Let Us Dream: The Path to a Better Future

Let Us Dream: The Path to a Better Future
Pope Francis in conversation with Austen Ivereigh
Simon & Schuster
London 2020
149 pages

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We surely all remember the image of Pope Francis standing and praying in a lonely and wet St Peter’s Square last March at the start of the Covid 19 crisis. Over the weeks and months which followed, this book grew from a series of conversations with his biographer, Austen Ivereigh.

In a short prologue, Francis sets the scene, describing how a crisis is something out of which one emerges either better or worse, but never the same. The book is then divided into three parts entitled: A Time to See, A Time to Choose and A Time to Act. Throughout, he describes his personal experiences in Argentina and the Church’s own ways of dealing with situations, mapping out possibilities for the world to become a better place when we emerge from the pandemic.

In A Time to See, Pope Francis describes how his mind and heart have overflowed with people but that rather than thinking globally we need to act locally: he pays particular attention to the sufferings of the Rohingya, Uighurs and Yazidi, and of Christians in Egypt and Pakistan. “Going to the margins helps to touch the sufferings and wants of a people … the abstract paralyses but focusing on the concrete opens up possible paths.”

 

Pope Francis describes how in the lockdown he prayed for those who worked to save the lives of others while risking their own – nurses, doctors, caregivers, also priests and religious and ordinary people whose vocation is service. They are he says, the antibodies to the virus of indifference

 

He shows great understanding of how disproportionally Covid 19 has affected certain groups, particularly the elderly and those in shantytowns and refugee camps. He asks “How though born beloved creatures of our creator … did we become blind to the preciousness of creation and the fragility of humanity?” 

On the other hand, he recalls Jesus’ last words in St. Matthew’s Gospel: “I am with you always” and describes how when we face choices and contradictions, asking “what’s God’s will?” can open us to unexpected possibilities. He describes these possibilities as “overflow” because they often burst the banks of our thinking. He praises the work of committed journalists, who took us to the margins, showed us what was happening and made us pay attention. He also notes the rise of disinformation, defamation, and a fascination with scandal. He criticises how some media persuaded people that foreigners are to blame, that Covid-19 is “little more than a flu” and that everything will be back to normal soon. 

The Pope describes different awakenings of conscience but also the risk of those awakenings being manipulated or commercialised. He makes several references to the killing of George Floyd but is worried by the toppling of statues, insisting that for there to be true history, “…there must be memory. … A free people is a people that remembers, is able to own its history rather than deny it, and learns its best lessons.”

He describes how in the period after 2007 his ecological awareness took shape, leading to the publication of the Encyclical Laudato si in 2015. He describes this as a spiritual experience, writing it as a social encyclical not a green encyclical. He speaks of awareness, not ideology, but criticises the excessive exploitation of what we continually exploit and don’t recognise as a gift. 

While acknowledging that the pandemic has caused a disruption and great hardship, he suggests that a “stoppage” can always be a good time for sifting. He reframes it as an opportunity for reviewing the past, remembering with gratitude who we are, what we have been given and how we’ve gone astray. He explains that there are moments in our lives when we are ripe for conversion, calling them our “personal Covids”. He describes three such times in his life, “personal Covids” which led to personal change. The first of these was when he was struck down with a serious illness as a young seminarian. The second was the challenge of his time spent in Germany working on his thesis, feeling like a square peg in a round hole. The last describes his time in Córdoba (Argentina) when he learned that his style of leadership was harsh. Of course today it’s very hard for us to imagine a harsh Jorge Bergoglio! Along with these personal anecdotes, he also points to times in the lives of Biblical figures such as David, Solomon, Samson and St Paul, and the “personal Covids” that led them to extraordinary changes.

The Pope insists that the world must change as a result of Covid-19. Contrasting this moment with the aftermath of the banking crisis in 2008, he writes that “we must redesign the economy so that it can offer every person access to a dignified existence while protecting and regenerating the natural world.” He goes on to speak about the need for a people’s movement, “calling for profound change, a change that flows from the roots, from the concrete needs of people, that arises from the dignity and the freedom of the people.” This is the deep change that arises from people capable of meeting, organising and coming up with truly human proposals. While lamenting the hyperinflation of the individual and the weakness of the state, he does finish the section on a positive note saying that it is time to see that we can reorganise the way we live together in order to make better choices.

In the second part, A Time to Choose, Pope Francis highlights the need to discern the signs of the times. We need openness to reality and a robust set of criteria to guide us. We need prayer to hear the promptings of the Spirit and cultivate dialogue in a community that can hold us together and allow us to dream. He lists the variety of unimaginable events, including environmental collapse, this global pandemic and the return of populism. “What we once considered normal will increasingly no longer be. It is an illusion to think we can go back to where we were.” He says we must avoid seeking answers in fundamentalism – but must seek the Spirit’s help in discerning the signs of the times.

One such sign of the times is our exclusion and isolation of the elderly, who have been victims, not just because of their age, but have often been living in underfunded care homes, looked after by poorly paid workers. Another is the huge ecological damage done to Mother Earth – what is the Spirit telling us in this regard? Yet another is the leading role of women in the pandemic. They have been simultaneously the most affected and the most resilient in this crisis, accounting as they do for about seventy per cent of those working in health care worldwide. He acknowledges how countries with women presidents or prime ministers have on the whole reacted better – what might the Spirit be saying to us here? He describes in detail the influence of women, experts in various fields whom he has appointed to roles in the Vatican and the perspective they bring.

Pope Francis champions the ideal of fraternity over individualism – in the Jesuit tradition union de ánimos, where despite differences of viewpoints, people can work together as a community concerned for each other is the way forward. It is hard to build fraternity when fears are exacerbated and exploited by the kind of populist politics that seeks power over society. As an alternative model, the Pope goes on to describe how synodality operates within the Church, going right back to apostolic times and how various recent synods have led to great fruit. Despite situations being often characterised as struggles between conservatives and liberals, synods have done great work where contrapositions have not led to conflict. 

By respectful, mutual listening, free of ideology and predetermined agendas, journeying together to seek God’s will, the Spirit can lead us to look in places we never looked in before. The Pope teaches us that our God is a God of surprises and finishes the section urging us to move forward with courage, building unity through discernment to discover and implement God’s dream for us and the paths of action ahead.

Early in the final section, A Time to Act, Pope Francis attempts to find a definition of a people. He explores the concept over several pages and highlights how things have gone so wrong in today’s society. 

To speak of the people is to offer an antidote to the perennial temptation of creating elites, whether intellectual, moral, religious, political, economic or cultural. Elitism reduces and restricts the riches that the Lord placed on the earth, turning them into possessions to be exploited by some rather than gifts to be shared.

Here his commitment to saving the planet merges with his commitment to those on the margins. He goes on: 

If, faced with the challenge, not just of the pandemic but of all the ills that afflict us at this time, we can act as a single people, life and society will change for the better. This is not just an idea but a call to each of us, an invitation to abandon the self-defeating isolation of individualism, to flow out from my own “little lagoon” into the broad river of a reality and destiny of which I am a part yet which at the same time lie beyond me.

Without mentioning names, he writes:

We need politicians who burn with the mission to secure for their people the three Ls of land, lodging and labour [in Spanish three Ts, tierra, techo y trabajo], as well as education and healthcare. That means politicians with broader horizons who can open new ways for the people to organize and express itself. It means politicians who serve the people rather than who make use of them, who walk with those they represent, who carry with them the smell of the neighbourhoods they serve. This kind of politics will be the best antidote to corruption in all its forms.

Does this seem too idealistic? Too naïve in the face of the problems of humanity? The stakes are high in a world where one per cent of the population own almost half of the world’s wealth and which is now ravaged by a pandemic whose long lasting effects are an unknown quantity. Pope Francis is fully aware of all the ills facing humankind and proposes ways we might emerge better from the pandemic. Would that the leaders of the nations of the world all had a copy of this book, read it and took it to heart and turn the Pope’s dream into a reality.