Centring the voiceless: Pope Francis’s enduring global impact

Pope Francis has been monitoring the long-suffering people of Gaza from his hospital bed in Rome, where he has been receiving pneumonia treatment since February 14, according to Father Gabriel Romanelli, the parish priest of the Church of the Holy Family in Gaza.

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

Francis believes that those who suffer and who live in the existential peripheries of life reflect the real God, as evidenced by his devotion to the people of Gaza. He thinks that focusing on the poor and the forgotten of society improves understanding the logic of love and life.

Therefore, many Catholics and countless other good-will individuals around the world are praying for the pope’s quick recovery and return to his calling. They are praying because they are aware that leaders like him, who are driven by a deep concern for those who are suffering from war, poverty, and injustice, want to advance our common humanity in a fight against the perilous rise of nativism, protectionism, and parochial nationalism, can only help us end the polycrisis we are currently experiencing.

In the last ten years, Francis has repeatedly demonstrated his unwavering commitment to promoting coexistence and combating global injustice.

In February 2019, for example, he signed the Abu Dhabi Declaration on “human fraternity for world peace and living together” alongside Grand Imam of al-Azhar Ahmed Al-Tayyeb.

The widely cherished document serves as a model for future generations to develop a culture of reciprocal respect by acknowledging all people as brothers and sisters. It calls for a “culture of tolerance and of living together in peace” in the name of “all persons of good will present in every part of the world”, but especially “orphans, widows, refugees, those exiled from their homes and countries, victims of wars, persecution, and injustice, those who live in fear, prisoners of war and those being tortured”.

The COVID-19 pandemic, which once again demonstrated how all people are bound together by a common destiny, followed the Abu Dhabi document. It strengthened Francis’ commitment to spreading his message about our shared humanity by uniting people in shared suffering.

The pandemic has demonstrated that the world’s future cannot be built on economic orthodoxies imposed by market freedom, as Francis argued in his post-pandemic encyclical Fratelli Tutti. On the contrary, he suggested, there is the need to recover “a sound political life that is not subject to the dictates of finance”. He suggested that the elimination of injustice-strengthening structures and the emergence of a new moral urgency that “springs from including the excluded in the construction of a shared destiny” and respecting the dignity and rights of all people, wherever they are in the world.

The world, however, failed to heed Francis’s warning and regrettably learned little from the catastrophe of COVID-19. In fact, social, political and economic conditions of many worsened after the pandemic. Rather than a deeper understanding and greater appreciation of our common humanity and shared destiny, what came to define the post-pandemic world has been more violence, war, nationalism and intolerance. Since the pandemic, social hierarchies have become more rigid, identities more narrow and the already dysfunctional global system even more inclined to fuel division, injustice, poverty, and tensions among nations and peoples.

The post-pandemic world is currently experiencing a “third world war fought piecemeal,” which is fueled by a culture of indifference, as Francis has repeatedly demonstrated in recent years. He frequently encouraged people to cry in protest of the arbitrary killings of innocent people while calling for the end of the Ukrainian war. He wept again on the shores of&nbsp, Lampedusa, Italy, where so many people fleeing wars and poverty have drowned. Since becoming the head of the Catholic Church in 2013, Francis has vehemently argued that every life should be valued rather than valued. He is also adamant that we are all children of God.

He continues to communicate this message through his regular phone calls to Gaza these days. These calls, which have even been made from the hospital, are both an attempt to show the world the existential peripheries’ plight and show solidarity with Gaza’s wounded, fearful, and hungry masses.

Francis made perilous trips to South Sudan in 2023, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, the site of the longest war in Africa, and there, where the people have not experienced any peace, progress, or prosperity in more than ten years, as a result of this same desire to put those who are suffering the effects of war at the forefront of global attention.

In his autobiography, Hope, released in January, Francis further articulates 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 perilous journey from Italy to Argentina. He claims that his commitment to putting the suffering of those in warzones and the suffering of immigrants at the center of his papacy has shaped his life through this marginalization and precarity.

Francis has also criticized the hypocrisy of the world powers. Because of the fact that he made it clear that the same nations that provide humanitarian aid to victims of war are the ones who use the same weapons to kill and otherwise mistreat them and ultimately destroy their societies in many of the calamitous wars that he used his position to expose, from Gaza and Ukraine to Sudan and Congo. Additionally, many nations who provide these weapons also reject welcoming the refugees from war.

Today, the world needs Francis’s leadership and message of peace, fraternity and solidarity more than ever before. Only a paradigm shift from violence to nonviolent methods of healing relationships, fostering trust, and combating historical injustices can bring the world out of this crisis. Because he has always been clear on the issue of whether religion and violence are compatible and whether war is always the result of humanity’s demise, Francis has always provided a guiding light for those who are pushing for this desperately needed paradigm shift.

These days, there are many forces around the world pushing for more war, division, confrontation and injustice. For instance, US President Donald Trump was still enthusiastically promoting his huge plan for their homeland, which includes their expulsion, the day Francis sent his blessing to the people of Gaza from his hospital bed in Rome.

While Trump and his followers were working to strengthen their violent structures and wishing that the victims of war and the poor would simply vanish while Francis was praying for their recovery and sending a message of hope to those who were suffering.

In the end, how should we treat our fellow humans is the most urgent issue of our time. Due to their race, culture, social standing, or religion, we can either treat them as people with equal dignity or as non-people. There are so many victims of violence today that are viewed as “non-grievable,” as the philosopher Judith Butler so beautifully explains. When a society views even one person in this manner, it loses recognition that each life matters. As a result, rather than seeing in victims of war and oppression our “shared condition of precariousness”, people, according to Butler, begin to cast the lives of those belonging to certain targeted populations as “not quite lives”. “When such lives are lost”, Butler writes, “they are not grievable, since, in the twisted logic that rationalizes their death, the loss of such populations is deemed necessary to protect the lives of the ‘ living'”.

In a world where too many lives, including those in Gaza, have been deemed “ungrievable” by so many in our societies, Francis is a beacon of light reminding us of our common humanity and shared destiny. No one knows how long he will remain on Earth, but it is obvious that his legacy will continue to appeal to the poor, the weak, the needy, and those who yearn for peace, fraternity, and coexistence in the face of growing divisions and increasing violence.

Source: Aljazeera