ROME – Offering further confirmation of his ongoing recovery, Pope Francis has written to Italy’s leading newspaper from his hospital room to call for “disarming the earth” in the context of the various wars currently underway, including Ukraine and Gaza.
“We must disarm words, to disarm minds and disarm the earth,” Francis wrote. “There is a great need for reflection, for calm, [and] for a sense of complexity.”
In a moment of tension, the pope called for special attention to language, calling on journalists especially to “feel the full importance of words.”
“They are never just words: They are facts that build human environments,” he wrote. “They can connect or divide, serve the truth or make use of it.”
At the same time Francis was providing a reminder that his diminished physical capacity has not compromised his lucidity, his top aide was insisting that despite the pope’s illness there has been “no talk” of a possible resignation.
Speaking on the margins of a conference on Iftar for Rome’s Muslim community, Italian Cardinal Pietro Parolin, the Vatican’s Secretary of State, insisted that resignation never came up when he spoke to Francis in the Gemelli Hospital last week.
“No, absolutely no, we didn’t talk about this,” Parolin said, adding that “I saw him a week ago, and I found him better with respect to the first time” the two men had spoken during the hospitalization.
Parolin indirectly chastised mushrooming speculation on the internet about the state of the pope’ health, saying “I believe we need to stick to the medical bulletins,” referring to the bulletins from the physicians treating Pope Francis released by the Press Office of the Holy See, “because they give us the pope’s real condition.”
Francis addressed his letter, dated March 14, to Luciano Fontana, the editor-in-chief of Corriere della Sera, Italy’s paper of record. The journalist had written to the pontiff to offer best wishes for his recover and to invite him to offer a brief reflection on the international situation.
The pope wrote that his present struggle with double pneumonia, now in his fifth week in the hospital, has given him a deepened perspective on the “absurdity” of war.
“In this moment of illness … war seems even more absurd,” he wrote. “Human fragility, in fact, has the power to make us more lucid with respect to what lasts and what passes, to what makes us live and what kills.”
“Human fragility has the power to make us more lucid with respect to what lasts and what passes, to what makes us live and what kills,” the pontiff wrote. “Perhaps this is why we so often tend to deny limits and to avoid fragile and wounded people: They have the power to question the direction we have chosen, as individuals and as a community.”
The pope called for reinforced efforts by international organizations and diplomacy, as well as religious groups.
“While war does nothing but devastate communities and the environment, without offering solutions to conflicts, diplomacy and international organizations need new life and credibility,” he wrote, “Religions, moreover, can draw on the spirituality of peoples to rekindle the desire for brotherhood and justice, the hope of peace,” he said.
“All this requires commitment, work, silence, [and] words. Let us feel united in this effort, which heavenly grace will not cease to inspire and accompany,” Francis wrote.
