I perfectly remember the place and the time I was when I found out that Jorge bergoglio he had been announced as the new Pope. I called Alicia Oliveira, his great friend, and she was crying inconsolably, not with emotion like all Argentines, but with sadness because she wasn’t going to see him anymore.
If there is something that moves me about Pope Bergoglio, as the Vaticanologists call him, it is his Pastoral Geopolitics. It is a great motivator for the opposing parties to sit at a table. It is not a small thing. He did it with Cuba and the United States. He did it in Colombia where he later won the NO in that referendum for Peace, he put that country on his shoulder, joined Álvaro Uribe and the then president José Manuel Santos in the Vatican and crowned it with his trip to that country on September 6 2017. Is conducting peace negotiations between Armenia and Azerbaijan; Armenia and Turkey, the two Koreas, Israel and Palestine, with Iran and the G5 for nuclear disarmament, Russia Ukraine. There are times when his trades give results and other times they don’t. But he does not cease in his commitment.
His first tool was the power of prayer, when the President Barack Obama announced an invasion of Syria, Francis called for a world day of prayer to prevent it. The day was so overwhelming that President Obama at the G20 summit in St. Petersburg was forced to decline action.
They say in Rome that the Popes define their Pontificate in the first exit from the Vatican, inside Italy and outside of it. Francis traveled to the Island of Lampedusa, the last enclave of Italy, near Africa, to coherently dress his discourse on the need for the Church to come out of its self-absorption and seek the existential peripheries of the world. Thousands and thousands of Iraqis, Libyans and Syrians whoThey survive on boats fleeing the disintegration that the West began and the Islamic State followed. “Who is responsible for the Blood of these brothers?” None, we answer, I have nothing to do with it, we are a society that has forgotten the experience of crying ”,“ They are here, because before we were there ”, were his most conclusive expressions.
He has installed discussions and terms that bear his trademark to denounce the current ills of globalization. Thus he spoke of the “culture of indifference”. They are not migrants, she says, they are refugees fleeing wars. “Damn those who make weapons and damn those who sell them, those are the ones who make wars.”
The first trip outside of Italy was to Albania, a country where 97% of its population is Muslim. The interreligiousness that he practiced in Buenos Aires with the Institute of Interreligious Dialogue that he founded when he was a cardinal, is perhaps one of the most important and credible tools that he has. Francisco for your pastoral message. “It is not fair to identify Islam with violence,” she said, “you are our older brothers and sisters in the faith.” “We all belong to a single family, the family of God,” she warned when visiting the Synagogue in Rome.
“No people is criminal, no religion is terrorist,” he dared to say, in a subversive expression for many of the crusaders of the old continent.
He denounces financial capitalism because it generates a “throwaway culture” as “a culture of exclusion of all those who are unable to produce according to the terms that exaggerated economic liberalism has established”, and which excludes “from animals to human beings, young people without work, the elderly, the poor, the hungry”.
Faced with this, he proposes to practice the Culture of Encounter. A society where differences can coexist complementing, enriching and illuminating each other. Something can be learned from everyone, no one is useless, no living being is expendable.
He dreams of a world where Fraternity prevails, respecting our different cultures and traditions, our different citizenships. Because “either we are brothers, or we destroy each other”, brotherhood is today “the border” on which we must build peace. A peace that is not only the absence of war, because “war is not necessary to make enemies”: it is enough to do without the other, look away, as if the other did not exist. Because, “either we are brothers, or we are enemies”, that is the challenge of our century “today is the time to listen. It is the moment of sincere acceptance”
Lastly, he questions us that, in a fraternal society, every person must have the right to Land, a Roof and Decent Work.
*By Eduardo Valdesnational deputy and former Argentine ambassador to the Vatican.
by Eduardo Valdes
