Continuing our Papal Readings: the second part of Pope Francis's interview with Carlos Herrera
Continuing our Papal Readings, I offer the second part of Pope Francis's interview with Carlos Herrera. Read attentively; Saint Peter will be checking later.
On euthanasia
- We live in a culture of rejection. What is useless is thrown away. The old are disposable material: they irritate. Not all of them, but in the collective unconscious that is how they are perceived… the terminally ill, the unloved… And now let us look at the periphery, especially the Asian one, where whole cities may be thrown away. …The Church asks that we help people to die with dignity. It has always been so.
As a child I heard a parable. In a very good family there were several children, and their grandfather lived with them, but the grandfather had grown old and began to drool at the table. The father could no longer invite people to the house, for shame. Then it occurred to him to set a handsome table in the kitchen, and he explained to the family that from the next day his father would eat in the kitchen, and in this way they would be able to have guests. A week later he comes home and finds his little son playing with wood, nails and hammers, and says to him: “What are you doing?” “I am making a table, Papa. For you, when you grow old.”
On ecology
- I am going to make history here: the Fifth Conference of the Bishops of Latin America and the Caribbean, which was in 2007, if I am not mistaken. I heard the Brazilian bishops speak about the preservation of nature, about environmental problems, the Amazon… and I wondered what on earth that had to do with evangelisation. I felt it keenly, having not had the faintest idea before. When I returned to Buenos Aires, I became interested in the subject of ecology and gradually began to understand something of it. It was then that the idea came to me of writing something by way of magisterium on the preservation of nature.
When I arrived in Strasbourg, President Hollande sent the Minister for the Environment, who at that time was Madame Ségolène Royal, to meet me and to see me off. She said to me: “Is it true that you are writing something? Please publish your text before the summit in Paris, because we need support.” I came back from Strasbourg and sped up. And I left before the meeting in Paris. For me the Paris meeting became the culmination of my realisation of the universal, human scale of this problem.
On the beginning of the papacy
- The election took me by surprise; I came to the Vatican with a small suitcase and one cassock. I was going about my ordinary affairs, preparing sermons for Holy Week back home. And of course the election to the papal throne took me by surprise. But I promised to carry out everything that the cardinals had marked as a priority at the meetings before the conclave for the next Pope. That became my programme.
On disappointments
- I have had several disappointments in life, and that is a good thing, because disappointments make you crash to the ground. They are the emergency landings of life. And the task is to get up. There is an Alpine song that means a great deal to me: “In the art of climbing, what matters is not to avoid falling, but not to stay down.” Faced with disappointment, you have two paths: either you stay there, or you get up and take a risk again. And I believe that in the face of war, in the face of defeat, even in the face of one’s own disappointment, one’s own failure or one’s own sin, one must get up and not stay down.
On the devil in the Vatican
- The devil slips in everywhere, but what I fear most are polite devils. The ones who ring the bell, ask your permission, enter your house, become friends… But did Jesus never speak of this? He did!
On Afghanistan
- It is important to remember the fact of the 20-year occupation and other historical facts, but I was moved by what Chancellor Merkel, one of the great figures of world politics, said in Moscow about the last 20 years: “An end must be put to the irresponsible policy of interference from outside and of building democracy in other countries while ignoring the traditions of peoples.” I think that says a great deal.
