Render an account of the present-day world but without forgetting the “ocean of good,” which is at work, appealed Pope Francis to the media. On February 9, 2017, in a message for the 150 years of the Italian daily La Stampa, the Pontiff puts on guard against the “hardening of the heart”: “Life is given to us and (…) we are invited to share it (…) by being interested in one another.”
In his message, published in a special edition of the newspaper born in Turin in 1867, the Holy Father invites not to let oneself be “robbed of hope,” in face of a world lacerated by conflicts, violence, hatred and terrorism. He is saddened by “this complex war” which results in “innumerable innocent victims,” but also by “the economic crisis,” “the terrible consequences of poverty, famine, underdevelopment,” the “gulf towards which we run by devastating the environment.”
However, “if evil seems menacing and invasive to us, there is good, an ocean of good at work in the world,” he assured. “It has the visage of the one who helps victims of bombardments in Syria. It has the look of the one who receives migrants without believing in the temptation to closure, of the one who is resolved not to see in the other, in one who is different, an ‘enemy.’ It has the hands of one who engages to guarantee a tomorrow to the numerous youths and children without a future in poor countries. It is the smile of volunteers who meet in the corridors of our hospitals, of one who shares some of his time with aged and lonely persons in our towns.”
So the Pope hopes that La Stampa will write about “the world we live in, knowing always how to describe the complexity without ever forgetting the ocean of good which makes us look at the future with hope.”
Pope Francis paused on two “challenges,” the first being “to overcome the globalization of indifference,” the “corrosive sickness that petrifies our heart, that renders us narcissistic and capable of looking only at ourselves and our interests, that makes us incapable of weeping, of feeling compassion, of letting ourselves be wounded by the sufferings of others.”
This “hardening of the heart,” warns the Pontiff, “makes us used to the car bombs of terrorists, of migrants who drown in the Mediterranean, to the homeless who die of cold on our streets.” Thus, he adds, “we are degraded little by little: no one belongs to us and we do not belong to anyone.” Whereas “life is given to us and we are invited to share it (..) by being interested in one another.”
The second challenge is “an appeal to realism”: “It is fundamental to seek integral solutions to combat poverty, to give dignity to the excluded (…) and to look after nature beginning with what is most precious, human life.”
In Jesus, God “chose to come to the world in precariousness, far from projectors, from seductions of power, from the splendor of appearance.” It is the “revolution of tenderness”: to encounter God “it is necessary to bend down, to lower oneself, to make oneself little. Peace, joy, the meaning of life meet by letting oneself be astonished by this Child God who accepted to suffer and die out of love.”
“Peace and justice are built day after day, by acknowledging the irrepressible dignity of every human life, beginning with the littlest and without defense, by acknowledging each human being as our brother.”
