Pope Francis is supporting demands for racial justice in the wake of the US police killing of George Floyd and is blasting COVID-19 sceptics and media organisations that spread their conspiracies in a new book penned during the Vatican’s coronavirus lockdown.
In Let Us Dream, Francis also criticises populist politicians who whip up rallies in ways reminiscent of the 1930s, and the hypocrisy of “rigid” conservative Catholics who support them. But he also criticises the forceful downing of historic statues during protests for racial equality this year as a misguided attempt to “purify the past”.
Pope Francis waves as he arrives for the Angelus noon prayer from the window of his studio overlooking St Peter’s Square, at the Vatican, Sunday, on 22nd November. PICTURE: AP Photo/Alessandra Tarantino.
The 150-page book, due out on 1st December, was ghost-written by Francis’ English-language biographer, Austen Ivereigh, and at times the prose and emphasis seems almost more Ivereigh’s than Francis.’ That’s somewhat intentional – Ivereigh said Monday he hopes a more colloquial English-speaking pope will resonate with English-speaking readers and believers.
At its core, Let Us Dream aims to outline Francis’ vision of a more economically and environmentally just post-coronavirus world where the poor, the elderly and weak aren’t left on the margins and the wealthy aren’t consumed only with profits.
But it also offers new personal insights into the 83-year-old Argentine Pope and his sense of humour.
At one point, Francis reveals that after he offered in 2012 to retire as Archbishop of Buenos Aires when he turned 75, he planned to finally finish the thesis he never completed on the 20th-century German intellectual, Romano Guardini.
NBA PLAYERS HAILED BY POPE AT VATICAN FOR DEMANDING JUSTICE
Pope Francis lauded a delegation of NBA players who met with him at the Vatican on Monday as “champions” and said he supported their work on addressing social injustice.
Five players – Marco Belinelli, Sterling Brown, Jonathan Isaac, Kyle Korver and Anthony Tolliver – were joined by NBA players’ union executive director Michele Roberts and two other union executives, Sherrie Deans and Matteo Zuretti.
“We’re here because, frankly, we’re inspired by the work that you do globally,” Roberts told the Pope during the meeting, which took place in the papal library.
The union said the players spoke about their “individual and collective efforts addressing social and economic injustice and inequality occurring in their communities.” Belinelli addressed the Pope in Italian, and the group presented the Pope with gifts such as a commemorative basketball, a union-produced book highlighting efforts players have taken and an Orlando Magic jersey.
“You’re champions,” Pope Francis said. “But also giving the example of teammork, you’ve become a model, giving that good example of teamwork but always remaining humble…and preserving your own humanity.”
The audience was held days before a book comes out in which Pope Francis supports demands for racial justice, specifically the actions taken following the killing of George Floyd, a Black man who died in May. A police officer in Minneapolis pressed a knee against his neck for minutes while Floyd said he couldn’t breathe.
Roberts said Pope Francis sought the meeting with the players, and that it “demonstrates the influence of their platforms.” Demands for social and racial justice have been paramount among players, especially in recent months following the deaths of Floyd and Breonna Taylor, among others.
Brown, in his remarks to the Pope, told him about what he and the Milwaukee Bucks went through in the NBA’s restart bubble – particularly when they decided to sit out a playoff game against Orlando in response to the shooting of Jacob Blake, a Black man, by police in Kenosha, Wisconsin.
“It was raw and emotional for our team,” Brown told the Pope.
Brown sued officials in Milwaukee after getting taken to the ground, shocked with a Taser and arrested during an encounter with police in 2018, contending in that lawsuit that police used excessive force and targeted him because he is Black. A settlement where Brown would receive $US750,000 plus an admission from the city that his civil rights were violated was agreed to this month.
“We are extremely honoured to have had this opportunity to come to the Vatican and share our experiences with Pope Francis,” Korver said. “His openness and eagerness to discuss these issues was inspiring and a reminder that our work has had a global impact and must continue moving forward.”
– TIM REYNOLDS, AP
“But in March 2013, I was transferred to another diocese,” he deadpans. Francis was elected Pope, and Bishop of Rome, on 13th March, 2013.
The publisher said the book was the first written by a pope during a major world crisis and Ivereigh said it was done as a response to the coronavirus and the lockdown. For Francis, the pandemic offers an unprecedented opportunity to imagine and plan for a more socially just world.
At times, it seems he is directing that message squarely at the United States, as Donald Trump’s administration winds down four years of “America first” policies that excluded migrants from Muslim countries and diminished US reliance on multilateral diplomacy. Without identifying the US or Trump by name, Francis singles out Christian-majority countries where nationalist-populist leaders seek to defend Christianity from perceived enemies.
“Today, listening to some of the populist leaders we now have, I am reminded of the 1930s, when some democracies collapsed into dictatorships seemingly overnight,” Francis wrote. “We see it happening again now in rallies where populist leaders excite and harangue crowds, channeling their resentments and hatreds against imagined enemies to distract from the real problems.”
People fall prey to such rhetoric out of fear, not true religious conviction, he wrote. Such “superficially religious people vote for populists to protect their religious identity, unconcerned that fear and hatred of the other cannot be reconciled with the Gospel”.
Francis addressed the killing of Floyd, a Black man whose death at the knee of a white policeman set off protests this year across the United States. Referring to Floyd by name, Francis said: “Abuse is a gross violation of human dignity that we cannot allow and which we must continue to struggle against.”
But he warned that protests can be manipulated and decried the attempt to erase history by downing statues of US Confederate leaders. A better way, he said, is to debate the past through dialogue.
“Amputating history can make us lose our memory, which is one of the few remedies we have against repeating the mistakes of the past,” he wrote.
Turning to the pandemic, Francis blasted people who protested anti-virus restrictions “as if measures that governments must impose for the good of their people constitute some kind of political assault on autonomy or personal freedom!”
He accused some in the church and Catholic media of being part of the problem.
“You’ll never find such people protesting the death of George Floyd, or joining a demonstration because there are shantytowns where children lack water or education,” he wrote. “They turned into a cultural battle what was in truth an effort to ensure the protection of life.”
The cover of ‘Let us Dream’, the book, due out on 1st December, that was ghost-written by Francis’ English-language biographer, Austen Ivereigh.
He praised journalists who reported on how the pandemic was affecting the poorest. But he took a broad swipe at unnamed media organisations that “used this crisis to persuade people that foreigners are to blame, that the coronavirus is little more than a little bout of flu, and that restrictions necessary for people’s protection amount to an unjust demand of an interfering state.”
“There are politicians who peddle these narratives for their own gain,” he writes. “But they could not succeed without some media creating and spreading them.”
In urging the world to use the pandemic as an opportunity for a reset, Francis offers “three COVID-19” moments, or personal crises of his own life, that gave him the chance to stop, think and change course.
The first was the respiratory infection that nearly killed him when he was 21 and in his second year at the Buenos Aires diocesan seminary. After being saved, Francis decided to join the Jesuit religious order.
“I have a sense of how people with the coronavirus feel as they struggle to breathe on ventilators,” Francis wrote.
The second COVID-19 moment was when he moved to Germany in 1986 to work on his thesis and felt such loneliness and isolation he moved back to Argentina without finishing it.
The third occurred during the nearly two years he spent in exile in Cordoba, northern Argentina, as penance for his authoritarian-laced reign as head of the Jesuit order in the country.
“I’m sure I did a few good things, but I could be very harsh. In Cordoba, they made me pay and they were right to do so,” he wrote.
But he also revealed that while in Cordoba he read a 37-volume History of the Popes.
“Once you know that papal history, there’s not that much that goes on in the Vatican Curia and the church today that can shock you,” he wrote.
Francis repeated his call for a universal basic income, for welcoming migrants and for what he calls the three L’s that everyone needs: land, lodging and labour.
“We need to set goals for our business sector that – without denying its importance – look beyond shareholder value to other kinds of values that save us all: community, nature and meaningful work,” he writes.
