, already has a politics. On the subject of politics with a capital P, the great Pope Pius XI [1922–39], said that it is one of the highest forms of charity. Working toward a "good" politics means helping a country to advance, helping its culture to advance: that's politics. And it's a job. On my way back from Mexico in mid-February 2016, I learned from journalists that Donald Trump, before being elected president, said that I was a politician before declaring that, once he was elected, he would build thousands of kilometers of walls ... I thanked him for calling me a politician, because Aristotle defines the human being as a political animal, and it's an honor for me. So at least I'm a person! As to walls ...

The instrument of politics is closeness, it is about confronting problems, understanding them. There's another thing that we've forgotten how to do: persuasion. That may be the subtlest, the most refined political method. I listen to the other person's arguments, I analyze them and present him with mine ... The other person tries to convince me, I try to persuade him, and, in that way, we walk together. Perhaps we don't arrive at a Hegelian-style or idealistic synthesis — thank God, because you can't do that, you mustn't do that, because it always destroys something.

DOMINIQUE WOLTON: The definition you give of politics — convincing people, arguing and above all negotiating — corresponds perfectly with the definition of communication that I defend, which stresses the importance of negotiation even in a situation of uncommunication!4 Communication is a concept inseparable from democracy, because it presupposes the freedom and equality of both partners. Communicating sometimes means sharing, but most often it means negotiating and living together ...

POPE FRANCIS: Engaging in politics means accepting that there is a tension which we are unable to resolve. And yet to resolve something through synthesis is to destroy one party in favor of the other. There can only be a resolution upward, to a higher level, where both parties give the best of themselves, in a result which is not a synthesis but a common journey, a "walking together." Let's take globalization, for example. It's an abstract word. Let's compare the idea to something concrete: one might see globalization, which is a political phenomenon, in the form of a "bubble," each point of which is equidistant from the center. All the points are identical, and what prevails is uniformity: it is quite plain that this kind of globalization destroys diversity.

But we can also conceive of it as a polyhedron in which all the points are united, but in which each point, whether it is a people or an individual, preserves its own identity. Engaging in politics is seeking that tension between unity and people's own identities.

Let's move on to the field of religion. When I was a child, they used to say that all Protestants went to hell — all of them, absolutely all of them. (laughter) Ah, yes, it was a mortal sin. There was even a priest who used to burn the tents of the evangelical missionaries in Argentina. Here, I'm talking about the years 1940 to 1942. I was four or five, I was walking in the street with my grandmother and, on the other side of the pavement, there were two women from the Salvation Army, with their hats with the insignia. I asked, "Tell me, Grandma, who are those ladies? Are they nuns?" and she replied, "No, they're Protestants. But they're good people." So, the first time I heard an ecumenical speech, it came from an elderly person. My grandmother was opening up the doors of ecumenical diversity to me. We must transmit that experience to everyone. In the education of children, of young people ... each one has their own identity ... concerning interreligious dialogue; it must exist, but one cannot establish a sincere dialogue between religions if one does not take one's own identity as a starting point! I have my identity, and I speak with mine. We come closer to one another, we find points in common, things we don't agree on, but on those points in common we forge ahead for the good of all, we do charitable works, we perform educational actions, together, lots of things. What my grandmother did with the child that I was at the age of five was a political act. She taught me to open the door.

In tense situations, then, we must not seek synthesis, because synthesis can destroy everything; we must tend toward the polyhedron, toward the unity that preserves all diversities, all identities. The master in this field — because I don't want to commit an act of plagiarism — is Roman Guardini. In my view Guardini is the man who understood everything, and he explains it particularly well in his book Der Gegensatz — I don't know the English title, but in Italian it's La Contrapposizione. That first book that he wrote on metaphysics, in 1925, is his masterpiece in my view. In it, he explains what we might call the "philosophy of politics," but at the root of all politics lie persuasion and closeness. The Church must therefore open its doors. When the Church adopts an attitude that is not just, it proselytizes, and proselytism, I don't know if I can say this, isn't very Catholic! (laughter)

DOMINIQUE WOLTON: You acknowledge that for a long time the Church defended a more than inegalitarian concept of dialogue. What is the relationship between proselytism and interreligious dialogue?

POPE FRANCIS: Proselytism destroys unity. And that's why interreligious dialogue does not mean making everyone agree, it means walking together, each with his or her own identity. It's like when you set off on a mission, when nuns or priests go into the world to bear witness. The politics of the Church is its own witness. Going out of oneself. Bearing witness. Let me come back to Guardini for a moment. There is also a very short book on Europe by one of the thinkers who inspired him, Przywara, who also works on these very questions. But the master of oppositions, of bipolar tensions, as we might call them, is Guardini, who teaches us this path of unity in diversity. What's happening today with fundamentalists? Fundamentalists lock themselves up in their own identity and don't want to hear anything else. There is also a fundamentalism concealed within global politics. Because ideologies are not capable of engaging in politics. They help us think — besides, we need to know ideologies — but they are not capable of engaging in politics. We saw a lot of those in the last century, ideologies that have given rise to political systems. And they don't work.

So, what must the Church do? Agree with one or with the other? That would be the temptation, it would send out the image of an imperialist Church, which is not the Church of Jesus Christ, which is not the Church of service.

Let me give you an example for which I can't claim any merit, which is down to two great men that I'm very fond of: Shimon Peres and Mahmoud Abbas. Those two men were friends, and they spoke to each other on the phone. When I went there, they wanted to make some kind of gesture, but they couldn't find the place to do it, because Abbas couldn't go to Jerusalem, to the nunciature. Peres said, "I'd happily go to the Palestinian territory, but the government won't let me go there without a significant escort, and that would look like an act of aggression." So both asked if they could meet here. I thought I couldn't organize the interview on my own with both of them, so I called Bartholomew I, the Orthodox Patriarch of Constantinople. So, four different religions came together, different, but all doing the same thing, because they all wanted peace and unity. Each one planted a seed of his own but a tree remained. We planted it together. The other thing that remained was the memory of a friendship, an accolade among brothers. The Church must serve politics by building bridges: that is its diplomatic role. "The work of Nuncios is to build bridges."

Here's something that is at the heart of our faith. God the Father sent His son, and He is the bridge. "Pontifex": the word sums up God's attitude toward humanity, and that must be the political attitude of the Church and of Christians. Let us build bridges. Let us work. Let us not find ourselves saying "But who are you?" Let us do everything together and then let's talk to each other. That's how things will get better. For example, I felt obliged to go to Caserta and ask forgiveness from the charismatics, from the Pentecostalists. Then I felt the need, when I was in Turin, to go to the Waldensian Church — we did some terrible things to the Waldensians, we even killed them — to ask forgiveness. Sometimes bridges are established when you ask forgiveness. Or when you go to other people's houses. You have to build bridges in the image of Jesus Christ, our model, who is sent by the Father to be the "pontifex," the one who establishes the bridges. In my view, that is the foundation of the political action of the Church. When the Church becomes involved in "low" politics, it is no longer engaging in politics.

DOMINIQUE WOLTON: Everyone says, "The Church doesn't get involved in politics." But the Church intervenes, with you, as it did with John Paul II, and Benedict XVI before that, about everything: migrants, wars, borders, climate, nuclear, terrorism, corruption, ecology ... Isn't that politics? To what extent is the Church involved in politics and at what point does it turn into something else?

POPE FRANCIS: The French bishops wrote a pastoral letter in autumn 2016, following on from a letter that they wrote fifteen years ago, Rediscovering the meaning of politics. There's big politics and there's little party politics. The Church mustn't get involved in party politics. Paul VI and Pius XI said that politics, big politics, is one of the highest forms of charity. Why? Because it is oriented toward the common good of all.