Everything is connected — Pope’s idea of solidarity

Pope Francis has made solidarity one of the foundations of his pontificate and his new encyclical Fratelli Tutti is sure to be one of the most important texts on this theme.

Oct 03, 2020

By Loup Besmond de Senneville
Pope Francis has made solidarity one of the foundations of his pontificate and his new encyclical Fratelli Tutti is sure to be one of the most important texts on this theme.

“Where is your brother?”

It is Pope Francis who is citing these words from the Book of Genesis. He has only recently been elected to the Chair of Peter and is now standing under a blazing sun, near an altar set up in a small boat made of blue, green, white and red driftwood.

Less than four months after his election, he has chosen for his very first trip outside of Rome to travel to Lampedusa. This is where migrants have perished at sea while trying to cross the Mediterranean.

“These brothers and sisters of ours were trying to escape difficult situations to find some serenity and peace,” Francis says, standing at an ambo decorated like the helm of a ship.

“They were looking for a better place for themselves and their families, but instead they found death,” history‘s first Latin American and Jesuit Pope continues.

A few minutes later, he says grimly: “We have lost a sense of responsibility for our brothers and sisters.”

Since his visit to Lampedusa seven years ago, Francis has never stopped rolling out this thread of solidarity.

Sometimes he does this even more explicitly, as in his first message for the World Day of Peace on January 1, 2014. The title of the text sounds like a programme - Fraternity, the Foundation and Pathway to Peace. And the Pope describes solidarity as an “essential human quality“.

This is only a question of recognising that the common solidarity of humanity finds its source in the same God. Francis is convinced that it is also necessary to grasp the very concrete consequences — chief among them, peace between peoples.

But the 83-year-old Pope also sees solidarity as a principle to be implemented at the political level so that everyone has “access to capital, services, educational resources, healthcare and technology”.

Solidarity is thus an essential ingredient for “defeating poverty”.

In Laudato Si’, his 2015 social encyclical, Francis insists that “genuine care for our own lives and our relationships with nature is inseparable from fraternity, justice and faithfulness to others”.

And from this stems the principle he repeats often in the text and has continued to reiterate ever since: that “everything is connected”.

The Pope made this link again in September 2015 while taking part in an interreligious meeting at the 9/11 Memorial in New York City.

He evoked the hours following the September 11 attack. “No one thought about race, nationality, neighbourhoods, religion or politics,” he said. “It was all about solidarity, meeting immediate needs, brotherhood. It was about being brothers and sisters”.

Fraternity was summoned again in the historic joint document that Francis and Ahmad Al-Tayyeb, the Grand Imam of Al-Azhar University, issued on February 4, 2019, in Abu Dhabi. “Faith leads a believer to see in the other a brother or sister to be supported and loved,” the document says.

It is therefore natural that Pope Francis adapted this concept throughout the health crisis of COVID-19, making it the foundation of human dignity, the common good, the preferential option for the poor and the universal destination of goods.

It is expected that the Pope will continue to unfold these concepts in his upcoming encyclical Fratelli Tutti, which he signed on Saturday October 3 in Assisi at the tomb of papal namesake, St Francis. ––LCI (https://international.la-croix.com/)

Total Comments:0

Name
Email
Comments