by Isabel Smyth 

Pope Francis’ latest encyclical, Fratelli Tutti, is, like most encyclicals, rather dense and wordy. It runs to 142 pages, 287 paragraphs and 288 footnotes. It covers a wide range of issues. But at its heart it has a simple message, that of personhood. It is a call to conversion of heart, to see others as persons and not statistics or algorithms, to recognise them as our sisters and brothers and to live this out in the context of a troubled and unjust world. In a way it is a companion letter to Laudato Sí which stresses the interconnectedness of all life. Fratelli Tutti stresses the interrelatedness of all people as one human family.

Fraternity has been at the heart of Pope Francis’ papacy ever since that moment when he appeared on the balcony of St Peter’s having been elected Pope and declared ‘Let us always pray for each other. Let us pray for the whole world, that there might be a great sense of fraternity’.

Language

The language of fraternity is unfortunate for many women in the English speaking world because of its exclusive and sexist connotations. The title, Fratelli Tutti, which means ‘All Brothers’, is taken from a quotation of St Francis of Assisi who, at the time was addressing his brothers, but this encyclical is for all, men and women, brothers and sisters. I have no doubt Pope Francis has no intention of excluding women. He declares that women possess the same dignity and identical rights as men; that ‘we say one thing with words but our decisions and reality tell another story’ (23).

When it comes to women and language, however, he seems to have a blind spot. For some (mainly men) this focus on language can be seen as a distraction; but language is important and forms the way people understand and read the world. The language of brotherhood and fraternity is male and can give legitimation to the marginalisation and even oppression of women today as much as it has in the past. While the Catholic Women’s Council has written an open letter to the Pope expressing this sense of marginalisation and alienation, what is needed, I think, is a request for a conversation with the Pope – perhaps from some women theologians or a representative group of women religious – to put forward this case. It was, after all, a conversation with the Jewish historian Jules Isaac that led Pope John XXIII to see how the language of the bible and catholic teaching could be read as antisemitic. It was this that led to the Vatican II document, Nostra Aetate, which transformed the Church’s attitude to other faiths, particularly Judaism, and set it on its interfaith journey.

Islam

Fratelli Tutti begins and ends with a reference to Islam. At the outset the Pope remembers the meeting between St Francis of Assisi and Malik alKamil, the Sultan of Palestine, Syria and Egypt in the 15th century during the Fifth Crusade, at a time when Christian forces were unwilling to respond to the peace initiatives of the Sultan. It concludes with a reference to Blessed Charles de Foucauld who came to feel himself a brother of all when he lived and died among Muslims in North Africa in the 20th century. The Pope also acknowledges that in the writing of the encyclical he felt supported and encouraged by Ahmad Al-Tayeb, the Grand Imam of the prestigious Al Azhar University in Cairo whom he met at an interfaith event in Abu Dhabi in February 2019. At that meeting the Pope and the Grand Imam signed a document on ‘Human Fraternity for World Peace and Living Together’. Pope Francis acknowledges how ‘the present encyclical takes up and develops some of the great themes raised in the document that we both signed… where we declared that ‘God has created all human beings equal in rights, duties and dignity, and has called them to live together as brothers and sisters’ (5).

Cardinal Czerny, the Jesuit under-secretary of the Dicastery for Promoting Integral Human Development, has some good advice for understanding the encyclical. When asked what particularly struck him when he read the encyclical he responded without hesitation ‘the first two chapters’. He explained: ‘I think if we can grasp the first two chapters then the rest works for us. And if we don’t let ourselves be grasped by the first two chapters, then the rest just remains a representation of the big themes of this pontificate’.

A closed world

Chapter 1 is entitled ‘Dark Clouds Over a Closed World’ and sets out ‘trends that hinder the development of universal human fraternity’. The Pope looks honestly at the current state of the world and how advances such as the European Community and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights have not lived up to our dreams and expectation and are beginning to unravel.

He sees ancient rivalries and conflicts raising their head in the face of national interests that are more interested in the economic and financial sectors of society than they are in the common good. Individuals are seen as consumers and bystanders. Supposed limitless consumption has led to an empty individualism and loss of critical thinking as people live only for the moment with no thought of the past or future.

Words like democracy, freedom, justice and unity, the Pope suggests, are meaningless tags used to justify any action. The absence of healthy debate in the political and civic arena, confrontation and discrediting others, wastefulness, unemployment, poverty, inequality, human trafficking, migration are ills facing our world and mean that ‘persons are no longer seen as a paramount value to be cared for and respected’ (18) so that while we might be neighbours we are not brothers and sisters.

The Pope paints a picture of a closed world in which fear and conflict breed a mistrust that leads people to become xenophobic, to withdraw into their own safety zones and build walls in the heart as well as on the land to prevent encounters with other cultures and people. These walls ‘are erected for self-preservation, the outside ceases to exist and leaves only ‘my world to the extent that others, no longer considered human beings possessed of inalienable dignity become only them’ (27).

Covid-19 ‘momentarily revived the sense that we are a global community, all in the same boat, where one person’s problems are the problems of all’ (32). But it also exposed the shallowness of much of our relationships, our tendency towards virtual reality, our lack of harmony with our world that is ‘crying out in rebellion’. This is a critical moment. Will we go back to business as usual and ‘plunge even more deeply into feverish consumerism and new forms of egotistic self – preservation’(35)? Can our human family experience a rebirth? It is this rebirth of the human family, a return to a sense of personhood when the ‘me’ and the ‘them’ becomes the ‘we’ that Fratelli Tutti is all about.

A culture of encounter

The Pope emphasises throughout the encyclical that this rebirth of the human family will come about by developing a culture of encounter and dialogue which is the focus of the second chapter. Entitled ‘A Stranger on the Road’ it is an Ignatian contemplation on the story of the Good Samaritan.

This is one of the best known stories in the Bible and Pope Francis places it quite firmly within the Jewish tradition of caring for the stranger. Reflecting on the story he asks: ‘which of these persons do you identify with?’ Do you identify with the robbers whom the Pope describes as those who benefit from and cheat society for corporate and personal gain and are the secret allies of those who pass by and look the other way? Are you like the priest and levite, the professional religious figures, devoted to worship and the Torah, who cross to the other side by retreating inwards, ignoring others, being indifferent to their plight? Are you like the injured man with feelings of being neglected and let down?

The Pope is inviting us to look anew at ourselves and the world in which we live. He wants us to see with new eyes. He calls us to identify with the Samaritan who, while being the outsider, the heretic and the one considered impure, is the one who notices the plight of the injured man. The parable shows, he suggests, that ‘belief in God and the worship of God are not enough to ensure that we are actually living in a way pleasing to God’ (74).

What the Pope is doing is calling us ‘to rediscover our vocation as citizens of our respective nations and the entire world, builders of a new social bond’ (66). This we will do if we see life from the perspective of the Good Samaritan, if we reject a culture of exclusion and act not just as neighbours but as brothers and sisters, if we love in a way that ‘does not care if a brother or sister in need comes from one place or another. For love shatters the chains that keep us isolated and separate: in their place it builds bridges. Love enables us to create one great family, where all can feel at home’ (62). And we can do this step by step and ‘case by case act at the most concrete and local levels… (so that) we seek out others and embrace the world as it is without fear of pain or a sense of inadequacy, because there we will discover all the goodness that God has planted in human hearts’ (78).

The titles of the rest of the chapters indicate the attitude that Pope Francis is calling for: Envisaging and Engendering an Open World; A Heart Open to the World; A Better Kind of Politics; Dialogue and Friendship in Society; Paths of Renewed Encounter and finally Religions at the Service of Fraternity in Our World, which is a recognition of the role of dialogue in the path of peace and harmony, a place where religions can share God’s way of seeing things and act together for the common good.

This is an amazing encyclical – dense maybe but simple in its message of openness and inclusiveness. It shows what is in the heart of Pope Francis.

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