Editorial: The Guardian view on Pope Francis: championing humanity
The pontiff’s eloquent challenge to the forces of greed, inequality and environmental destruction is rooted in his intelligent conservatism
Sunday 1 January 2017 13.35 EST
Last modified on Sunday 1 January 2017 17.00 EST
Pope Francis leads an organisation that fought against democracy, liberty, equality and feminism for nearly 200 years after the French revolution of 1789. It is a paradox that he is now heralded in some quarters as the global champion of all those causes, which everywhere seem under attack. The key to understanding this contradiction is that the pope is not himself a liberal. He is a conservative with a small c, mistrustful of all grand schemes of human betterment, whether socialist or libertarian, and he believes in sin and the devil – as do most of his 1.2 billion followers. If conservatism stands for anything more than the remorseless pursuit by the strong of their advantage over the weak, it is a profound suspicion of the human capacity to be good, a belief, as Milton put it, that we shall never cease “hammering from our flinty hearts the seeds and sparkles of new miseries for ourselves”. This isn’t the whole truth, but at a time when a world order seemingly based on rational self-interest is being consumed in greed and rage – including the “plague of terrorism” that Francis urged all to confront as it struck Turkey again – a little of Milton’s grim scepticism is salutary; even, almost, hopeful.
For the pope, a world order based on the unlimited satisfaction of individual wants is unattainable, and the attempt to reach it destructive of the world around us, and of the peace of our inner worlds. As he wrote 18 months ago in his powerful encyclical on the environment: “When people become self-centred and self-enclosed, their greed increases. The emptier a person’s heart is, the more he or she needs things to buy, own and consume. It becomes almost impossible to accept the limits imposed by reality.” This attack was not confined to the one encyclical, but has been one of the most important themes of all his preaching, most recently in his New Year homily: “The lack of physical (and not virtual) contact is cauterising our hearts and making us lose the capacity for tenderness and wonder, for pity and compassion.” But, he continued, “we are not interchangeable items of merchandise or information processors. We are children, we are family, we are God’s People.”
This is the development of a consistent line of Catholic criticism of the economist’s world that goes back at least as far as Pope Leo XIII’s 1891 Rerum Novarum, and arguably comes from the roots of western civilisation, in Aristotle and Aquinas. Catholic social teaching offers a coherent perspective on how the individual fits into society. It addresses directly the two great questions of our time: how the economy should be arranged to benefit everyone, and how our societies should treat the natural environment. Pope Francis has been an astonishingly eloquent advocate for human rights, for the environment, for peace and against the ravages of capitalism. He doesn’t do fluffy. In fact, at times, he sounds like a pure revolutionary.
“We should be particularly indignant at the enormous inequalities in our midst,” he wrote in his 2015 encyclical. “We fail to see that some are mired in desperate and degrading poverty, with no way out, while others have not the faintest idea of what to do with their possessions, vainly showing off their supposed superiority and leaving behind them so much waste which, if it were the case everywhere, would destroy the planet. ... We continue to tolerate that some consider themselves more human than others.”
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/jan/01/the-guardian-view-on-pope-francis-championing-humanity
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