Focusing the voice without voice: the last global impact of Pope Francis | Religion

According to Father Gabriel Romanelli, the parish priest of the Church of the Sagrada Familia in Gaza, Pope Francis has been reviewing the people of Gaza, even from his hospital bed in Rome, where he has been receiving treatment for pneumonia since then 14 of February.

In an interview with the Vatican’s official information platform, Vatican News, Romanelli said that Francis has maintained an almost daily contact with his church for 15 months of massacres, violence, fear and hunger in Gaza and continued making calls to the parish during his ongoing hospitalization. “He asked us how we were, how the situation was, and sent us his blessing,” Romanelli said.

As evidenced by his attachment to the people of Gaza, Francis believes that those who suffer and that inhabit the existential peripheries of life reflect the true face of God. It is his conviction that the logic of love and life is better understood when fixing the looks to the poor and the forgotten of society.

As such, many Catholics and innumerable men and women of good will worldwide are praying for the rapid recovery of the Pope and return to his mission. They are praying because they know that our world can only overcome the polygrisis that faces today under the guidance of leaders like him, leaders who are driven by a deep concern for those who suffer from war, poverty and injustice; Leaders who wish to advance to our common humanity to counteract the dangerous increase in Nativism, protectionism and parish nationalism.

Francis has demonstrated his unwavering commitment to promote coexistence and confront global injustice many times in the last decade.

In February 2019, for example, he signed Abu Dhabi’s statement on “Human Fraternity for World Peace and Living together” along with the great imam of Al-Ahmed al-Tayyeb.

The broadly appreciated document, recognizing all human beings as brothers and sisters, serves as a guide for future generations to advance a culture of mutual respect. Ask for a “culture of tolerance and living together in peace” on behalf of “all the people of good will be presented in each part of the world”, but especially “orphans, widows, refugees, those exiles of their homes and countries; victims of Wars, persecution and injustice;

After the Abu Dhabi document, the Covid-19 Pandemia arrived, which once again demonstrated how all humans remain united in a common destination. By joining people in shared suffering, it served to strengthen Francisco’s commitment to spread his message about our common humanity.

As Francis explained in its post-pandemic encyclical, Fratelli Tutti, the pandemic has shown that the global economy is not infallible and that the future of the world cannot be built on economic orthodoxies dictated by market freedom. On the contrary, he suggested, there is a need to recover “a solid political life that is not subject to the dictates of finance.” There is a need, he proposed, for the dismantling of structures of injustice and the irruption of a new moral urgency that “arises from including the excluded in the construction of a common destiny” and respecting the dignity and rights of all people everywhere In the world.

However, the world could not hear Francis’s warning and unfortunately learned little from Covid-19’s catastrophe. In fact, the social, political and economic conditions of many worsened after the pandemic. Instead of a deeper understanding and a greater appreciation of our common humanity and our shared destiny, which came to define the post-pandemic world has been more violence, war, nationalism and intolerance. Since pandemic, social hierarchies have become more rigid, the narrowest identities and the already dysfunctional global system even more inclined to division, injustice, poverty and tensions between nations and peoples.

Francis has repeatedly explained in recent years how the post-pandemic world lives through a “World War II fought for fragmentation” that is fed by a culture of indifference. He often invited people to cry in front of the meaningless murders of the innocents as he did before while calling for the end of the war in Ukraine. He cried again on the shores of Lampedusa, Italy, where so many people fleeing wars and poverty have drowned. As head of the Catholic Church since 2013, Francis has tirelessly expressed his conviction that we are all children of God and that each life must be appreciated instead of having a price.

These days, he is sending this message once again through his daily phone calls to Gaza. These calls, which have continued even from the hospital, are an act of solidarity with the masses wounded, fearful and hungry from Gaza, but also an attempt to remind the world the difficult situation of people in existential peripheries.

This same desire to place people who suffer the consequences of war in the center of world attention had led Francis to make dangerous trips in 2023 to the Democratic Republic of the Congo, the longest war site in Africa and Sudan and Sudan and Sudan Del Sur, where people have not experienced any peace, progress or prosperity in more than a decade.

In his autobiography, Hope, launched in January, Francis articulates even more why he is so moved by the suffering of war victims, refugees and migrants. He tells the story of his own family marked by wars, exile, migration, deaths and losses that forced them to undertake the dangerous trip from Italy to Argentina. He explains that this experience of marginality and precariousness has shaped his life in his commitment to place the pain of people suffering in war zones and the anguish of immigrants in his papacy’s center.

Francis has also condemned world powers for his hypocrisy. This is because, in many of the calamic wars in which he used his position to shed light on, from Gaza and Ukraine to Sudan and Congo, he realized that the countries that send humanitarian relief to the victims of the war are The same countries whose weapons are used to kill and mutilate the same victims and destroy their societies in the first place. In addition, countries that supply these weapons are also also those who refuse to welcome war refugees.

Today, the world needs Francis’s leadership and the message of peace, fraternity and solidarity more than ever. The world is in a crisis in which only a paradigm change of violence to non -violent ways of healing relationships, generating trust and addressing historical injustices can be left. Francis has always been a guide light for those who push for this change of paradigm so necessary because it has always been consisting of its message that faith and violence are incompatible and that war is always a defeat of humanity.

These days, there are many forces around the world by pressing for more war, division, confrontation and injustice. In the same week that Francis sent his blessing to the people of Gaza from his hospital bed in Rome, for example, the president of the United States, Donald Trump, still enthusiastically promoted his great plan for his homeland that includes his expulsion .

While Francis was sending a message of hope to those who suffer and pray for their healing, Trump and their similar were working to strengthen their architectures of violence and wishing that the victims of war and the poor simply disappear.

At the end of the day, the most pressing question of our times is how we, as humans, treat our fellow human beings. We can choose to treat them as people with equal dignity or as non -persons due to their race, culture, social location or religion. As explained eloquently by the philosopher Judith Butler, today there are so many victims of violence that are considered “non -thick” because the society in which they exist has framed them as expendable. When even a person is part of this way in a society, society loses its recognition that each life matters. As a result, instead of seeing our “shared precariousness condition” in the victims of war and oppression . “When such lives are lost,” writes Butler, “are not serious, since, in the twisted logic that rationalizes his death, the loss of such populations is considered necessary to protect the lives of the” living “.”

In a world where too many lives, including those of Gaza, have been considered “irremediable” by so many in our societies, Francisco is a lighthouse of light that reminds us of our common humanity and a shared destination. No one knows how long he has left on this land, but it is clear that his legacy of focus violence will surely survive. him.

The opinions expressed in this article are typical of the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial position of Al Jazeera.