Long live François | Page 12

The Texas Border Patrol, on horseback, brutally accused hundreds of thousands of Haitians who fled the misfortune in which their country has become, the first to become independent in the Caribbean: Haiti is the reverse of poetic justice. The soil punished by natural disasters, political plots, dictators, famines. An unlivable territory. The Border Patrol acted mechanically: its members were brainwashed to see these blacks as an enemy that is endangering Texas.

You see pictures (the ones I saw have been credited by @paultratje and @adreeslatif) and you see them too quickly, get the sense of the scene, keep going. But it’s a good exercise to go back to these photos, already located in the bases of the scene (“Texas Border Guard prevents Haitian migrants from entering”) and see the details. Stories are captured by the details. We must review the gestures. Muscles. The leg stretching out to escape. The open or closed eyes of the battered migrant. The distance between the horse and the victim. The smirk of the guardian who enjoys. This mystery: the enjoyment of the cruel.

The young man who wants to flee but is held back by a guard above the horse pulling his shirt. The young man cannot let go because he holds in his hands two plastic bags in which he has to carry everything he has. All of the assaulted are barefoot. A very young man with a backpack over his shoulder carries his baby in his arms. Many are wet because they tried to enter a river in Texas, where they came from Ciudad Acuña, Mexico.

This week, the Pope said with his usual frankness on his first post-settler trip to Slovakia that many wanted him dead. That they were organizing their succession. Francisco is boring, irritating, and extremely protesting for many pillars of world power. In what a pope can be, he is counter-cultural, anti-hegemonic. This is why they want to get rid of it and make sure that the cardinals who vote guarantee them a new Pope who puts everything back in its place.

Francisco is the Pope who asked forgiveness from Latin America, because this unequal and painful scenario arose from the Spanish colonization which included the Church. And it is the men of the Church who decide whether Indians are human beings or not. He asked for forgiveness in Bolivia, in a historic act but which is not well remembered, because Francisco had the media apparatus against him since he ceased to be Bergoglio and made his gaze known and posed that gaze on real political circumstances.

Many of us began to understand what that look was like when his papacy’s first trip was Lampedusa. There, Africans drowned because they were prevented from reaching Europe and it seemed that “that” might be an acceptable policy. This visit forced the EU to a new immigration policy which lasted a few years and was the period during which there were fewer drownings in the Mediterranean.

The catastrophe of the forced displacement of people for political or natural reasons is a consequence of the system against which the Pope works, giving arguments and concepts rooted in the Gospel in which he believes but which, all together, are an anti-neoliberal corpus which is that it anticipates inevitable and foreseeable events that world power persists in multiplying because, as was argued in the Aparecida Document, it does not have its center in life but in silver itself, in the golden calf.

The Laudato Si, his first fully-written encyclical, is the spirit of the saint who inspired the Pope to use his name, and as theologian Leonardo Boff said at the time, it is not just a name but “A model of the church. “. There is the change of point of view on nature, which Saint Francis considered as sister and the Pope who also bears her name, as well as on the peoples crushed by her Church: there is a bridge between these different visions of the world and the thought displayed in Laudato Si: no species will escape, neither will man.

A few years later, Fratelli Tutti arrived, which is in a way an answer to the questions posed in the previous work, which together constitute a complete diagnosis of a dying system that wants to attack humanity and thousands. of species that suffer from a mode of large-scale production, plunder and cruel to anything that hinders the aspiration to maximum profitability.

It’s not just this country, although sometimes they want us to believe it’s the worst in the world. Hatred has been rediscovered as a driving force. This is not a great discovery: it was always the great imperial impulse, which rested not so much on the self-esteem of the empire as on the hatred of what it had to dialectically root out or dominate in order to assert itself. .

The Pope did more than write his arguments and his explanations about the world. These encyclicals, however, for believers and non-believers alike, are an anti-liberal body of work that no one will be able to erase with Francisco alive or dead. They are a counter-narrative to the monotonous hum of the great apparatuses of psychological action, which seek that the devastated majority of the world be indifferent to their own destruction, and that they too vote for it.

Since 2013, Pope Francis has been making and pressing his biological clock, touring the world and mediating, uniting and offering dialogues of peace. There are many Pope for the Church who have more to be ashamed of than winning souls. He is there, his body tired and his will intact, letting those who want to get rid of him know that he is fully aware of it, and that he knows why. The Pope has fought his great fight for eight years, against the strongest powers in the world, disconcerting, being loved, embodying his words in favor of those who in all latitude and circumstances flee like Haitians now, flee without country, without property, without expectations and without revenge. They flee because their destiny seems to be to flee, and it is not: someone has kept what belonged to them.

Over the past eight years, Francisco has embodied compassion, that not necessarily Christian feeling, which makes the pain of others hurt his own skin. Long live Francisco, whose courage deserves that we continue to pray for him, even those of us who do not believe in his god, but believe in the nobility of his purpose.