Pope Francis stands up for the world’s minorities

IT WOULD be wrong to take the two speeches delivered by Pope Francis before the European Parliament and the European Council as anecdotal or incidental addresses. It would also be wrong to suppose that in Strasbourg on November 25, 2014, he was only speaking to the citizens of Europe and their representatives, writes World Review expert Charles Millon. The Pontiff sketched out a geopolitical perspective for the entire world, for governments and international institutions to implement. While it is true that, as Stalin noted, the Pope no longer has an army, this does not prevent the Vatican being one of the most influential states in the world in terms of diplomacy. This was recently demonstrated by its role in initiating a reconciliation between Cuba and the United States. Without a doubt, it is this lack of physical power itself – this ‘soft power’ – which comprises the key to the success of this Catholic geopolitics. The aim of the Pope’s speeches has been to remind the European authorities, as well as powers throughout the world, of the need to return to a true universality in order to succeed in organising the planet differently. He said, ‘Keeping democracies alive is a challenge in the present historic moment. The true strength of our democracies – understood as expressions of the political will of the people – must not be allowed to collapse under the pressure of multinational interests which are not universal, which weaken them and turn them into uniform systems of economic power at the service of unseen empires.’ In this, the Pope formally disputed the belief – deeply seated in the minds of Westerners for centuries, and increasing tenfold in recent decades with the acceleration of globalisation – that humanity can be united and live as one simply through ‘doux commerce’ – acting in a manner acceptable to trading partners. It is certainly a critique directed at the current European Union, which was founded on a unified market and currency at the risk of destroying national and local economies, but also at these large Promethean agglomerations which are trying to take shape throughout the world, such as the transatlantic trade agreement - the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership - being negotiated between Europe and the US. The Pope said, ‘To our dismay we see technical and economic questions dominating political debate, to the detriment of genuine concern for human beings.’ In his opinion, this is causing a general destruction of human relationships. The words of the Holy See should not be taken as a mere statement of morality, which one may accept or reject on a personal level; their scope is also global, ie political, and as such they concern the entire world. That is particularly the case when the Pope asserts that we are seeing ‘a tendency to claim ever broader individual rights; underlying this is a conception of the human person as detached from all social and anthropological contexts, as if the person were a 'monad' (single entity), increasingly unconcerned with other surrounding monads.’ The social and political implications of this situation, if real, would be drastic and staggering. This applies in the sense that democracy is undergoing a process of ‘denaturation’, no longer conceived of as a system capable of protecting minorities, but only as a powerful machine to satisfy the uniform desires of the masses. Thus, ‘unless the rights of each individual are harmoniously ordered to the greater good, those rights will end up being considered limitless and consequently will become a source of conflicts and violence’, which can be seen, in particular, in the global rise of Islamism, of which the Islamic State is a textbook example. Europe's destiny, which we have a tendency to forget, is certainly ‘to care for individuals and peoples in need,’ and to respond to ‘the many instances of injustice and persecution which daily afflict religious minorities, and Christians in particular, in various parts of our world’. However, that requires, in addition to speeches, an understanding of the world's current geopolitical situation. For instance, does Europe's complete alignment with a policy of US power meet the needs of this complexity? Certainly not, as shown by the situations in the Ukraine, Syria and Libya. The unilateral resolve against the regime of Syria's President Bashar al-Assad has long blinded our governments, who did not see that worse things lay behind him, and against him; the castigation of Russia's President Vladimir Putin has reduced the European Union to the role of a timid servant of US interests in the Ukraine; and the careless attack on Libya's leader Colonel Muammar Gaddafi has ultimately released destructive forces throughout Africa, which we are now unable to control.

RB metadata

ID: 

1423475275256672300