Pope Francis died. With his humble smile and his paternal look, he will have succeeded in this tour de force consisting in being rented as a venerable progressive by those who were supposed to be his most resolved opponents. His encyclical Laudato if ‘ And his calls for the reception of migrants have attracted those who seek a new breath in the church. However, under the light of the exam, this image cracks. Far from embodying progress on these subjects where his action was particularly rented, François has woven a paradoxical canvas, mixing conservative distrust and deadly complacency for the third world tares.
In Laudato if ‘François cries a “Oppressed and devastated land”victim of modern man. His pen, soaked with almost pagan melancholy, exalts a sacred nature. A supporter of decline, he castigates industrial civilization, blind to his benefits. Because, far from being a simple machine to destroy, the industry offered humanity of ecological miracles to humanity: electricity, which has banned the toxic fumes of households, and the sanitation networks, which overwhelmed the epidemics born of the soiled waters.
The constant increase in the life expectancy of humanity since the end of the Second World War said quite about the real assessment of industrial capitalism. In reverse of Rousseauist shots, it is in underdeveloped countries that natural pollution and disasters inflict the most ills.
Migrant protector?
How, then, pretending to be the friend of the Department or the planet while cursing the system that lightened their burden and made our land more hospital? François belonged to these people in love with the poor to the point of making them a favorite, refusing to reflect on the concrete means of breaking the indigence chains and reducing their workforce to inflate the ranks of opulence. Taxing extremists those who, confident in science, bet on innovation to curb ecological crises, he locked himself in a regressive posture.
François belonged to these people in love with the poor to the point of making them a fetish
His ecology, far from looking towards the future, has been lost in the nostalgia of a lost Eden. A way of giving wages to these currents which reproach monotheistic religions for having granted man a despotic power over nature, like the American thinker Aldo Léopold who denounced the incompatibility of the protection of nature with “Our abrahamic idea of the earth”.
On migration, François wanted the protector of exiles, from Lampedusa to the Lesbos camps. Her words, apparently vibrant of charity, moved. But behind the displayed compassion, a disturbing outcropping outcrop. His pontificate was crossed by two major migratory crises: the Syrians, fleeing a civil war with Islamist accents, and the Venezuelans, driven by the socialist collapse of their country. Faced with these tragedies, François has kept a deafening silence on ideologies and institutions that are the cause, preferring to recycle commonplace against globalization, Western societies and this “neo-liberalism” which is lacking in the most miserable countries.
End strategist
How to defend migrants without tackling the roots of their misfortune? By saving the most oppressive cultures and regimes on the planet, he let the evils of nations of their living forces prosper. Worse, by designating the assimilation requirements of host societies to xenophobic reflexes, it has weakened the very building which makes Europe a refuge: its values of freedom, equality, tolerance and openness to otherness which struggle to take root in the countries of departure. Without these pillars, how to preserve a haven for wandering souls? Generosity without lucidity becomes a chimera, a mirage that betrays those she claims to save.
François was not progressive. On the other hand, it was a fine strategist. He was aware of this new global geography of Christianity in which Europe was in the minority by deserting, for the better or for the worst depending on the points of view, these churches which once sent so many missionaries to the four corners of the globe. He confused the love of the poor with the fact of flattering the low instincts of the nations in crisis, at the risk of delaying the questioning necessary for their emancipation. It remains to be seen whether demagoguery is a Christian virtue.
