We cannot go on thinking of ourselves, but only together can we do this

I was working in Calcutta when Pope John Paul II came to town, during his whirlwind tour of the Subcontinent in February 1986.

Of course, I too went to see him and his Popemobile.  He was an important figure for me in two ways: For one, I was coming out of my pinkie years, and I had tremendous respect for the work that he had done in ending communism in Poland and across Europe.  And, as one who was rapidly drifting away from faith, I wanted to understand the role of religion in life.

It is not merely COVID-19 that makes me think about faith and the existential crisis--these have been topics that I often blog about.  Especially during high holy days of (m)any religion.

As I noted in this post in March 2016, during the Holy Week, I use the religious calendar "to think about what it means to be human and what it means to lead a good life.  Atheist I am, but I feel constantly driven, sometimes a tad too intensely, to understand these."

We are now a week away from Good Friday.  A couple of days ago, Pope Francis gave "his extraordinary blessing "urbi et orbi" (to the city and the world) in an empty St. Peter's Square at the Vatican."

Source

In that address, Pope Francis said:

We have realized that we are on the same boat, all of us fragile and disoriented, but at the same time important and needed, all of us called to row together, each of us in need of comforting the other. On this boat… are all of us.

I was immediately reminded of MLK's "we may have come on different ships, but we're all in the same boat now."

The Pope reminds us that "we cannot go on thinking of ourselves, but only together can we do this.":

The storm exposes our vulnerability and uncovers those false and superfluous certainties around which we have constructed our daily schedules, our projects, our habits and priorities. It shows us how we have allowed to become dull and feeble the very things that nourish, sustain and strengthen our lives and our communities. The tempest lays bare all our prepackaged ideas and forgetfulness of what nourishes our people’s souls; all those attempts that anesthetize us with ways of thinking and acting that supposedly “save” us, but instead prove incapable of putting us in touch with our roots and keeping alive the memory of those who have gone before us. We deprive ourselves of the antibodies we need to confront adversity.
In this storm, the façade of those stereotypes with which we camouflaged our egos, always worrying about our image, has fallen away, uncovering once more that (blessed) common belonging, of which we cannot be deprived: our belonging as brothers and sisters.

We're all in the same boat that has sprung a leak.  I hope that COVID-19 will teach the 63 million Americans that we are all in this together, irrespective of our skin tones, our religions, and any other superficiality that demagogues love to use to divide people up.

Here's to a better tomorrow!

(Embedding this song here because of the news that Bill Withers has died.)

Castro's come-to-Jesus moment ... not really ;)

When the current leader of the Roman Catholic faith, Pope Francis, talks about issues that the political left typically cares about, the political right jumps to label him a Marxist or a communist or whatever such red-colored labels they like to stick on him.

But, as the Economist noted in reviewing a book, a biography that traced the arc that Jorge Bergoglio took to become Pope Francis:

Pope Francis excoriates the “golden calf” of the free market, and there are echoes of Marxist or even Leninist thinking in the way he links capitalism and war. But Mr Ivereigh locates the pontiff’s roots elsewhere: in the broad Argentine movement known as Peronism, a kind of populism tinged with nationalism which trusts the wisdom of ordinary folk and resents all elites. Some Peronists went Marxist; the young Father Bergoglio did not.

That last sentence there says a lot: "Some Peronists went Marxist; the young Father Bergoglio did not."

Now perhaps you are worried about the Pope's Peronism, eh!  Don't jump to conclusions:

Nor, contrary to one version of his early life, did he have any truck with right-wing authoritarianism.

 So, what's the deal?

The pope also shows more sign than his predecessors of understanding the human dilemmas posed by abortion and assisted suicide, but still hews to the church’s teaching on the sanctity of life. Even among people who disagree with all those views, Francis commands sympathy. For his part, he has acknowledged the integrity of people, including atheists and Marxists, whose beliefs differ from his own; and the respect is often mutual. His idiosyncratic humanism, forged in a land of political and economic turmoil, seems infectious. This book explains where it comes from.

Within the religious framework, Pope Francis is a relatively freewheeling critic of capitalism and a pragmatic humanist, in contrast to the hardcore ideologue that Pope Benedict was.

If one is not an ideologue, or is rapidly running away from brutal ideology, then this papacy will look all the more friendly.  Is it any wonder then that Raul Castro met with the Pope, on his way back from a trip to Putin's Russia?  Especially after the role that the Vatican played in helping the US end its freeze of Cuba.  And, of course, as any good politician, Castro knew well what will sell in the press:

After the audience with the Pope, Mr Castro said he was so impressed by a Vatican audience with Pope Francis that he might return to the faith he was born into.
Mr Castro praised the pontiff's wisdom, adding: "I will resume praying and turn to the Church again if the Pope continues in this vein."

After ruining Cuba, and exporting its brand of communism, and making Che's secular-jihadist image a "brand" in the global capitalism that they despised, prayers the Castro brothers will need in plenty!

In a few months, there will be the return visit:

Francis will travel to Cuba in September on his way to the United States. He will be the third pope to go to the Caribbean island nation, following John Paul II's visit in 1998 and Benedict XVI's in 2012.