His words were a thousand antidotes. It is always wrong to hate, kill, or go to war in the name of God, the Pope said. Hope, he added, will never be “it can never be silenced by the blood spilled by those who pervert the name of God.” “Fraternity, he also said, is more durable than fratricide, hope is more powerful than hatred, peace more powerful than war.”
Everywhere else, these words would merely have been trivial, emptied of meaning by two thousand years of rites, but it was in Iraq, and behind each of these words could be heard the heart-rending sobs of the victims of Saddam, of the Iran-Iraq war, of the first Iraq war, of the chemical clouds scattered over the Kurdish villages, of the second Iraq war, of years of incessant attacks on schools and marketplaces and above all the torture of Daesh, the monstrous “Islamic State” which had decapitated people, dismembered people, burned people alive and reinvented the slave markets.
There, in what had been the cradle of civilization but what has gone through, for so many decades, the most atrocious things man could ever invent, these words had meaning. In the midst of tears and ruins, they resounded as appeals to love one another, to defend the weakest and repudiate hatred, to forgive and cease fire in order to live together in the brotherhood of the children of God.
On this land steeped in blood, these words of a Pope as humble as he whose name he has chosen took on the force of the commandments, and how could we fail to hear that it is to the world, to the whole world, and not only to Iraq, that Francis addressed these words, these words suddenly so full of meaning, urgency and necessity?
The gap is widening. The wounded West increasingly rejects the shattered East, which in turn wants to stand up against those whose domination had so humiliated it. Nothing is more urgent than to avoid the clash of civilizations and, Francis, thank you, it is an atheist who tells you so, thank you Holy Father for having so magnificently raised yourself to the duty of the shepherd to tell us all, on the five continents, to Islam as well as to Christianity, that nothing offends God more than to call upon him to spread hatred and blood.
Thank you for this intense tête-à-tête with Grand Ayatollah Al-Sistani, the most respected Shiite dignitary. You in white, he in black, the world has seen you in dialogue, attentive and deferential, and the strength of this moment will have been equaled only by that in Mosul, which was the Iraqi capital of Daesh and is now a heap of rubble. In the heart of the gutted old city, a simple, low platform covered in red shone like hope – hope, which you said was stronger than anything – and the tenderness of your smile had the power of forgiveness.
So no, I don’t understand why these few days did not get more space on the sites of the major newspapers and television screens, because one had to be deaf and blind not to hear and see that those words were worth a hundred contingents of blue helmets and a thousand UN resolutions. They were only words, but why must one be an atheist to remember that the words of Christ had converted Rome and remain a weapon like no other?
