"The Pope, immigration and the Catholic Church before the Nations"
Pierre Manent
Le Figaro
Paris, September 25, 2023
Op-Ed: By criticizing European nations over immigration, the Pope shows little regard for the singularity of each human community, analyzes the philosopher. It's to forget how indispensable families, cities, nations and the Church are to each other respectively.
***
| Pierre Manent's latest publication |
Pope Francis has said it again: he did not come to France, but to Marseille. The French, however, need not be mortified by this, since, as he emphasized, his firm resolve is not to visit any "major European country." It doesn't matter that he is warmly and eagerly received by the Prime Minister and the President of the French Republic, that he is protected at every second by the French police, gendarmes and military, it doesn't matter that the city of Marseille is today the city in France most dependent on the goodwill of the government and the resources of the State: for him this nation, like other European nations, cannot be the object of his care nor the recipient of his intentions, as far as he is concerned it doesn't exist. "Marseilles and the Mediterranean" is the circumscription from which the truth of the present world emerges, and from which we must draw the principal motives for our actions.
On the contrary, the popes who were his predecessors had shown a lively and friendly attention to the different European nations, knowing how closely the history of the Church and of Christianity was interwoven with the history of the European nations. Even today, each nation's physiognomy is strongly marked by the way it received the Christian religion and by the character of its relations with the Catholic Church. The popes had something to say to each of our nations, as can be seen from Pope Benedict XVI's addresses to the British Parliament, the Bundestag, and the Bernardins in Paris, in three countries where the Roman Church was the subject and object of bitter conflict. The Church's respect for nations stems not only from our history, but is an expression of her respect for human communities, for all the mediations through which humanity gathers and governs itself. As we know, the Church sees herself as the mediator between humanity and God Himself, as the conciliar constitution Lumen gentium explains in magnificent terms.