Alufa n’sonra, ijo n’ru [While the priest grows fat, the congregants grow lean and emaciated with hunger] A popular Yoruba wisecrack against priestly pursuit of riches
It is Wednesday, September 23, 2015. I have just watched the television broadcast of the address of Pope Francis to a joint meeting of both chambers of the United States Congress. The Pope’s speech was stunning in the eloquence, wisdom and humility with which he took up the cause of the poor – the talakawas of this world – and the cause of survival of our planet as a common home for all of us, the denizens of planet Earth. The speech is over and I think hard. I think back to the entirety of my life and I conclude that I have never heard a more powerful and moving speech than this speech by Pope Francis. This thought, this realization is why I started writing my column for the week a whole two days before Friday, September 25, 2015, which would have been the deadline for writing and submitting the piece for this week’s column to my Editor.
I am writing now because I want what I write to come straight from the powerful emotions stirred in my mind and imagination by Pope Francis’ speech to the U.S. Congress. As I begin to write, I think further: if I wait until Friday morning, what I write may be good and compelling, but it will not have the emotional force of what I am feeling right now, right after listening to the delivery of the speech. For in essence what I am feeling right now is this: this man, Pope Francis, (former Catholic Archbishop of Buenos Aires, Argentina, former Cardinal Jorge Mario Bergoglo) comes closer than any man I have ever met or read about to my sense of the spirit, the moral vision and energy that animated that man of Judea who was one of the greatest moral reformers and revolutionary visionaries that ever lived, this being Jesus Christ of Nazareth. As this thought takes hold of my mind with great clarity and conviction, I say to myself that if I don’t write what I am feeling about this speech right now, if I wait until Friday morning to write the column, I would perhaps have begun to think, perhaps like the conventional Christian that I am not, that comparing Pope Francis with Jesus is extravagant and hyperbolic, if not even blasphemous. With this particular idea in my mind, I continue to write, thinking that all I will have to do two days from now on Friday morning before sending the piece to my Editor would be to read it over, and make necessary corrections and revisions if any are needed.
To be entirely truthful and perhaps even somewhat confessional here, this comparison of Pope Francis to Jesus Christ comes from a region of my mind that goes all the way back to my youth when I was a Christian who was drawn to the faith by the combined effect on my evolving moral imagination of some of the most vivid, inspirational and transformative stories of Christ’s ministry: the story of the preacher who asked his disciples to sell all their worldly goods, give up their monetary possessions and take up the vows of poverty as a non-negotiable condition of their acceptance into his ministry; the narrative of the militant anti-capitalist who took up the whip to drive and scatter the profiteering money-changers and usurers from the temple and its precincts; the account of the radical and inventive allegorist who stated that it would be far easier for a whole camel to be threaded through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God; the realistic and compassionate preacher who, before his famous Sermon on the Mount, fed the hungry and the destitute in their thousands, their tens of thousands; and the tale of the man who, in the greatest of his sermons, gave us those eight so-called “beatitudes” that are almost unmatched in the clarity and eloquence with which they articulated ethical and spiritual imperatives for a just, humane, simple but dignified life for each and everyone of us, most especially the poor, the talakawa.
That was the composite image of Christ in my mind in the period of my youth as an activist in the Students’ Christian Movement (SCM) when I was the Secretary General of all the secondary schools in Ibadan that had chapters of the SCM. Today, Wednesday, September 23, 2015, nearly fifty years later, that image rose up again in my mind, except that it was not of Christ himself that I was thinking about but Pope Francis.
It is not necessary for me to itemize the three or four central ideas expressed by the Pope in his speech that conjured this comparison with Christ in my mind. This is because, as important as these ideas are, it is the moral and spiritual framework within which Pope Francis articulated them that made the comparison possible, even compelling. I know no better way of giving the reader an idea of this moral and spiritual framework than by saying emphatically that while ordinarily political imperatives are extremely difficult to align with moral imperatives, the Pope in his speech made this alignment between politics and morality not only easy and logical but vital. And the manner in which he accomplished this task was incredible in its discursive elegance: he talked of politics in the loftiest of spiritual and moral terms. In other words, in an age in which in nearly every country in the world, nobody in his or her right senses would think of politicians as moral leaders of their communities, Pope Francis asserted, simply but vigorously, that this is what politics is or should be – the moral touchstone of mankind.
The central ideas or themes of the Pope’s speech can be briefly summarized. One: the gap between the rich and the poor is growing wider and wider at the same time in which the ranks of the poor grow bigger and bigger; as a consequence, the poor in their millions or even billions in all the countries of the world are being excluded from all that is vital for life lived in dignity and freedom from want. Two: there is no need to be fearful of the “stranger”, the immigrant in our midst for nearly everyone in the Americas at the present time is a descendant of “strangers” and immigrants to the two continents, South and North America. The Pope extended this idea to what is happening in Europe now with the flood of refugees and migrants fleeing from their war-torn or poverty-stricken homelands and he took it upon himself to remind Europeans that they themselves have in the past fled from Europe in times of war or desperation in search of new lives in other parts, other continents of the world. Three: human activities are posing serious and possibly catastrophic dangers to the earth and our natural environment and if urgent and coordinated action is not taken now or soon enough, the very survival of our species will be doomed irreversibly. Four: human life is precious and sacred and should be protected at all stages and all in circumstances of weakness, impairment and peril. Capital punishment should be abolished in all the countries of the world and to the necessity that often arises to punish criminals in order to protect the society and the innocent from their misdeeds, we must add the recognition that rehabilitation is always possible for even the worst offenders. Five: in the pursuit of wealth and profits, the global trade in arms seems unstoppable; lethal weapons of mass destruction are quite easily acquired by nations, groups and individuals who absolutely make no secret of their intentions to use the weapons they buy either on defenseless populations or in pursuit of criminal activities linked with international drug trafficking.
It will be readily seen that although these are issues and ideas whose moral and practical usefulness to humankind seems indisputable, they are in fact issues and ideas that divide the peoples of the world and all its nations into fiercely and bitterly opposing camps. This is why, on balance, though most commentators on the views of Pope Francis agree that a few of his views are conservative, especially those that pertain to matters of church doctrine, these commentators place the Pope far more solidly on the Left than on the Right. It would be disingenuous of me not only to say that I am in agreement with this assessment of the “politics” of the Pope’s views, but that it pleases me enormously that he is more Left-leaning than Right-leaning. However, the fundamental thing about the Pontiff’s “politics”, his political views is that they are solidly grounded in a notion and a practice of “politics” which powerfully calls out to the moral being in all of us. In other words, whether you are a woman or man of the Left or the Right, the Pope’s political views place your claims to being a moral being on the line. Only the most cynical, the most asinine men and women would abjure or give up their claims to being moral beings. This is the underlying power of the Pope’s speech to the U.S. Congress.
That should be my last word in these reflections but there is one more factor to add. Like Jesus of Nazareth, this Pope is also a brilliantly strategic and pragmatic moral philosopher. Like Jesus, in his speech, Pope Francis grounded the moral framework of his political views on pragmatism and enlightened self-interest. Throughout the delivery of his speech, he made allusions to the golden rule: do unto others as you would have them do unto you. If you are haunted by the specter of poverty for yourself and your offspring, do not impose poverty on other men and women and their progeny. If you turn your back, your compassion on refugees and migrants now, know that you or your children and their children may one day also be refugees and migrants, as indeed your ancestors once were in these Americas, this Europe, this world.
bjeyifo@fas.harvard.edu
