To start anew, we must look at the faces

Please, “let us stop this shipwreck of civilization!”. The Pope said this forcefully on Sunday morning, 5 December, at Lesvos, in the heart of the Mediterranean, “this great basin of water, the cradle of many civilizations” that now “looks like a mirror of death” more than anything else. “Let us not let our sea (mare nostrum) be transformed into a desolate sea of death (mare mortuum). Let us not allow this place of encounter to become a theatre of conflict”. In the first place, the clash concerns ideas, ideologies, and reality. The Pope repeated this forcefully in Lesvos — at the Identification Centre, built after the fire in the Moira Camp, which he visited in 2016 — that reality is superior to ideas and therefore an effort must be made to accept reality, take it into account and realize that with reality as it is, in its concreteness, ...