Our Brother, a Peacemaker

Andrea Monda

He devoted himself without reserve until the last day. Until the end. Going towards the people and embracing them. And if conditions did not allow it, he made telephone calls to the many towards whom he felt the urgency to make his voice heard. Among them was Fr Gabriele Romanelli, a parish priest in Gaza, whom Francis used to call — often via video — in the afternoons, not only to make his voice heard, but so they could see each other, look into each other’s eyes. “Face-to-face” encounters were fundamental to Pope Francis because looking into another person’s eyes makes lying impossible and allows for true communication, which is first of all connection and communion. He used the phone to reduce distances and draw closer to others, in accordance with “God’s style” made of “closeness, compassion and tenderness”. This elimination of distances was the style of his Pontificate, which maintained “roles”, but in a way that did not suffocate relationships, because people are more than the sum of their qualifications or their performance. It is thus necessary to pass from “the culture of the adjective to the theology of the noun”.

In his Urbi et Orbi message on Easter Sunday, Pope Francis mentioned Gaza, “where the terrible conflict continues to cause death and destruction and to create a dramatic and deplorable humanitarian situation” — a wounded Gaza and therefore, a wounded Holy Land. He also mentioned Ukraine, “martyred Ukraine”, for which he had prayed every day starting from 24 February three years ago, to Easter Sunday, when he wrote: “May the risen Christ grant Ukraine, devastated by war, his Easter gift of peace, and encourage all parties involved to pursue efforts aimed at achieving a just and lasting peace”.

And longer still is the list, in the Pope’s heart and words, of countries devastated by conflicts in this “third world war fought piecemeal”. He warned against it from the beginning of his Pontificate, and, like all prophets, he was misunderstood. Alongside the diplomacy of the Holy See, the Pope never held back his prophetic voice, characterized not only by words but also by gestures, silence and prayer. On Friday morning, 25 February 2022, the day after Russia invaded Ukraine, he travelled by car to the nearby Embassy of the Russian Federation to the Holy See. The swiftness of the gesture was striking. Only a few hours had passed since the invasion, and this was his way of making his presence felt and expressing his concern over the tragedy that was just beginning to unfold.

On 15 August of the same year, in his Message for World Youth Day titled, “Mary arose and went with haste” (Lk 1:39), Pope Francis said: “In these troubling times, when our human family, already tested by the trauma of the pandemic, is racked by the tragedy of war, Mary shows to all of us, and especially to you, young people like herself, the path of proximity and encounter”. Two enlightening words: proximity and encounter. The example remains that of the Good Samaritan, who conquers laziness, lethargy and the paralysis that fear often elicits, and moves with compassion, drawing himself near the weakest and most fragile brothers and sisters. Precisely like Mary, who experiences the “earthquake” of the announcement she received without closing herself off into a complaining self-referentiality, but rather, going outwards, running towards others. She “did not remain paralysed, for within her was Jesus, the power of resurrection and new life”. Proximity and encounter as an antidote to war and as preconditions for a “preventative peace”.

Pope Francis was a tireless peacemaker. Peace is fragile and in need of artisanal care made of weaving relationships every day and stitching up a wounded fraternity. The death of God led to the death of our neighbours in the “short twentieth century”. By killing the Father, man automatically went on to kill his brother. Returning from Malta on 3 April 2022, Francis admitted with some bitterness, that as “humanity we are stubborn. We are in love with wars, with the spirit of Cain”, and with regards to the “patterns of war”, he added, “we are incapable of imagining another pattern. We are not used to thinking of the pattern of peace anymore”. Throughout these years the Pope has urged us to widen our glance, sharpen our imagination, make our creativity thrive in order to return to living in fraternity and avoid fratricide. He invited us to truly draw near to our neighbours, to be everyone’s brother or sister, as Jesus urged in the Gospel. The Pope’s Encyclical Letter, Fratelli Tutti, of 4 October 2020, and his apostolic journeys remain the most eloquent aspects of his Pontificate. Pope Francis, our brother, travelled far and wide throughout the world to encourage people to live and embody the dream of peace.

His journeys revealed the plan of this work of weaving peace in the world’s most devastated places, including Myanmar, Africa and Iraq. They also led to the signing of the Document on Human Fraternity with the Grand Imam Al-Tayyib, in Abu Dhabi, on 4 February 2019. On his return flight to Rome the following day, when the then-director of the Holy See Press Office, Alessandro Gisotti, described the event as great and historic, Francis said, “No history is small, none. Every history is great and worthy, and even if it is bad, its dignity hidden, it can always emerge”. The dignity of man is never a failure, because it is founded on the creative love of God. It was a theme that also echoed in the text of the last Via Crucis on Good Friday, when Pope Francis wrote: “An economy in which the ninety-nine are more important than the one is inhumane. Yet we have built a world that works like that: a world of calculation and algorithms, of cold logic and implacable interests”.

Pope Francis reminded us of all this and he did so until the end, “in haste”, with his popemobile among the faithful in the Square in the light of an Easter morning, after he had greeted them from the Loggia of the Benedictions, the same place where everything had started 12 years earlier, when he had asked the faithful to pray for him and to journey with him, in synodality — the people with their bishop. His journey, his earthly life, has ended. Our brother Francis precedes us and from now onwards, he waits for us for the final embrace. (A. Monda)