One can only note with dismay the evidence of a continuing growth in military expenditure and the flourishing arms trade, while the political and juridic process established by the international community for promoting disarmament is bogged down in general indifference. How can there ever be a future of peace when investments are still made in the production of arms and in research aimed at developing new ones?
—Benedict XVI, Message for the Celebration of the World Day of Peace 2006
Pope Francis’s words and initiatives for peace and against war, especially in Syria, in the Gaza Strip, and in Iraq, are a topic that deserve a separate book. It suffices here to briefly remember some of the pope’s interventions, highlighting how these may have contributed to alienate sympathy from those who hoped for his explicit “blessing” of the bombing of ISIS fundamentalists, the militants of the self-proclaimed Islamic caliphate that is moving its war of conquest in Iraq and in Syria, taking advantage of the instability that dominates the entire region.
In particular, it may be interesting to examine in this chapter those interventions in which Francis talked about the link between acts of war and the sale of weapons, between wars and the economy.
On Sunday, June 2, 2013, Pope Francis received in the Chapel of the Domus Sanctae Marthae thirteen soldiers injured during peacekeeping missions, most of whom had served in Afghanistan.1 They were accompanied by their families and the relatives of twenty-four other soldiers killed during peacekeeping operations. Francis celebrated Mass for them, at the end of which the Prayer for Italy, composed by John Paul II, was recited.
During the homily, the pope said that war is “madness. It is the suicide of humanity. Because it kills the heart; it kills precisely that which is the Lord’s message: it kills love! Because war comes from hatred, envy, desire for power, and—we have seen it many times—from that hunger for more power.” Then Francis, referring to the “great of the earth” and the illusion of those who think of solving the “local problems and economic crises” through war, added: “Why? Because, for them, money is more important than people! And war is just that: an act of faith in money, in idols, in idols of hatred, in the idol that leads to killing one’s brother, which leads to killing love.”
Francis concluded: “It reminds me of the words of God our Father to Cain, who, out of envy, had killed his brother: ‘Cain, where is your brother?’ Today we can hear this voice: God our Father weeps, crying over this madness of ours, and who says to all of us: where is your brother? And to all who have power ‘Where is your brother? What have you done?’ . . . Behind a war there are always sins: the sin of idolatry, the sin of exploiting men on the altar of power, sacrificing them.”
On September 8, 2013, the day after the Vigil of Prayer for Peace in Syria, which had registered significant participation from all over the world with people praying and fasting to avert a Western military intervention against Assad’s regime—Francis pronounced unambiguous words against the arms trade and the traffickers of death. But he also reproached the powerful of the earth who are playing their military and commercial games at the expense of suffering civilians.
Francis’s plea for peace was vibrant and heartfelt. To choose to do good “entails saying ‘no’ to the fratricidal hatred and falsehood that are used; saying ‘no’ to violence in all its forms; saying ‘no’ to the proliferation of weapons and to the illegal arms trade.” These, warns Francis, are the enemies to fight, “united and consistent, following no other interests than those of peace and of the common good.” The pope started from the gospel parable of the king going to war. A passage of Scripture that “at this moment in which we are praying intensely for peace, this word of the Lord touches us to the core.”2
Francis then addressed the crowd returning to St. Peter’s Square after the vigil of the previous day. Speaking more spontaneously, he pronounced these eloquent words: “And the doubt always remains: is this war or that war—because wars are everywhere—really a war to solve problems or is it a commercial war for selling weapons in illegal trade?”
The following day, Bishop Silvano Tomasi, permanent representative of the Holy See to the United Nations and other international organizations in Geneva, stated on Vatican Radio: “The proliferation of weapons continue to strengthen and nourish crime mafias of various types. Commercial interests—as the pope says—play an important role in arms transfer.” Tomasi then recalled “the traffickers’ profit and even the economic interests of states that produce and sell weapons, such as the United States, Russia, the UK, France, Germany, Israel, China, and others. These are states where the arms industry is a significant component of the economy.” The market figures have been presented by SIPRI, the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, which is dedicated to the monitoring of the international arms system: in the 2008–12 period there was a 17 percent increase in weapons exports in the world.
After the brief but intense pilgrimage to the Holy Land in May 2014, Pope Francis convened in Rome, at the Vatican, a meeting of “invocation for peace” between Israelis and Palestinians, inviting former President Shimon Peres and Palestinian President Abu Mazen. With them and the pope was also the ecumenical patriarch of Constantinople, Bartholomew. In the aftermath of that poignant moment, Francis gave an interview to journalist Henrique Cymerman, who had been involved in the preparation of the event. That interview was published in the Catalan newspaper La Vanguardia on June 12.
In one of his answers, the pope said:
It’s proven that with the food that is left over we could feed the people who are hungry. When you see photographs of undernourished kids in different parts of the world, you take your head in your hand, it is incomprehensible. I believe that we are in a world economic system that isn’t good. At the center of all economic systems must be man, man and woman, and everything else must be in service of this man. But we have put money at the center, the god of money. We have fallen into a sin of idolatry, the idolatry of money.
The economy is moved by the ambition of having more and, paradoxically, it feeds a throwaway culture. . . . But we are discarding an entire generation to maintain an economic system that can’t hold up anymore, a system that to survive must make war, as the great empires have always done. But as a Third World War can’t be done, they make zonal wars. What does this mean? That they produce and sell weapons, and with this the balance sheets of the idolatrous economies, the great world economies that sacrifice man at the feet of the idol of money, obviously they are sorted.3
A week after the publication of the interview, The Economist criticized Francis, comparing him to Lenin, and cast the interview as a “real bombshell.” In particular, the English-language weekly newspaper targeted the pope’s statements on the “idolatrous economies” feeding on wars.4
“By positing a link between capitalism and war,” wrote The Economist, “[the pope] seems to be taking an ultra-radical line: one that consciously or unconsciously follows Vladimir Lenin in his diagnosis of capitalism and imperialism as the main reason why world war broke out a century ago. And there are plenty of counter-arguments one could offer. Many other ruling powers in history (from feudal warlords to secular totalitarian regimes) have had a more obvious stake in violence and confrontation than capitalism has. And thinkers like Joseph Schumpeter and Karl Popper have argued forcefully that capitalism can consolidate peace, by offering non-violent ways to satisfy human needs.”
However, the same piece also recognized that on other points made during the interview Francis may have been right, even though he is not a “professor” like Benedict XVI. “But then, in contrast with his cerebral predecessor, Francis does not pretend either to be an academic philosopher, political scientist or economist; he is a more intuitive figure and his intuitions are often sound. He observes what he calls the ‘idolatry of money’ in some places and hungry children in others. He is viscerally distressed by the waste of human talent and energy among the young. He concludes that economists must be missing some important point. Francis may not be offering all the right answers, or getting the diagnosis exactly right, but he is asking the right questions. Like a little boy who observes the emperor’s nakedness.”
Francis also spoke strong and unambiguous words on the flight back from the trip to Korea in August 2014, in response to a question about the situation in Iraq and Islamic fundamentalist violence against religious minorities. The question was asked by Alan Holdren, an American journalist of the Catholic News Agency, ACI Prensa, and EWTN.
“Your Holiness, as you know, United States military forces have just begun to bomb terrorists in Iraq in order to prevent a genocide, to protect the future of minorities—I’m also thinking of the Catholics in your care. Do you approve of this American bombing?”5
Francis replied:
In these cases, where there is an unjust aggression, I can only say that it is licit to stop the unjust aggressor. I emphasize the word: “stop.” I’m not saying drop bombs, make war, but stop the aggressor. The means used to stop him would have to be evaluated. Stopping an unjust aggressor is licit. But we also need to remember! How many times, with this excuse of stopping an unjust aggressor, the powers have taken over peoples and carried on an actual war of conquest! One nation alone cannot determine how to stop an unjust aggressor. After the Second World War, there was the idea of the United Nations: that is where discussion was to take place, to say: “Is this an unjust aggressor? It would seem so. How do we stop him?” This alone, nothing else.
About minorities, the pope added: “Thanks for using that word. Because people say to me: ‘the Christians, the poor Christians. . . .’ And it is true, they are suffering, and martyrs, yes, there are many martyrs. But there are also men and women, religious minorities, not all Christians, and all are equal before God. To stop an unjust aggressor is a right of humanity, but it is also a right of the aggressor to be stopped in order not to do evil.”
In response to another question, the pope said: “But turning to these instances of martyrdom and suffering, and these women: these are the fruits of war! Today we are in a world at war everywhere! Someone told me,‘You know, Father, we are in the Third World War, but it is being fought “piecemeal.” ’ Do you understand? It is a world at war, where these acts of cruelty take place. I would like to reflect on two words. The first is cruelty. Today children don’t count! We used to speak of conventional wars; today, this does not count. I’m not saying that conventional wars are a good thing, of course not. But today a bomb is dropped and kills the innocent with the guilty, the child and the woman with him, his mother. . . . They kill everybody. But we need to stop and think a bit about the degree of cruelty at which we have arrived. This should frighten us! I don’t say this to create fear: one can make an empirical study. The degree of mankind’s cruelty is presently frightening.”
With his answer on the American bombing in Iraq, Pope Francis refused to join those who in the West seem to want to present what is happening as a clash of civilizations between Islam and Christianity—which is precisely what the fundamentalists want. While recognizing the right and the duty to stop the aggressor and, therefore, to intervene forcefully to stop genocide and massacres, Francis does not endorse operations that turn into wars of conquest intended to “take over” peoples. He insists on the role of an institution that seems almost forgotten and is no longer mentioned when dealing with international crises: the United Nations. Francis is realistic about the situation in the Middle East, devastated by conflicts fought in the name of an “exportable” democracy that resulted only in destabilization and chaos.
One can imagine that the pope’s unambiguous words on the arms trade, wars made to sell weapons, and idolatrous economies that feed on conflicts, as well as his distancing from those who would have liked to see him more compliant with the Western bombing operations, did not help him make many friends in certain and well-known circles.
Pope Francis returned to the war and its folly on September 13, 2014, during the Mass celebrated at the Military Memorial of Redipuglia, Italy, on the occasion of the centennial of the outbreak of the First World War.
“After experiencing the beauty of traveling throughout this region, where men and women work and raise their families, where children play and the elderly dream . . . I now find myself here, in this place, near this cemetery, able to say only one thing: War is madness.”6
“Whereas God carries forward the work of creation,” continued Francis,
and we men and women are called to participate in his work, war destroys. It also ruins the most beautiful work of his hands: human beings. War ruins everything, even the bonds between brothers. War is irrational; its only plan is to bring destruction: it seeks to grow by destroying. Greed, intolerance, the lust for power. . . . These motives underlie the decision to go to war, and they are too often justified by an ideology; but first there is a distorted passion or impulse. Ideology is presented as a justification and when there is no ideology, there is the response of Cain: “What does it matter to me? Am I my brother’s keeper?” War does not look directly at anyone, be they elderly, children, mothers, fathers. . . . “What does it matter to me?”
Francis then returned to the idea of a third world war “fought piecemeal, with crimes, massacres, destruction. . . . In all honesty, the front page of newspapers ought to carry the headline, ‘What does it matter to me?’ ” This attitude, said Francis, “is the exact opposite of what Jesus asks of us in the Gospel. We have heard: he is the least of his brothers; he, the King, the Judge of the world, he is the one who hungers, who thirsts, he is the stranger, the one who is sick, the prisoner.
“Here and in other cemeteries,” continued Francis, “lie many victims. Today, we remember them. There are tears, there is mourning, there is sadness. From this place we remember the victims of every war. Today, too, the victims are many. . . . How is this possible? It is so because in today’s world, behind the scenes, there are interests, geopolitical strategies, lust for money and power, and there is the manufacture and sale of arms, which seem to be so important! And these plotters of terrorism, these schemers of conflicts, just like arms dealers, have engraved in their hearts, ‘What does it matter to me?’ ”
“It is the task of the wise,” explained Francis, “to recognize errors, to feel pain, to repent, to beg for pardon and to cry. With this ‘What does it matter to me?’ in their hearts, the merchants of war have perhaps made a great deal of money, but their corrupted hearts have lost the capacity to cry. Cain did not cry. He was not capable of tears. The shadow of Cain hangs over us today in this cemetery. It has been seen here. It is seen from 1914 right up to our own time. It is seen even in the present.”
“With the heart of a son, a brother, a father,” concluded Francis, “I ask each of you, indeed for all of us, to have a conversion of heart: to move on from ‘What does it matter to me?’ to tears: for each one of the fallen of this ‘senseless massacre,’ for all the victims of the mindless wars, in every age. Weeping. Brothers and sisters, humanity needs to weep, and this is the time to weep.”