Amid the COVID-19 crisis, Pope Francis was recently interviewed by his internationally acclaimed biographer Austen Ivereigh. The interview was originally published in The Tablet and the Commonweal magazine. This abridged version is being exclusively published by The Sunday Times of Malta.
How are you experiencing the pandemic and lockdown, both practically and spiritually?
The Curia is trying to carry on its work, and to live normally, organising in shifts so that not everyone is present at the same time. Everyone works in his office or from his room, using technology.
How am I living this spiritually? I’m praying more.
And I think of people. That’s what concerns me: people. Thinking of people anoints me; it takes me out of my self-preoccupation.
I’m thinking of my responsibilities now, and what will come afterwards. What will be my service as Bishop of Rome, as head of the Church, in the aftermath? That aftermath has already begun to be revealed as tragic and painful.
My major concern is how to accompany and be closer to the people of God. I’m living this as a time of great uncertainty. It’s a time for inventing, for creativity.
In Alessandro Manzoni’s I Promessi Sposi, with its various priestly characters, the drama centres on the Milan plague of 1630. In the light of the novel, how do you see the mission of the Church in the context of COVID-19?
Cardinal Borromeo really is a hero of the Milan plague. Yet in one of the chapters he goes to greet a village but with the window of his carriage closed to protect himself. This did not go down well with the people. The people of God need their pastors to be self-sacrificing, like the Capuchins in the novel, who stayed close.
The creativity of the Christian needs to show forth in opening new horizons, opening transcendence towards God and towards people, and in creating new ways of being at home. It’s not easy to be confined to your house.
Take care of the now, for the sake of tomorrow, with a simple creativity, capable of inventing something new each day. Inside the home that’s not hard to discover, but don’t run away, don’t take refuge in escapism.
Quarantining measures are a sign that some governments are willing to sacrifice economic wellbeing for the sake of vulnerable people. Yet might they not also be exposing levels of exclusion that have been considered normal and acceptable before now?
It’s true, a number of governments have taken exemplary measures on the basis of clear priorities. But we’re realising that all our thinking has been shaped around the economy.
In the world of finance it has seemed normal to practise a throwaway culture, from the beginning to the end of life. It’s a culture of euthanasia, either legal or covert.
Let us not lose our memory once all this is past, let us not file it away and go back to where we were
What comes to mind is Pope Paul VI’s encyclical Humanae Vitae. What people didn’t realise at the time was the prophetic force of the encyclical, which foresaw the neo-Malthusianism which was then just getting under way across the world. We see it in the way people are selected according to their utility or productivity: the throwaway culture.
Do you see the crisis and the economic devastation it is wreaking as a chance for an ecological conversion, for reassessing priorities and lifestyles? Might we see in the future an economy that is more ‘human’ and less ‘liquid’?
We have a selective memory. Who now speaks of the fires in Australia? Who speaks now of the floods? The 70th anniversary commemoration of the Normandy landings marked the beginning of the end of dictatorship, but no one seemed to recall the 10,000 boys who remained on that beach.
What comes to mind is a verse of Virgil’s: “perhaps one day it will be good to remember these things too”. We need to remember our roots, our tradition, which is packed full of memories. In the Spiritual Exercises of St Ignatius, the First Week, as well as the ‘Contemplation to Attain Love’ in the Fourth Week, are completely taken up with remembering. It’s a conversion through remembrance.
This crisis is affecting us all, rich and poor alike, and putting a spotlight on hypocrisy. I am worried by the hypocrisy of certain political personalities who speak of facing up to the crisis, but who in the meantime manufacture weapons. This is a time to be converted from this kind of functional hypocrisy. It’s a time for integrity.
You ask me about conversion. Every crisis contains both danger and opportunity: the opportunity to move out from the danger. Today I believe we have to slow down our rate of production and consumption (Laudato Si’, 191) and to learn to understand and contemplate the natural world.
Yes, I see early signs of an economy that is less liquid, more human. But let us not lose our memory once all this is past, let us not file it away and go back to where we were. This is the time to take the decisive step, to move from using and misusing nature to contemplating it.
And speaking of contemplation, this is the moment to see the poor. Jesus says we will have the poor with us always, and it’s true. But the poor are hidden, because poverty is bashful. St Teresa of Calcutta saw them, and had the courage to embark on a journey of conversion. To ‘see’ the poor means to restore their humanity. They are not things, not garbage; they are people.
In Dostoyevsky’s short novel, Notes from the Underground, the employees of that prison hospital had become so inured that they treated their poor prisoners like things. And seeing the way they treated one who had just died, the one on the bed alongside tells them: “Enough! He too had a mother!” We need to tell ourselves this often: that poor person had a mother who raised him lovingly.
We disempower the poor. We don’t give them the right to dream of their mothers. And to see them can help us to discover the piety, the pietas which points towards God and towards our neighbour.
Go down into the underground, and pass from the hyper-virtual, fleshless world to the suffering flesh of the poor. If we don’t start there, there will be no conversion.
I’m thinking at this time of the saints who live next door. They are heroes: doctors, volunteers, religious sisters, priests, shop workers – all performing their duty so that society can continue functioning. How many doctors, nurses and religious sisters have died! All serving…
If we become aware of this miracle of the next-door saints, if we can follow their tracks, the miracle will end well, for the good of all. God doesn’t leave things half way.
What we are living now is a place of metanoia (conversion). So let’s not let it slip from us.
Do you see emerging from this crisis a Church that is more missionary, more creative, less attached to institutions?
Less attached to institutions? I’d say less attached to certain ways of thinking. Because the Church is institution. The temptation is to dream of a de-institutionalised Church, or one that is subject to fixed institutions.
It is the Holy Spirit who institutionalises the Church, in an alternative, complementary way, because the Holy Spirit provokes disorder through the charisms, but then out of that disorder creates harmony.
The young person is bud and foliage, but without roots they cannot bear fruit. The elderly are the roots
A tension between disorder and harmony provoked by the Holy Spirit: this is the Church that must come out of the crisis. If you ask me which book of theology can best help you understand this, it would be the Acts of the Apostles. There you will see how the Holy Spirit de-institutionalises what is no longer of use, and institutionalises the future of the Church.
About a week ago an Italian bishop called me. He wanted to give absolution in hospitals to those inside the wards from the hallway of the hospital. But some canon lawyers had told him that absolution could only be given in direct contact.
“What do you think, Father?” he asked me.
I told him: “Bishop, fulfil your priestly duty.” And the bishop said “Thank you, I understand”.
I found out later that he was giving absolution all around the place.
This is the freedom of the Spirit in the midst of a crisis, not a Church closed off in institutions. That doesn’t mean that canon law is not important; but the final canon says that the whole of canon law is for the salvation of souls. That’s what opens the door for us to go out in times of difficulty to bring the consolation of God.
How are we being called to live this extraordinary Lent and Eastertide? Do you have a particular message for the elderly who were self-isolating, for confined young people, and for those facing poverty as result of the crisis?
You speak of the isolated elderly: solitude and distance. How many elderly there are whose children do not go and visit them in normal times!
Yet the elderly continue to be our roots.
This tension between young and old must always be resolved in the encounter with each other. Because the young person is bud and foliage, but without roots they cannot bear fruit.
The elderly are the roots. I would say to them, today: I know you feel death is close, and you are afraid, but look elsewhere, remember your children, and do not stop dreaming. This is what God asks of you: to dream (Joel 3:1).
What would I say to the young people? Have the courage to look ahead, and to be prophetic. May the dreams of the old correspond to your prophecies – also Joel 3:1.
Those who have been impoverished by the crisis are today’s deprived. What meaning does deprivation have for me, in the light of the Gospel? It means to enter into the world of the deprived, to understand that he who had, no longer has.
What I ask of people is that they take the elderly and the young under their wing, that they take history under the wing, take the deprived under their wing.
What comes now to mind is another verse of Virgil’s when Aeneas, following defeat in Troy, has lost everything. Two paths lie before him: to remain there to weep and end his life, or to follow what was in his heart and leave the war behind. It’s a beautiful verse: “I gave way to fate and, bearing my father on my shoulders, made for the mountain”.
This is what we all have to do now, today: to take with us the roots of our traditions, and make for the mountain.
To read the full interview, click the PDF attached below or visit http://catholicvoices.mt/category/media/
Attached files