According to Father Gabriel Romanelli, the parish priest of the Church of the Holy Family in Gaza, Pope Francis has been checking up on the long-suffering people of Gaza even from his hospital bed in Rome, where he has been receiving treatment for pneumonia since February 14.
In an interview with the Vatican’s official information platform, Vatican News, Romanelli said Francis has maintained nearly daily contact with his church throughout 15 months of massacres, violence, fear and hunger in Gaza and continued to make calls to the parish during his ongoing hospitalisation. “He asked us how we were doing, how the situation was, and he sent us his blessing,” Romanelli said.
As demonstrated by his attachment to the people of Gaza, Francis believes that those who suffer and who inhabit the existential peripheries of life reflect the true face of God. It is his conviction that the logic of love and life is understood better by fixing the gaze on the poor and the forgotten of society.
As such, many Catholics and countless men and women of goodwill around the world are praying for the pope’s quick recovery and return to his mission. They are praying because they know our world can only overcome the polycrisis it is facing today under the guidance of leaders like him – leaders who are driven by a deep concern for those suffering from war, poverty and injustice; leaders who want to advance our common humanity to counter the dangerous rise of nativism, protectionism and parochial nationalism.
Francis has demonstrated his unyielding commitment to promoting coexistence and confronting global injustice many times over in the past decade.
In February 2019, for example, he signed the Abu Dhabi Declaration on “human fraternity for world peace and living together” alongside Grand Imam of al-Azhar Ahmed Al-Tayyeb.
The widely cherished document, in recognising all human beings as brothers and sisters, serves as a guide for future generations to advance a culture of mutual respect. It calls for a “culture of tolerance and of living together in peace” in the name of “all persons of good will present in every part of the world”, but especially “orphans, widows, refugees, those exiled from their homes and countries; victims of wars, persecution, and injustice; those who live in fear, prisoners of war and those being tortured.”
After the Abu Dhabi document came the COVID-19 pandemic, which demonstrated yet again how all humans are held together in a common destiny. Bringing people together in shared suffering, it served to strengthen further Francis’s commitment to spreading his message about our common humanity.
As Francis explained in his post-pandemic encyclical, Fratelli Tutti, the pandemic has proven that the global economy is not infallible and that the future of the world cannot be built on economic orthodoxies dictated by market freedom. On the contrary, he suggested, there is the need to recover “a sound political life that is not subject to the dictates of finance”. There is the need, he proposed, for the dismantling of structures of injustice and the irruption of a new moral urgency that “springs from including the excluded in the building of a common destiny” and respecting the dignity and rights of all people everywhere in the world.
The world, however, failed to heed Francis’s warning and regrettably learned little from the catastrophe of COVID-19. In fact, social, political and economic conditions of many worsened after the pandemic. Rather than a deeper understanding and greater appreciation of our common humanity and shared destiny, what came to define the post-pandemic world has been more violence, war, nationalism and intolerance. Since the pandemic, social hierarchies have become more rigid, identities more narrow and the already dysfunctional global system even more inclined to fuel division, injustice, poverty, and tensions among nations and peoples.
Francis has repeatedly explained in the past few years how the post-pandemic world is living through a “third world war fought piecemeal” that is fuelled by a culture of indifference. He often invited people to cry in the face of the senseless killings of the innocent as he once did while making an appeal for an end to the war in Ukraine. He wept again on the shores of Lampedusa, Italy, where so many people fleeing wars and poverty have drowned. As the head of the Catholic Church since 2013, Francis has tirelessly expressed his conviction that we are all children of God and every life should be prized rather than priced.
These days, he is sending out this message yet again through his daily phone calls to Gaza. These calls, which have continued even from the hospital, are an act of solidarity with Gaza’s hurt, fearful and hungry masses but also an attempt to remind the world of the plight of the people at the existential peripheries.
This same desire to place people who are suffering the consequences of war at the centre of global attention had led Francis to make dangerous trips in 2023 to the Democratic Republic of the Congo, the site of the longest war in Africa, and to South Sudan, where the people have not experienced any peace, progress or prosperity in more than a decade.
In his autobiography, Hope, released in January, Francis further articulates why he is so moved by the suffering of war victims, refugees and migrants. He tells the story of his own family marked by wars, exile, migration, deaths and losses that forced them to undertake the perilous journey from Italy to Argentina. This experience of marginality and precarity, he explains, has shaped his life in his commitment to placing the pain of people suffering in warzones and the anguish of immigrants at the centre of his papacy.
Francis has also condemned the world powers for their hypocrisy. This is because, in many of the calamitous wars that he used his position to shed light on, from Gaza and Ukraine to Sudan and Congo, he realised the countries sending humanitarian relief to victims of war are the same countries whose weapons are used to kill and maim the same victims and destroy their societies in the first place. Furthermore, the countries that supply these weapons are often also the ones who refuse to welcome the refugees of war.
Today, the world needs Francis’s leadership and message of peace, fraternity and solidarity more than ever before. The world is in a crisis that it can get out of only through a paradigm shift from violence to nonviolent ways to heal relations, build trust and address historical injustices. Francis has always been a guiding light to those pushing for this much needed paradigm shift because he has always been consistent in his message that faith and violence are incompatible and that war is always a defeat of humanity.
These days, there are many forces around the world pushing for more war, division, confrontation and injustice. Within the same week that Francis sent his blessing to the people of Gaza from his hospital bed in Rome, for example, United States President Donald Trump was still enthusiastically promoting his big plan for their homeland that includes their expulsion.
While Francis was sending a message of hope to those who are suffering and praying for their healing, Trump and his like were working to strengthen their architectures of violence and wishing that the victims of war and the poor would simply disappear.
At the end of the day, the most pressing question of our times is how we as humans shall treat our fellow human beings. We can either choose to treat them as people with equal dignity or as nonpersons because of their race, culture, social location or religion. As explained eloquently by philosopher Judith Butler, there are so many victims of violence today who are considered “non-grievable” because the society they exist in has framed them as expendable. When even one person is framed this way in a society, that society loses its recognition that every life matters. As a result, rather than seeing in victims of war and oppression our “shared condition of precariousness”, people, according to Butler, begin to cast the lives of those belonging to certain targeted populations as “not quite lives”. “When such lives are lost,” Butler writes, “they are not grievable, since, in the twisted logic that rationalizes their death, the loss of such populations is deemed necessary to protect the lives of the ‘living’.”
In a world where too many lives, including those in Gaza, have been deemed “ungrievable” by so many in our societies, Francis is a beacon of light reminding us of our common humanity and shared destiny. No one knows how much longer he has left on this Earth, but it is clear that his legacy of centring the poor, the weak and the needy and yearning for peace, fraternity and coexistence in the face of deepening divisions and increasing violence will surely outlive him.
The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera’s editorial stance.
