Ten years of Francisco here on earth to go to heaven

(The author is a national deputy and former ambassador to the Holy See)

I remember perfectly where and when 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 Argentinians, but with sadness because she wasn’t going to see him anymore.

If there is something that moves me about Pope Bergoglio, as the Vaticanists call him, it is his pastoral geopolitics. It is a great source of motivation for opposing parties sit at a table. It’s not nothing. He did it with Cuba and the United States. He did it in Colombia where he then won the NO in that referendum for peace, he put this country on his shoulder, joined Álvaro Uribe and the then President José Manuel Santos in the Vatican and the crowned it with his trip to that country on September 6. 2017. conducts 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. Sometimes your transactions pay off and sometimes not. But he does not stop his commitment.

His first tool was the strength of prayer. When President Barack Obama announced an invasion of Syria, Francis called a world day of prayer to prevent it. It was so radical that President Obama, at the G20 summit in St. Petersburg, was forced to refuse to act.

It is said in Rome that the Popes define their Pontificate in the first exit from the Vatican, inside and outside Italy. Francis traveled to the island of Lampedusa, the last enclave of Italy, near Africa, to coherently dress his speech on the need for the Church to come out of its withdrawal and seek the existential peripheries of the world. Thousands and thousands of Iraqis, Libyans and Syrians surviving on boats fleeing the disintegration that the West started and followed by the Islamic State. “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 there, because before we were there”, were their most conclusive expressions.

You have installed discussions and terms that are branded to you for denounce the current evils of globalization. Thus, he spoke of the “culture of indifference”. They are not migrants, he said. They are refugees fleeing wars. “To hell with those who make weapons and to hell with those who sell them, they are the ones who make war.

The first trip outside of Italy was to Albania, a country where 97% of its population is Muslim. The interreligious he practiced in Buenos Aires with the Institute of interreligious dialogue which he founded when he was a cardinal, is perhaps one of the most important and credible tools available to Francis for his pastoral message. “It is not fair to identify Islam with violence”, he condemned, “you are our elder brothers and sisters in the faith”. “We all belong to one family, the family of God” warned when visiting the Synagogue in Rome.

“No people are criminal, no religion is terrorist,” he dared to say, in an expression subversive for many crusaders from the old continent.

Francis denounces the financial capitalism that generates the “throwaway culture”, as “a culture of exclusion of all those who are incapable of producing on the terms that exaggerated economic liberalism has established”, and which excludes “from animals to human beings, the young without work, the elderly, the poor, the hungry”.

against it proposes to practice the culture of encounter. A society where differences can coexist by complementing, enriching and enlightening each other. Something can be learned from everyone, no one is useless, no living being is expendable.

The pope dreams of a world where Fraternity prevails, respect for our different cultures and traditions, our different citizenships. Because “either we are brothers or we destroy each other”. Fraternity is today “the frontier” 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 suffices to do without the other, to look away, as if the other did not exist. Because “either we are brothers or we are enemies”, such is the challenge of our century.

Finally, he challenges us to the fact that, in a fraternal society, each person must have the right to land, to a roof and to decent work.

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