Sadness overwhelmed us.  Hugo Chávez, the last great hero of the pantheon of the Patria Grande, had passed into immortality, after leaving traces of his life in his last campaign that, ominously, ended under the torrential Caracas rain surrounded by the love of his Bolivarian people.  Economic interests raised their glasses and toasted: “Long live cancer!” much as they had when our own Evita died, and as they do every time one of our own leaves this world. March began, the summer was ending, autumn seemed fatally to be arriving, to hide the sun of our hopes for the poor of our America.

 

A few days later, in a faraway walled city, like a relic of other times, cloistered in hermetic secrecy, an indecipherable struggle was taking pace in silence, where little over a hundred men, all too human, were electing the pastor of 1.200 million Catholics. Perhaps, as some said, Chávez helped from heaven. Maybe the Third World cardinals acted firmly in search of real change in the Church.  In any event, what happened was a miracle: against all possibilities, in spite of treacherous operations of the Empire, a Latin American Jesuit, a friend of the poor, of unimpeachable conduct, enormous courage and exemplary humility, came to the throne of Saint Peter.  A comrade was elected Pope.

 

The world was astonished when, in his first words, after bowing to the people gathered in St. Peter’s Square, with his old shoes and his cross of iron, Francis called for a poor Church for the poor. Cardinal Bergoglio was little known outside [of Argentina] and little understood in his own country, in spite of his emphatic pastoral work and his vigorous contribution to Christian social thinking. Nevertheless, economic interests followed his growing influence in the Church to the point where they undertook a fierce campaign of defamation against him, financed mainly by the Ford Foundation, the National Endowment for Democracy and the British Council.

 

As usual, the propaganda was served up in different segments to progressive and conservative elements of the public.  Communist and reactionary, betrayer and subversive, obscurantist and heretical, the corporate media tried to weaken his image on all fronts regardless of contradictions and confabulations.  They succeeded to some extent, to the point where many comrades added their voices to those of the most recalcitrant elements in a prejudiced repudiation of the new Pope.

 

As it turned out, the lies fell like a house of cards in the face of the witness of thousands of workers, campesinos, activists and Third World priests who came out to show the world who Bergoglio was.  Francis, in his first acts and words, confirmed the fact that he had not left his convictions at the door of the Vatican and awakened an overwhelming wave of popular sympathy. The powers took note of the social climate and changed their strategy, reinterpreting him as a good priest, who is nice and easy going... moderate and inoffensive.  Over the next few months, Francis was to show evidence of the fact that the sweetness of fame and power had not succeeded in domesticating him.

 

 

During the ceremony of inauguration, up in front, before the powerful people of this planet, there was a robust man, his skin baked by the sun and work, wearing his uniform of work and struggle, who looked out-of-tune among the hundreds of highly preened dignitaries.  He was Sergio Sánchez, a recycler from a shantytown and an activist of the Argentinian Movimiento de Trabajadores Excluidos (Excluded Workers’ Movement: MTE for the Spanish acronym).  The presence of Sergio was no accident. It proclaimed the popular orientation of the new Pontiff, his firm option for the poor and his solid support for social movements.

 

As a bishop, Bergoglio had already developed an incessant but discreet support for workers and their organizations.  The anecdotes are without number: solidarity with persecuted militants, support for campesino organizations, protection for pedlars, promotion of “shantytown priests”, accompanying factory workers who had reopened closed factories and a forthright attitude of struggle against exploitation and exclusion, traffic in persons, drug-trafficking and the consumer culture. All this, added to his legendary austerity and simple life style, his constant interpolation against the self-satisfied life style of the petty bourgeoisie, postmodern consumerist hedonism and “lite progressivism”, had made him an uncomfortable figure not only for the reactionary right but also for the liberals of the centre left.

 

Every year, together with a number of people’s organizations, he celebrated a mass under the watchword “for a society without slaves or excluded persons” in which workers were allowed to speak out and express their wants and vindications in blunt terms.  His homilies are a clear demonstration of the Franciscan ideals, and they are worth reading (1).

 

The social thinking of Francis is clearly enunciated in his apostolic exhortation Evangelii Gaudium.  His critique of capitalism, especially in its neoliberal garb, is up front, explicit and structural.  These are not simply descriptions of misery.  Francis gets to the heart of the matter, attacking the matrix of Capital, its essence: the maximization of profit that he tersely describes as “an idolatrous cult to the god Money.”

 

For greater clarity, the document says: “this economy kills.”  He qualifies as “crude and naive” the hope that the Market and those who hold economic power will “trickle down” equity and social inclusion.  He denounces the terrible inequalities and openly asserts that their origin is found in the capitalist market and financial speculation.  He repudiates repressive solutions against the excluded and underhanded domination of those who “look for a solution in an ‘education’ that would tranquilize them, making them tame and harmless.”

 

This transcendent document proposes a revolutionary programme.  He does not beat about the bush in repudiating the tyranny of private property and calling for the common destiny of all goods. “Not to share one’s wealth with the poor is to steal from them and to take away their livelihood.  It is not our own goods that we hold, but theirs.”  He exhorts us to “create a new mentality that thinks in terms of community, that gives priority to the lives of everyone over the appropriation of goods for some” and notes that “while the problems of the poor are not radically [!!] resolved, renouncing the absolute autonomy of markets and financial speculation and attacking the structural causes of inequity, the problems of the world will not be resolved and in the end, no problem will be resolved. Inequity is the root of all social evils.”

 

He denounces the destructive character of individualist and alienated consumer culture that is promoted by capital and tells us that “the great risk of today’s world, with its multiple and overwhelming offer of consumer goods, is an individualistic sadness that springs from the comfortable and avaricious heart, from the sickening search for superficial pleasures, from the isolated conscience.”

 

The rejection of imperialism, fundamentally in its militarist variant, has also figured in the words and actions of Francis.  His transcendent contribution to avoid the bombardment of Syria leaves no doubts about his tenacious conflict with the Empire of Money.  Denouncing the dirty hands of the Military Industrial Complex behind the war-making adventures, pointing out the shameful utilization of human rights to justify acts of violence, Francis takes his place clearly in the anti-imperialist camp.  Similarly, on repeated occasions he has appealed to the notion of the Patria Grande and the figures of San Martín and Bolivar, an explicit appeal to the unity of our peoples.

 

To attack the structural causes of poverty, to propose radical solutions, to confront the Empire of Money, to vindicate the Patria Grande, to repudiate consumerist individualism, to construct a communitarian mentality and to propose a society of brothers, is the strategic orientation of Franciscan thought and is without doubt a revolutionary project.

 

 

As was said above, the special relationship of Francis with popular movements is not limited to a critique of those who torture and oppress them.  Nor is it limited to accompanying the poor and the excluded.  Francis also promotes organizations and militants.  He calls for popular organization, social struggle, committed militancy, the exercise of policy in search of justice, and a preferential, almost exclusive, unremitting option for the poor.

 

Since becoming Pope, in December of last year, through the Pontifical Academy, he convoked a colloquium in which the author of this article and João Pedro Stedile of the Movimento sem Terra were able, for the first time, to present the position of popular movements on the phenomenon of exclusion (2).  In this framework the document “Capitalismo de exclusion, periferias sociales y movimientos populares” (3) (“Capitalism of exclusion, social peripheries and popular movements”) was presented, and later published (4).  In this way, a new front of accumulation for the popular sector is opened, and we have an obligation to take advantage of this.

 

The possibility of coordination and collaboration between this renewed Church and our own organizations is potentially infinite.  There is no doubt that we can count on support for our struggles for social justice, for land, for work, for dignity, for nature and for a communitarian democracy with a leadership role that can overcome the decadent bourgeois pseudo-democracy and the capitalism of bankers and transnational corporations.  This new encounter between organizations and the Church can become an explosive cocktail for the Empire, and because of this, the think tanks of the world economic establishment – the Financial Times, the Tea Party, CNN, etc., have intensified their campaign against Francis.

 

Having said this, I nevertheless believe that the most important contribution of Francis to Peoples goes beyond the contemporary situation.  This is not rooted exclusively in the possibilities of cooperation, in his support for one or another struggle.  Francis can function as a wind that carries the seeds of solidarity and struggle in the awareness of millions of men and women around the world.  Francis claims to the world the primacy of man over Capital, of human values before market values.  The outcome of this is unpredictable, uncontrollable, but without doubt will contribute to creating the conditions for a veritable militant landslide among Christians around the world.

 

It is for us to care for these scattered seeds, as our campesino comrades do, to water the seeds so that they grow and multiply, and harvest their revolutionary fruits for the service of our peoples.

 

 

Some social organizations have raised questions.  Liberal tendencies have attempted to hide the role of thousands of Catholic priests in the popular struggles of yesterday and today, distorting the image of the Church and reducing it to that of a medieval refuge for inquisitors, parasites, reactionaries and pedophiles (of which there are certainly many).  The martyrs, those who lost their lives for their people and the many who shared their struggles are forgotten and minimized.  As Chomsky said, in the media and military scene, “The USA has launched a bitter, brutal and violent war against the Church” (5).

 

Digging into the real history of our organizations, of the struggles of our peoples, of the search for political sovereignty, economic independence and social justice, of resistance against imperialist penetration and the culture of empty consumerism, we see at every step the presence of thousands of children of the Church, from laymen and women to bishops who struggle and have struggled together with organizations of the people, even on many occasions contributing to their birth.  These have been silenced. And with Francis have recovered their voices.  The new generations should know this history!  We must not let the illustrated liberals from the First World recount the history of Our America to us!

 

Beyond the prejudices stirred up and the burying of social history, there are questions concerning the position of the Church on serious contemporary themes such as abortion, decriminalization of drugs or same-sex marriage.  This is not the place to discuss any of these questions in depth. These are not simple or obvious questions, they do not have single definitions nor do they lack defenders in the centres of power.  What is important to understand is that these contradictions should not be obstacles to the unity of popular sectors at this stage and this unity, it is clear, includes committed Catholics.

 

Our mission as popular movements is, I believe, to see beyond these contradictions that are being stirred up, to fix our sights on the basic issue and unite all our forces to disrupt the structures of economic, social and political power.  As Stedile says, capital has the money, the Empire has the arms, and the peoples have the numbers.  If we find ourselves divided over these things, we cannot defeat our powerful enemy who continues accumulating gains at the expense of suffering and exclusion on the part of our comrades.

 

Enough of false antagonisms!  We must regroup popular forces on a global basis to defeat capitalism and create a society of brothers. Cooperation among revolutionary militants and the Franciscan Catholic Church is a strategic task. We have a great ally and we must take advantage of this moment. Unity, unity, unity must be our emblem!  Up with the poor of this world!

 

 

 

– Juan Grabois, an Argentinian lawyer, teaches in the University of Buenos Aires (UBA). He is an activist in the Movimiento de Trabajadores Excluidos (MTE) and a member of the National coordination of the Confederación de Trabajadores de la Economía Popular (CTEP).  In the framework of Argentinian social struggles he developed a close relationship with the then Cardinal Jorge Bergoglio.  At the present time, he collaborates with Francis in promoting people’s organizations and the struggle against social exclusion. .

 

Notas:

 

[1] http://cartoneando.org.ar/content/homil%C3%ADas-de-francisco-i-desde-2008-2013-en-la-misas-por-los-cartoneros-y-contra-la-trata-lab

 

[2] http://alainet.org/active/69869

 

[3] http://www.casinapioiv.va/content/dam/accademia/pdf/sv123/sv123-grabois.pdf

 

[4] See the complete debate in this link: http://www.casinapioiv.va/content/accademia/en/publications/scriptavaria/excluded.html

 

[5] http://actualidad.rt.com/actualidad/view/114192-chomsky-eeuu-asesinar-evangelio-america-latina

 

* This text is part of the magazine América Latina en Movimiento, No. 492 (febrero 2014) entitled "Francisco y los signos de los tiempos" (Francisco and the signs of the times) http://alainet.org/publica/492.phtml