A great leader is called to power with reticence, accepting their duties demonstrating empathy with the injustices affecting the least of their subjects. In 2013 Cardinal Bergoglio went to Rome expecting to retire soon. Robert Elsberg, his editor at Orbis Books said in an interview with Democracy Now that he electrified the conclave saying “[A]n evangelising church […] goes out to the margins and peripheries to touch the wounds of Christ”. The Argentine Jorge Bergoglio became Pope Francis, he never returned to Argentina. His work as pope demonstrated compassion for refugees, a deep concern for damaging the Earth and its climate and constant calls for peace in the holy land together with muslim and other christian leaders in the region.
Giovanni di Pietro di Bernardone became Francis of Assisi in the early 1200’s; he chose a life of poverty, chastity and obedience living as a vagrant and a beggar. More than a millennium passed till Bergoglio took the name Francis.
Bergoglio as a South American leader contrasted starkly with America’s far right leaders who oppose humility and service, reinforce the power and property of the obscenely rich and deny climate change and who demonstrate their hatred for muslim people supporting the genocide in Palestine.
Mark Carney was a lone voice warning against Climate Change at the Bank for International Settlements. He has since become acting prime minister of Canada. Carney spoke briefly on the death of Pope Francis calling him
“the world’s conscience, never hesitating to challenge the powerful on behalf of the vulnerable”,
” above all his holiness understood, and taught, that value in the market must never eclipse the values of society, he wrote about the cry of the earth and the cry of the poor, reminding us that ecological degradation and social injustice are deeply entwined […] he called on us to reintegrate human values into our economic lives. [… I] commit myself to fulfilling his challenge”.
Laudato Si, Pope Francis’ encyclical on climate change states: “To claim economic freedom while real conditions bar many people from actual access to it, and while possibilities for employment continue to shrink, is to practise a doublespeak which brings politics into disrepute.”
Maybe his death can mean a turning point for the Americas on these policies.
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