The reason for the meeting of Pope Francis with Paolo Rodari (Rodari, Paolo) from the newspaper Repubblica was the first part of the Mass memories of the last supper, a three-day Easter service. The interlocutors are talking about prisoners, sin, divine mercy. The Pope says, is literally inspiring, beautiful, truthful phrases on these topics. Don Quixote tried to free the convicts, met them on their path of knight errant, but the irony of the novel, was forced to repent of his own mercy immediately after its militant embodiment, received in response to spanking and hitting with sticks. But even from the Spanish-speaking Pope can not demand the irony of Cervantes. At least beyond elegant and kind of mysterious but eloquent of the parable of the request to throw a stone whoever is without sin. So long live the Pope, bringing to jail the Church ritual of the washing of feet.
Part of the conversation about violence in the world contains, however, a curious duality. Needless to say, it condemned the principle of any violence, from whatever quarter. A little less clear, if not to say vague, sounded the words of the militarists, the arms merchants, earning on the bloodshed, the logic of punitive measures and spirals, which is any form of violence, without exception (and this is emphasized). Morality, where both parts of the conversation are merged into a single metaphor, is that we all — the prisoners are all locked in the chamber of their own individualism, obeying the laws of the market. And here there is a rapid leap from ambivalence to ambiguity. Democracy and dictatorship, East and terrorists, rogue States and free countries — they are all considered on the same level with the same moralistic fervor.
In war to distinguish between friends and enemies, executioners and their victims. If all, without exception, become enemies, if the aggression and punitive measures as any other form of containment, be on the same shelf, if liability is a generalization and moralizing, warlords, arms traffickers, greed, the result of indiscriminately throw stones in the world created and inhabited by freedom and evil, and the people are left at the mercy of these events, waiting for a mercy that will never come to them. To protect Christians in the East, the Copts, the Pope, travelling through Egypt, you need weapons. It is necessary to stop Iran’s nuclear program to disarm jihadism, his threats, his creation, need containment, we need strength, something that can break the spiral of violence and aggression of those who want to subdue the so-called civilized world, the world inhabited by the enemies of the Sharia, Jews and Christians, and we are not talking about cultural differences, and an existential challenge.
When the Pope wrote to Putin and gave himself to fasting and prayer to avert armed, convincing even the terms of the negotiations, the response to the chemical attack of Assad on the outskirts of Damascus, where he suffered about thousands of innocent people, the metaphor of the Pontiff of mercy has reached an impasse. Today he had to realize it. He would have to feel that way, which marked the last three years of Syrian history in the death and misery. With a new awareness of the soul, he would have to show an understanding that the withdrawal of American and Western forces from the Middle East has created the perfect reason for the growing violence of the victorious badisma deadly forced to flee the country population, to the Exodus of millions of refugees. He had to realize it, and I say this with all due respect and understanding to that sacred work — the work of the Pope as a complicated and mysterious world.
