It has been rightly called the ‘political manifesto’ of Pope Francis’ pontificate.
In fact, there is a lot of politics and a lot of sociology in the new encyclical All Brothers, a very long document (130 pages) that looks more like a book than a letter. Francis wants to plead the cause of universal fraternity and social friendship. To do this, he speaks of borders to be broken down, of waste to be avoided, of human rights that are not sufficiently universal, of unjust globalisation, of burdensome pandemics, of migrants to be welcomed, of open societies, of solidarity, of peoples’ rights, of local and global exchanges, of the limits of the liberal political vision, of world governance, of political love, of the recognition of the other, of the injustice of any war, of the abolition of the death penalty. These are all interesting ‘political’ themes which, were it not for some comments on the parable of the Good Samaritan that intersperse the chapters, could have been written by a group of sociologists and humanitarian workers from some international organisation, perhaps after reading, for example, Edgar Morin and Zygmunt Bauman.
Much politics, little theology
These are the themes that Pope Francis has disseminated in many speeches and in his other encyclical, Laudato si (2015), on the care for the environment. Not surprisingly, he himself is by far the most cited author in the work (about 180 times),which evidences the circular trend of his thinking (the need to be self-strengthening) and the ‘novelty’ of his teaching with respect to the traditional themes of the social doctrine of the Roman Catholic Church. The vision proposed by All Brothers is the way in which Rome sees globalisation – with the eye of a Jesuit and South American pope.
It is only in the eighth (last) chapter of the encyclical that the pope deals with the theme of fraternity with religions, and here the document becomes more ‘theological’. This section can be considered to be an interpretation of the Document on Human Fraternity for World Peace and Living Together that Francis himself signed in Abu Dhabi with the Grand Imam of Al-Azhar Ahmad Al-Tayyeb in 2019. More than just a reflection, this section is a jumble of quotations (better: self-quotations) which, by overlapping plans and juxtaposing issues, end up confusing rather than clarifying. Despite this, its basic message is sufficiently clear: we are all brothers as children of the same God. This is Pope Francis’ theological truth.
When All Brothers talks about God, it does so in general terms that can fit Muslim, Hindu, and other religions’ accounts of god, as well as the Masonic reference to the Watchmaker. To further confirm this, All Brothers ends with a ‘Prayer to the Creator’ that could be used both in a mosque and in a Masonic temple. Having removed the ‘stumbling block’ of Jesus Christ, everyone can turn to an unspecified Divinity to experiment with what it means to be ‘brothers’ – brothers in a Divinity made in the image and likeness of humanity, not brothers and sisters on the basis of the work of Jesus Christ who has died and risen for sinners. ‘All Brothers has genetically modified the Biblically understood meaning of fraternity by transferring it to common humanity. In doing so, it has lost the Biblical boundaries of the word and replaced them with pan-religious traits and contents. The papal document is deist, at best theistic, but not in line with Biblical and Trinitarian Christianity.
The tragic irony of this pope is that if, on the one hand, he presents himself as the herald of the relaunch of ‘mission’ and the ‘church which goes forth’ (Evangelii Gaudium, 2013), on the other hand, he is the pope who, with his Jesuit ambiguity and now with his Roman Catholic universalism, has made authentic Christian mission more complicated than it was. He uses the words ‘mission’, ‘announcement’, and ‘missionary church’, but he has emptied them of their Evangelical meaning, removing their Biblical reference and filling them with empty and harmless content. All Brothers shows that the mission that Pope Francis has in mind is not the preaching of the gospel in words and deeds, but the extension to all of a message of universal fraternity.
