Christmas messages from Pope Francisco (Christmas Eve homily, Urbi et Orbi and Angelus) were all crossed by intertwining axes: war (which is “World War III”), hunger and poverty. What Bergoglio has been underlining in his different addresses is that the conflicts scattered throughout the world cannot be understood (he repeatedly mentions Ukraine’s “foolish war”but also the continuity of violence in the Holy Land, Lebanon, Iran, Yemen, Myanmar, Haiti, Syria… among others) with the problems of hunger and poverty that humanity faces.
It’s more. He denounces that “all war causes hunger and uses food itself as a weapon, preventing its distribution to the peoples who are suffering”. It is a complex and strategic look that comes out to the crossing of interpretations focused and circumscribed to particular situations which are usually done both from politics and from certain spaces of the intelligentsia and as a palpable manifestation of the interpretive confusion of the leadership. From his place, Francisco also does political pedagogy, going beyond the limits of the strictly religious.
For the Pope there islack of peace” in which “dignity and freedom” are trampled on and the main victims of “human voracity” are the fragile, the weak expressed in poverty and waste. For Francis, on the other hand, the wealth does not nest in money or power, but “in relationships and in people”.
It is a humanist and religious discourse that appeals to personal and community change. But in many passages it alludes to structural issues also denounced by Francis, although without providing operational and practical solutions. “It is not for the Church to enter this field”, Bergoglio would surely say if asked about this question.
The same diagnosis will be deepened in the next message of the world day of peace that Catholicism commemorates on January 1 of each year. On that occasion, the Pope will underline that “the various moral, social, political and economic crises that we suffer are all interconnected, and what we consider to be autonomous problems are actually one cause or consequence of the others.” Complex, strategic and multi-causal look.
And what has to do, what should the Church do in the face of this diagnosis?
Faced with this question, the magisterium of Bergoglio’s predecessors -and part of the teachings generated by Francis himself- resort to already consecrated ecclesiastical documents. In this case, the Pope – who is about to celebrate ten years of pontificate in March – relies on the words of a holy Latin American martyred bishop assassinated by the Salvadoran military in 1980: San Oscar Arnulfo Romero. To say with him that “the Church (…) supports and blesses the efforts to transform these structures of injustice and it only has one condition: that the social, economic and political transformations redound to the true benefit of the poor”.
In this too, Francisco is an original pope and faithful to the tradition of the church that lives and transits in Latin America.
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