Pope Francis Proposes a Cure for Populism

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In his address last week to the leaders of the beleaguered European Union, the Pope called for a bold new solidarity. In his address last week to the leaders of the beleaguered European Union, the Pope called for a bold new solidarity.CreditPHOTOGRAPH BY ANDREW MEDICHINI / AFP / GETTY

Last Friday, twenty-seven heads of state gathered in Rome to mark the sixtieth anniversary of the treaty that established the European Economic Community, the progenitor of the European Union. Perhaps because of the setting, it seemed natural that Pope Francis should address them; he did so in the Sala Regia, the elegant barrel-vaulted hall adjacent to the Sistine Chapel. Francis is the beleaguered E.U.’s staunchest defender, and he rallied his audience by recalling the founders’ spirit. “In a world that was all too familiar with the tragedy of walls and divisions, it was clearly important to work for a united and open Europe, and for the removal of the unnatural barrier that divided the continent from the Baltic Sea to the Adriatic,” he said. “What efforts were made to tear down that wall! Yet today the memory of those efforts has been lost.” Francis rattled off the economic, social, institutional, and humanitarian crises facing Europe, but he had no need to mention explicitly the most pressing crisis of all—Brexit, which comes to a head this week, as Prime Minister Theresa May (who was not in Rome) formally begins Britain’s withdrawal from the E.U.

At the sound of the Pope’s impassioned voice, the more history-minded of his listeners might have sensed ghosts of papal assemblies past, especially one held nearly a millennium ago, not in a Renaissance palace but in a rough field in southern France. Back then, the brutal feuds of warring princes were laying Europe waste. The killing and pillaging had become savage enough to require a drastic intervention. At the Council of Clermont, in 1095, Pope Urban II addressed a crowd of prelates, knights, and nobles—the leaders of the Latin West. He wished to heal what he called “the great disorder” of a continent in deep conflict with itself, and the speech he gave is remembered for its success in doing that. Having just promulgated, at the Council, a historic Truce of God, which restricted combat between Christians to three days a week, Urban declared, “I exhort and demand that you, each, try hard to have the truce kept in your diocese. And if anyone shall be led by his cupidity or arrogance to break this truce, by the authority of God and with the sanction of this Council he shall be anathematized.”

Urban sought to pacify the warring Frankish knights by uniting them against a common external enemy. “Let those who have been fighting against their brothers and relatives now fight in a proper way against the barbarians,” he said. The contemporary echo comes, of course, in Urban’s having defined the barbarians as “the base and bastard Turks and Arabs”—the Muslim infidels who were besieging the Eastern Church and desecrating the Holy Land. The Pope’s followers, marking their tunics with “the horizontal-vertical sign,” set out on their Crusade, and with a cry of “God wills it!” set in motion part one, yes, of the clash of civilizations. In the next two hundred years, as the Crusades went on, a coalescing Europe found its point of unity in the holy war against Islam. Now, in the secular age, that holy war has been reignited, and, with the rise of a border-obsessed Islamophobia, Europe’s unity is threatened by its blowback. Still, the difference between Pope Urban II and Pope Francis could not be clearer.

The resuscitation of Christendom is not on Francis’s bucket list. His concern is centered on human beings, not on members of any collective, whether religiously, ethnically, or nationally defined. From the start of his pontificate, Francis has been a stinging critic of the global “economy of exclusion and inequality,” so his denunciation of Euroskepticism cannot be taken as an unconscious alliance with global élites. On the contrary, in his remarks to Europe’s leaders, he called for a new solidarity, expansive and bold. Solidarity, he said, is “the most effective antidote to modern forms of populism.” And because it is rooted in the communal human condition—for him, the idea that we are all God’s children—it is a better organizing principle than, for example, class struggle, which assumes a dialectic of exclusion. “Solidarity entails the awareness of being part of a single body,” Francis said. “When one suffers, all suffer.” It is bounded not by nation or class, much less gender or race or religion, but, in Francis’s phrase, by “a new European humanism,” which looks beyond “the triumph of particularisms.” He contrasted this with tribalism, with the fear that erects “false forms of security.”

Such a vision transforms the meaning of what Francis sees as the continent’s single largest challenge: “the long file of women, men, and children fleeing war and poverty, seeking only a future for themselves and their loved ones.” The migrant crisis, he said, is not “a mere numerical or economic problem, or a question of security.” Rather, it “poses a deeper question, one that is primarily cultural. What kind of culture does Europe propose today?” A commonwealth of nations, yes—but, with legions of dying people at its door, standing for what?

The answer lies embedded in Europe’s own history. As Francis told the leaders, “We cannot understand our own times apart from the past, seen not as an assemblage of distant facts, but as the lymph that gives life to the present.” How resonant were such words, coming from that man, in that place. In truth, currents generated by his medieval predecessor, in the foundational era of the Crusades, flowed not only into sanctified violence and contempt for the other—evils we know too well. Equally consequential were the humane innovations that also followed in Europe: the Renaissance tie of faith to reason; the Reformation embrace of religious self-criticism; the Enlightenment elevation of the individual; modernity’s invention of democratic liberalism; the late-twentieth-century repudiation of interstate violence; the self-surpassing of nationalism into a larger political hope. All of this, too, is Europe, and now more than ever it deserves a stout defense.

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