“If man, with his weak, impulsive nature, is given an instrument of death, sooner or later he will use it,” the Pope said in his annual Christmas message, which traditionally precedes his Urbi et Orbi blessing in St. Peter’s Square . Sitting on a chair, he sometimes turned his head to the side to cough. He strongly condemned the arms industry: “How can we speak of peace when arms production, sales and trade are only increasing,” he asked rhetorically, mentioning not only the war between Israel and Hamas, but also the suffering in for example, Syria, Libya, Sudan, Congo and Ukraine. No citizen knows how much government money goes to the arms industry, he suspected.
The world was suffering from unpardonable madness, the Pope seemed to suggest. It was as if he were preparing for his speech at Johan Huizinga’s In the shadows of tomorrow (1935) had leafed through and read that we live in a ‘possessed world’. His speech, just like that of King Willem-Alexander, exuded a 1930s atmosphere. While the pope’s words still agreed with Huizinga, the king came up with a disguised quote from the poet Martinus Nijhoff when he remarked about society: “So close and yet often strangers to each other.” It was as if he were listening to Nijhoff’s lines from his poem Awater from 1934: “I have never seen Awater from so close […] never did he ever seem to achieve so much at once.” Despite their ‘literary’ examples, their story was, in short, that there is no longer a story of unity. You can wish for unity, but if no one believes in each other’s stories anymore, you will get nowhere.
They understood this better in the past, as is evident from the beautiful series Jesus of Nazareth to all directions in which Kefah Allush searches for the pioneers of Christianity. With his mildly mocking appearance and enormous curiosity, Allush proves to be an ideal travel guide in his stories about Saint Patrick in Ireland, Church Father Augustine in Tunisia (who before he became a believer was a “Vindicat student avant la lettre”), the brothers Cyril and Methodius in Bulgaria (who translated an alphabet for the Slavic languages and the Bible) and Bishop Henry of Uppsala (who Christianized the Finns).
They all understood that you could not simply enforce unity in faith and ideals, but that you needed and had to merge stories. The result can still be seen centuries later. “Knowing the Bible is one thing, but you also have to be able to present it,” says Irishman Tim Campbell, director of the Saint Patrick Center. He debunks many of the stories, but also tells with taste that Patrick – ‘Paddy’ to those who love the holy man – is an excellent salesman used to be. And he was a model of integration: as a British he managed to shape the Irish. According to him, ‘Paddy’ is, partly thanks to his charisma, the bond between the Irish and the Northern Irish, a kind of glue. “If something is broken, you need glue. Paddy is the glue.”
Political weapon
Less convinced of a saint as a binding agent is priest Heikki Huttunen, who explains in Helsinki (in part 4) that the Finnish Orthodox Church has separated from the Russian Orthodox Church since the war in Ukraine. The longer the war lasts, the more positions harden, including within his church. He did not envision a mediating role for the Finnish Orthodox Church. After all, the Russian Orthodox Church had ensured that the attack on Ukraine was legitimized. When “religion is abused as a political weapon, it is extremely dangerous,” he gloated about a world full of madness. As if Huizinga had come around the corner again: “It would not be unexpected for anyone if madness suddenly broke out into a frenzy.”