War is Stupid: Pope Francis

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I am reading Pope Franci’s autobiography, Hope. Some of his views on war and justice as expressed in the first pages [I’ve read only two chapters so far] accentuate the difference of this Pope from his predecessors. Many of his views are radical. I knew that Pope Francis was different from the other Popes, but hadn’t expected so much.

The title of chapter 2 is taken from Psalm 120: Too Long Do Live Among Those Who Hate Peace. The psalm was sung by Jewish pilgrims travelling to Jerusalem for religious festivals. It expresses a longing for deliverance from deceitful and hostile enemies. It is a prayer for divine justice. Justice is what Pope Francis seeks in the contemporary world too in chapter 2 of his autobiography.

“Each day the world seems more elitist,” he writes, “and each day crueler, toward those who have been cast out and abandoned. Developing countries continue to be drained of their finest natural and human resources for the benefit of a few privileged markets.” The Vatican was seldom known for its love for the underdogs.

The Pope goes on to advocate genuine development which “is inclusive, fruitful, directed toward the future and future generations.” He laments the present system which promotes false monopolistic development which “makes the rich richer and the poor poorer.” The poor are even blamed for their poverty by the rich.

Pope Francis hailed from a family that wasn’t rich. His grandparents, along with their young son (who would later be the Pope’s father) migrated from Italy to Argentina in order to escape the fascist regime of Mussolini. They were also familiar with the disasters that war brought, especially since the Pope’s father was an infantryman during the World War I.

“War is stupid,” Pope Francis writes. I can’t imagine any other Holy Father writing that so bluntly. It’s not people who are stupid, he asserts quoting Albert Einstein who thought that war would have been wiped out long ago “had not the common sense of nations been systematically corrupted […] for business and political reasons.” Yes, the multibillionaire-capitalists and their political systems have made the world what it is today. Even the Pope thinks so.

The Pope visited a War Memorial and a World War I cemetery in 2014. Looking at the thousands of tombs that carried the mortal remains of young soldiers, the Pope wept. “War is folly!” He writes in his autobiography. There is nothing called a just war. He quotes the example of Don Lorenzo Milani, a Catholic priest and a revolutionary educator, who made his students search in a hundred years of Italy’s history to find a ‘just’ war.

Wars are really not for the nation, the Pope writes, continuing to quote Don Milani. “… armies march upon the orders of the ruling class.”

Who wants a war? One Hitler, one Mussolini, one Napoleon… one Putin, one Trump – look at how this last guy treated Zelensky yesterday. Showing that video, my favourite breakfast news channel raised a question: Are we on the way to World War III?

Let us build bridges, the Pope concludes chapter 2. “Ony those who build bridges can move forward. The builders of walls end up imprisoned by the walls they themselves have built. Most of all, their hearts have become entrapped.”