On 24th September, 2015, Pope Francis went into a cave – a joint assembly of the Congress of the United States of America – so that ‘’the face of its people, their representatives’’ would be injected with a penicillin made of four local herbal ingredients, namely: Abraham Lincoln’s defence of liberty; Martin Luther King’s ‘’dream of full rights for all their brothers and sisters’’; Dorothy Day’s ‘’compassion’’ for the marginalised, and Thomas Merton’s ‘’dialogue’’ that ‘’sows peace in the contemplative style’’.
The curative promise in the drug, said Pope Francis, is to bring the legislators out of the darkness of ‘’fundamentalism’’ filling their cave to a sunlight which enables them to ‘’aim at restoring hope, righting wrongs, maintaining commitments, and thus promoting the well-being of individuals and peoples’’.
The Pope refrained from openly recalling histories of his native Argentina, Chile, Brazil, Guatemala, Haiti and other South American and Caribbean islands where successive American governments promoted assassinations of leaders promoting social justice; giving land to serfs; local industrialisation; human dignity, and sovereignty. In Nicaragua and Chile, America supported military coups and civil war against democratic-ally elected governments. In Brazil and Argentina hundreds of thousands of ‘’radicals’’ and ‘’communists’’ were slaughtered and tortured to death by security personnel trained by American experts with techniques of torture.
His words alluded to that sordid history as the silent face of the Golden Rule of (‘’Do unto others as you would have them do unto you’’), thus: ‘’The yardstick we use for others will be the yardstick which time will use for us’’. Spanish invaders and the United States had sowed violence, genocide and brazen exploitation of the Americas, and their reward is seasons of violence; massacre inside the two towers in New York; a pandemic of poverty and cocaine; gun violence and a politics of conservative lunacy by the ‘’Tea Party’’ tribe.
Of rare significance for Africa is the Pope’s call on America’s legislators for a new culture of governance. Said the Pope: ‘’Let us treat others with the same passion and compassion with which we want to be treated. Let us help others to grow, as we would like to be helped ourselves. In a word, if we want security, let us give security; if we want life, let us give life;; if we want opportunities, let us provide opportunities’’. These words are relevant for Euro-America’s corporations and leaders destroying Libya, Iraq, Nigeria, South Sudan, DR Congo and Syria as societies; and brutal debt economics of the IMF and the World Bank in Africa.
The Pope did not mention the role of China in the post-Cold War world. Fear of the advance of Chinese communism into Japan, South Korea, the Philippines and Indonesia led to massive investments by NATO and tolerance of their economic growth as show cases for the goodness of capitalism. China closed her gates but re-emerged as a surging hurricane promoting investments across Africa and South America. Together with Russia, India, Brazil and South Africa, she is a member of BRICS countries who rebuke NATO for ignoring the Golden Rule in their relations with Africa, Asia and South America.
The Pope’s bow to the brutalities committed against ‘’Native Americans’’ should have covered Peru, Brazil, Guatemala, Chile, Argentina, the Caribbean, Australia, New Zealand, Norway and Denmark. Rumania missionaries exterminated indigenous nationalities in Chile. European immigrants to Argentina exterminated African immigrants in that country. Brazilian land speculators are currently killing local populations in the Amazon forest. Australians sustain a long history of decimation of indigenous so-called ‘’Aborigines”. The Pope owes exterminated peoples a global summit towards their inclusion in his worthy injunction that we ‘’must move forward together, as one, in a renewed spirit of fraternity and solidarity, cooperating generously for the common good’’.
Pope Francis’ blunt rebuke of the House of Representatives led by a Speaker who is a devout Catholic, applies generously to Africa’s leaders too. To him a ‘’good political leader is one who, with the interests of all in mind, seizes the moment in a spirit of openness and pragmatism ‘’ and chooses ‘’to initiate processes rather possessing spaces’’. Their rigid fundamentalist worship of racist interests fuels opposition to President Obama’s economic, health, education policies; vote-rigging against African-American voters. African leaders often collude with them and abandon patriotic policies by past leaders as shelter for corruption through awarding new contracts.
The right and duty to protect the environment and dwindling resources was courageously presented to American legislators. He avoided calling for reparation to Africa and regions that are victims to political and environmental pollution by Euro-America and Japan. Africa’s Catholics have a campaign to undertake for reparations by beneficiaries of apartheid in South Africa; resource-induced massacres; famine from flood and drought.
This article was originally published on Daily Trust.