Tag Archives: pope-francis

Pope Francis: Smile, and Tell Jokes

Future Hope, , , ,

(The column below was written by me in 2018 after watching a promotional movie about Pope Francis. Over the years since, his unexpected concluding message in that movie is something I have come to believe in very strongly. The message? A smile and a sense of humor are essential elements for a person who wants to live a positive, impactful life, a life of love.

(Fellow Argentinian Che Guevera had something to say about love: “the true revolutionary is motivated by a great feeling of love.” And accounts by those who knew him indicate that, indeed, Che had a ready smile and a sense of humor. [1])

Oppression Is Not a Laughing Matter – Or Is It?

“Grant me, O Lord, good digestion, and also something to digest.
Grant me a healthy body, and the necessary good humor to maintain it.
Grant me a simple soul that knows to treasure all that is good
and that doesn’t frighten easily at the sight of evil,
but rather finds the means to put things back in their place.
Give me a soul that knows not boredom, grumblings, sighs and laments,
nor excess of stress, because of that obstructing thing called “I.”
Grant me, O Lord, a sense of good humor.
Allow me the grace to be able to take a joke to discover in life a bit of joy,
and to be able to share it with others.”
–Sir Thomas More, “Prayer for Good Humor,” early 1500’s

Last evening my wife and I watched the 2018 movie, “Pope Francis, A Man of His Word.”  It is not a critical look at the Pope, or an objective assessment of his strengths and weaknesses and what he has so far accomplished. It is an unabashed presentation of the Pope as a great man, a moral leader of the world, essentially a saint.

The ending surprised me. After an hour and a half of footage of him speaking and interacting with people all over the world, sharing his thinking and his prayers and his unquestionably genuine concern for “the least of these,” the poor, the final minute finds him talking about two things: the value of a smile and the importance of a sense of humor. Pope Francis tells the camera that just about every day he reads Sir Thomas More’s poem quoted above.

I was struck by the Pope doing this. Is he right that smiling and a sense of humor are so important?

I think there are a lot of people on the political Left who don’t agree with this. I know a whole bunch of them. They are the way I tend to be: very upset with the reality of the world in the grip of a mendacious and maddening, mega-corporation dominated capitalist system that is literally destroying the world’s ecosystems and causing uncountable suffering. How can one make jokes and be concerned about having a sense of humor in such a world?

When I was young I didn’t tell jokes. I didn’t laugh very much. I was very intense, I took myself and my beliefs very seriously. I remember once speaking at Boston College during the time of the Vietnam War and challenging those hearing me to put their lives on the line for change because we needed it so badly. I don’t know if I got through to many people listening to me; my sense at the time was that I hadn’t.

Actually, I still say similar things in my speaking and writing today, 50 years later, but over that time I’ve come to appreciate that this kind of intensity has its limitations. For example, I’ve come to appreciate the value of effective political satire which, by making fun of oppressors, exposes them in a way that can have more of an impact upon the listener than harsh, angry words.

More than that, I’ve learned that, as More points out in the line above -–“Give me a soul that knows not boredom, grumblings, sighs and laments, nor excess of stress, because of that obstructing thing called ‘I,’” — that taking oneself too seriously can lead down a very slippery and self-destructive slope.

A week and a half ago I spoke at a New Jersey activists’ climate conference. I began with one of my favorite inspirational writings, a poem by Chief Yellow Lark, “Let Me Walk in Beauty,” found in the book, “God Makes the Rivers to Flow: Sacred literature of the world,” by Eknath Easwaran. A key line in this poem is similar to More’s (or More’s is similar to his): “”I seek strength not to be greater than my brother or sister but to fight my greatest enemy, myself.”

It’s no joke; it’s a fact: sharing genuine smiles with one another and being able to laugh in the face of oppression and injustice are essential components of building a winning movement.

Ted Glick has been a progressive activist, organizer and writer since 1968. Past writings and other information can be found at https://tedglick.com, and he can be followed on Twitter at https://twitter.com/jtglick.

1–“Having heard so much about Guevara—his bravery, his fierce determination, his radical beliefs, his ferocity in argument, and his dominating, ruthless style of leadership—I was totally unprepared for the man. Not surprisingly, he was wearing faded army fatigues and a big white straw hat, but I was surprised to discover that he was my own age—thirty-five—and that he was charming and gentle of manner. He had soft brown eyes and a shy smile on his bearded face, and as we talked he revealed a delightfully self-deprecatory sense of humor. He looked to me like a twinkly-eyed Clark Gable with a cigar in his mouth.” 
– https://www.counterpunch.org/2017/10/06/beautiful-revolutionary-che-guevara-remembered/

Pope Francis, Presente!

Future Hope, , , ,

Growing up, I had virtually no contact with people who identified themselves as Catholics. Perhaps some of my friends and acquaintances in high school and college were but if so, I didn’t know it.

The first open Catholics I came to know in late 1969 at the age of 20 were people like then-Sister Joann Malone, Fathers Joe Wenderoth and Neil McLaughlin, John Grady and, eventually, Father Phil Berrigan. These were all leaders of the militantly nonviolent Vietnam War resistance movement, the Catholic Left.

These and other Catholics I came to know back then had been influenced by the South and Central American liberation theology movement which emerged in the 1960’s following the Cuban Revolution of 1959, led by Fidel Castro.

Castro had been raised in a Catholic family. In an interview in 1985 with Chilean priest Frei Betto, he spoke about the influence of his deeply religious mother and grandmother: “I always listened to them with great interest and respect. Even though I didn’t share their concept of the world, I never argued with them about these things, because I could see the strength, courage and comfort they got from their religious feelings and beliefs. Of course, their feelings were neither rigid nor orthodox but something very much their own and very strongly felt. It was a part of the family tradition.” (1)

Pope Francis prior to his being named Pope was connected with and supportive of the liberation theology movement, although he was explicitly not a supporter of armed struggle for the overturning of repressive and unjust governments. He was, however, a strong advocate for social and economic justice as made very clear in his famous 2015 encyclical, “Laudato Si’: On Care for Our Common Home.”

I re-read Laudato Si’ yesterday. There is much in it of value to all people, not just Catholics and including agnostics and atheists. In the introduction Francis summarizes the main questions the book deals with: “I will point to the intimate relationship between the poor and the fragility of the planet, the conviction that everything in the world is connected, the critique of new paradigms and forms of power derived from technology, the call to see other ways of understanding the economy and progress, the value proper to each creature, the human meaning of ecology, the need for forthright and honest debate, the serious responsibility of international and local policy, the throwaway culture and the proposal of a new lifestyle.”

Over the book’s 157 pages Francis does, indeed, deal with all of this and more.

Francis makes very clear over and over again that a central reason why the world’s economies and ecosystems are in such a critical state is the domination of government by “transnational corporations” and “powerful financial interests.” This is a good thing. Being truthful about the main source of our problems is always what those who want a world based on love, justice, peace and connection to nature should be about.

However, it is a problem that he never explicitly says that in order to create just societies and avoid economic, social and ecological collapse, the power and wealth of this billionaire class must be ended and drastically redistributed. Indeed, in such new societies billionaires would not exist. In my opinion, those who are now billionaires or multi/multi millionaires might come to appreciate how wrong they were to put the pursuit of obscene wealth and power before anything else. Some of them might actually come to realize that love and service to others is, indeed, a much better way to live.

Related to this problem with Laudato Si’ is the fact that nowhere in the book that I could find does Francis use the phrase, “fossil fuel industry,” much less call for it to be immediately and drastically downsized, moved aside so that wind, solar and other clean, renewable energy sources can take their place as rapidly as possible.

The fossil fuel industry and those banks and insurance companies who are financing their ecosystem-destroying pursuit of private profit must be named, called out, targeted for consistent, militant, nonviolent demonstrations and risk-taking direct action. They are truly public enemy number one and need to be treated as such.

As the Trump Must Go movement continues to grow and build its strength, with the next big showing of our power coming up on May 1, we can draw inspiration from the life and teachings of Pope Francis. He was a man of the people, humble, willing to take on conservative Catholic theology and speak truth to power. Let us hope that the new person elected to replace him continues and builds upon his forward-looking teachings.

1—p. 47, Fidel Castro and Frei Betto, “Fidel and Religion: Conversations with Frei Betto on Marxism and Liberation Theology.”

Ted Glick has been a progressive activist and organizer since 1968. He is the author of the recently published books, Burglar for Peace and 21st Century Revolution, both available at https://pmpress.org . More info can be found at https://tedglick.com.