- Ponmala
Thank you Pope Francis for letting the world know through your words and deeds who Jesus Christ was and what he stood for. For that same reason, you were an evangelist par excellence. No one had understood the message of the Parable of the Good Samaritan as you did. In it Jesus presented to us a Samaritan, who was viewed as an inimical infidel and an untouchable by the Jews, as a role model who loved a stranger as he loved himself. That Samaritan paid no attention to who the man who was robbed and beaten was and cared for him as if he were his kith or kin. The touch of the untouchable saved the life of a stranger, who most probably belonged to the Chosen People of God. As the world bade you goodbye, it recognised in you a Good Samaritan, who cared for the battered, the marginalised, the abandoned and the stigmatised, to whichever nation, race, gender or social status they belonged. The honour and respect you received was in fact a tribute to the teachings of Jesus, of which you were an embodiment. Jesus was glorified in you. Thank you! Thank you!!
Francis of Assisi renounced the opulence of the riches he inherited and went after the spiritual riches of the manger. He made a bold attempt to bring the manger centre-stage. But try all that he may, he failed in replacing the earthly palaces of God’s Kingdom with the manger. Less said about shifting Jesus into it. That was the mission Pope Francis took upon himself. And by taking the papal name Francis he declared to all and sundry that he would leave no stone unturned to put Jesus back in the manger, and that he had adopted the salvific mission of Jesus as his papal mission: ‘To proclaim good news to the poor, freedom for prisoners, recovery of sight for the blind, and release of the oppressed’ (Luke 4 18-19).
Translating the gospel into action was not all that easy for Pope Francis. Just as in the case of Jesus, his attempts at demolishing established notions and practices met with strong resistance from both within the Church and outside. The year of Pope Francis’ ascendancy to the Holy See (2013) was also the year of the rise of ISIS in Iraq and Syria/the Levant. The formal declaration of the Caliphate by ISIS in 2014 after the capture of Mosul was a significant turning point in modern history. The call for a world-wide Caliphate rose all over from emboldened Muslim fundamentalists. Then began a massive flow of refugees from Syria and Iraq to the Christian West.
Fuelled by concerns of cultural integration, economic strain and security risks, the refugees met with strong resistance even from staunch Catholic countries like Hungary and Poland. Pope Francis came out in full support of the refugees, urging governments to welcome and integrate them. He even brought twelve Syrian refugees from Greece to Italy in his plane. Taking a cue from the risky visit paid by St Francis of Assisi to the Sultan of Egypt in 1219 to bring an end to the hostility between Christians and Muslims occasioned by the Crusades, he paid a historic visit to the United Arab Emirates in 2019.
Behind these bold initiatives was the realisation that the only way to defeat Muslim fundamentalism was to befriend mainstream Muslims and nudge them into opposing Jihadi terrorism and abandon the Caliphate dream. That is easier said than done, because, while people of other faiths believe that they can achieve heaven by dying for the faith, Muslim terrorists believe that they can achieve heaven by killing others for the faith. For no other reason would they have killed 26 non-Muslim tourists in Kashmir’s Pahalgam. The only way the world can get rid of the scourge of Jihadi terrorism is to win mainstream Muslims over and nudge them to oppose it, as is already happening in India. That will remain an attainable dream if the rest of the world turns against Muslims, holding them responsible for the crimes committed by Jihadists. This is the most important of the many prophetic messages left by Pope Francis.
As already hinted, there are many in the Church and outside who did not take kindly to the Gospel based progressive ideas advocated by Pope Francis. But the Syro-Malabar Church stands out as the one Catholic group that openly acted in contravention of them. While the Pope held Muslims in brotherly embrace, a large section of the Syro-Malabar hierarchy treated them as an existential threat, for imaginary and concocted reasons. The nine-day mourning observed by the Syro-Malabar Church for Pope Francis can be no compensation for the pain caused to him by a meaningless and divisive controversy over the Mass that they created for extraneous reasons. If only they made amends by changing course in tune with the times and Pope Francis’ progressive thinking!
