THE "SICK" POPE

Angelo Scelzo

The symptoms are obvious, eloquent, to everyone: Pope John Paul II is "sick". And the diagnosis of the illness, in the eyes of many, is alarming. The Pope of a world without love and without hope does not want to hear of it, and he cannot resign himself if they slowly try to curtail the horizons of humanity or to ration the doses of generosity assigned to each person, like eyes looking from the soul.

This is his real illness. Moreover, it is a serious illness, since its symptoms are totally incomprehensible to the instruments by which we normally measure the ordinary course of affairs and events. Now that the walls have collapsed, some have tried to dismiss the whole affair by erecting a virtual poster saying "work in progress" next to the rubble, in the hope of settling things quickly and at best placating some conscience. Even that wind of hope, so strong and overpowering, seems to have abated or been scattered goodness knows where, so that a time that we can still count in days seems already a long time ago.

A world like this, flat as a smooth sea, is an ideal condition for strategies of globalization. A world like this is ready to be moulded effortlessly in the image and to the advantage of new economic potentates. The physiognomy that emerges is that of a planet-earth that is reconverted from its vocation as the common home of the human family, to an immense supermarket with increasingly reserved and selected access. In Paris, however, the young people showed how even a great metropolis can be surrounded by signs of boundless solidarity, symbolized by the splendid human chain which, in the interlinking of hands, encircled and enfolded every street in a single embrace.

«To a world fraught with divisions of every kind, frozen in mutual indifference, exposed to the anguish of global alienation, the young people - the Pope declared at the general audience of Wednesday 27 August - proclaimed a message from Paris: faith in the crucified and risen Christ can establish a new brotherhood in which we accept one another because we love one another».

Do we perhaps need to add something in order to understand why young people gather more and more around John Paul II? From the rubble of the walls to the no less cruel barriers of an ever more selective and unrestrained consumerism, the same voice continues to be raised. No sign of political equidistance. Instead a sure sign of unconditional and irrevocable anxiety for mankind.

Anxiety for mankind. This, there can be no doubt about it, is the Pope's "sickness", the unrecognized anomaly before a society which at times seems satisfied by the mediocrity that envelops and surrounds it like a reassuring protective cloak. So in the low game before life, a Pope old in years, who becomes a teacher of hope and courage for the world, a witness of optimism who truly makes the immense crowd of young people who follow him to the four corners of the world an icon of God's smile, becomes incomprehensible, a reason for scandal. His total self-giving, the way in which he offers up his every effort for others, jolts and makes an impression in a world, which, while striving to enlarge its frontiers, finds itself ever more withdrawn into itself.

There is no room of selfishness, for self-interests, for low horizons on the road the Pope indicates; on the road John Paul II has begun to travel calling around him the nation of young people like "hoisted sails" of hope that spans the world. If the crowd does not scatter, but becomes increasingly bigger and more impressive, it is because it is precisely this road that fully belongs to young people.

John Paul II parades the symptoms of this "sickness" at every step. And the sign of contradiction becomes increasingly sharper the more the news, in its dramatic daily course, takes it upon itself to bring disheartenment, as if to convince us, in the harshness of events, that it is more prudent not to have attention for, but to pay attention to people.