By Bob Williams, Stevensville
I got mighty frustrated trying to understand words Pope Francis was voicing, in front of the US Congress. Since he was reading from a carefully composed manuscript, how come no text line across the screen telling us what the dickens he was saying? After awhile I went and read what he said in his short discourse = homily, of carefully constructed but complex sentences.
Here’s one place to read a full transcript:
http://time.com/4048176/pope-francis-us-visit-congress-transcript/
About a quarter of the way through the homily to our Congress, also to the “entire people” of America, is the following long paragraph. Note how each of its last two sentences are composed with a lot of independent clauses.
“Our world is increasingly a place of violent conflict, hatred and brutal atrocities, committed even in the name of God and of religion. We know that no religion is immune from forms of individual delusion or ideological extremism. This means that we must be especially attentive to every type of fundamentalism, whether religious or of any other kind. A delicate balance is required to combat violence perpetrated in the name of a religion, an ideology or an economic system, while also safeguarding religious freedom, intellectual freedom and individual freedoms. But there is another temptation which we must especially guard against: the simplistic reductionism which sees only good or evil; or, if you will, the righteous and sinners. The contemporary world, with its open wounds which affect so many of our brothers and sisters, demands that we confront every form of polarization which would divide it into these two camps.”
At the end of his homily to us and our Congress, he read out a very complex sentence of maybe a dozen phrases. Here is a format and spacing of that sentence which makes sense to me: “A nation can be considered great when it defends liberty as Lincoln did, when it fosters a culture which enables people to ‘dream’ of full rights for all their brothers and sisters, as Martin Luther King sought to do; when it strives for justice and the cause of the oppressed, as Dorothy Day did by her tireless work, [when it strives for] the fruit of a faith which becomes dialogue and sows peace in the contemplative style of Thomas Merton.”
Time for concluding thoughts. I had difficulty understanding a tenth of what Pope Francis was saying!
How come no teleprompter and text line across the screen?
How come the big long campaign of disdain against Pope Francis?
1) Because the big campaign has successfully generated national media and momentum to focus away from his teaching, his message. While representing his teaching as often devoid of meaning. Writing for Rolling Stone, even independent minded, reliable Matt Taibbi chimed in with the disdain campaign.
2) Because for some players, USA politics are like competitive sports. Mission is to deny opportunity to the opposition.
3) Because disdain campaigner financiers do not want people to hear what Pope Francis has been saying about climate change! For instance, have you not read what he said about climate change? Have you not yet seen what he said?
And when you do your own thinking about his teachings on climate change, what might be your takeaway summary statements, you would use in conversations?
Here’s what I get from his recent teachings: ‘We’ve already talked about moral responsibilities to deal with changing climates. Now, I want to dialogue about commitment, to moral responsibility to deal with climate change.’