Let Us Dream

The Path to a Better Future

Pope Francis, Austen Ivereigh

• Publisher: Simon & Schuster
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781982171889
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religion

In this uplifting and practical book, written in collaboration with his biographer, Austen Ivereigh, the preeminent spiritual leader explains why we must—and how we can—make the world safer, fairer, and healthier for all people now. In the COVID crisis, the beloved shepherd of over one billion Catholics saw the cruelty and inequity of our society exposed more vividly than ever before. He also saw, in the resilience, generosity, and creativity of so many people, the means to rescue our society, our economy, and our planet. In direct, powerful prose, Pope Francis urges us not to let the pain be in vain. He begins Let Us Dream by exploring what this crisis can teach us about how to handle upheaval of any kind in our own lives and the world at large. With unprecedented candor, he reveals how three crises in his own life changed him dramatically for the better. By its very nature, he shows, crisis presents us with a choice: we make a grievous error if we try to return to some pre-crisis state. But if we have the courage to change, we can emerge from the crisis better than before.Francis then offers a brilliant, scathing critique of the systems and ideologies that conspired to produce the current crisis, from a global economy obsessed with profit and heedless of the people and environment it harms, to politicians who foment their people's fear and use it to increase their own power at their people's expense. He reminds us that Christians' first duty is to serve others, especially the poor and the marginalized, just as Jesus did. Finally, the Pope offers an inspiring and actionable blueprint for building a better world for all humanity by putting the poor and the planet at the heart of new thinking. For this plan, he draws not only on sacred sources, but on the latest findings from renowned scientists, economists, activists, and other thinkers. Yet rather than simply offer prescriptions, he shows how ordinary people acting together despite their differences can discover unforeseen possibilities.Along the way, he offers dozens of wise and surprising observations on the value of unconventional thinking, on why we must dramatically increase women's leadership in the Church and throughout society, on what he learned while scouring the streets of Buenos Aires with garbage-pickers, and much more. Let Us Dream is an epiphany, a call to arms, and a pleasure to read. It is Pope Francis at his most personal, profound and passionate. With this book and with open hearts, we can change the world.

PART ONE

A TIME TO SEE

IN THIS PAST YEAR OF change and crisis, my mind and heart have overflowed with people. People I think of and pray for, and sometimes cry with: people with names and faces, people who died without saying goodbye to those they loved, families in difficulty, even going hungry, because there’s no work.

Sometimes, when you think globally, you can be paralyzed: there are so many places of apparently ceaseless conflict, there’s so much suffering and need. I find it helps to focus on concrete situations: you see faces looking for life and love in the reality of each person, of each people. You see hope written in the story of every nation, glorious because it’s a story of sacrifice, of daily struggle, of lives broken in self-sacrifice. So rather than overwhelm you, it invites you to ponder, and to respond with hope.

You have to go to the edges of existence if you want to see the world as it is. I’ve always thought that the world looks clearer from the periphery, but in these last seven years as Pope, it has really hit home. You have to make for the margins to find a new future. When God wanted to regenerate creation, He chose to go to the margins—to places of sin and misery, of exclusion and suffering, of illness and solitude—because they were also places full of possibility: “where sin increased, grace abounded all the more” (Romans 5:20).

But you can’t go to the periphery in the abstract. I think often of persecuted peoples: the Rohingya, the poor Uighurs, the Yazidi—what ISIS did to them was truly cruel—or Christians in Egypt and Pakistan killed by bombs that went off while they prayed in church. I have a particular affection for the Rohingya people. The Rohingya are the most persecuted group on earth right now; insofar as I can, I try to be close to them. They are not Catholics or Christians, but they are our brothers and sisters, a poor people kicked from all sides who don’t know where to turn. Right now in Bangladesh there are thousands of them in refugee camps with Covid-19 running riot. Imagine what happens when the virus hits a refugee camp. It’s an injustice that cries to the heavens.

I met the Rohingya in 2017 in Dhaka: they are good people, people who want to work and take care of their families yet who are not allowed to, an entire population cornered and corralled. But what especially moves me is Bangladesh’s fraternal generosity to them. It’s a poor, densely populated nation; yet they opened their doors to 600,000 people. Their prime minister at the time told me how the Bangladeshis give up a meal each day so the Rohingya can eat. When last year, in Abu Dhabi, I was given an award—it was a significant sum—I had it sent straight to the Rohingya: a recognition of Muslims by other Muslims.

To go to the margins in a concrete way, as in this case, allows you to touch the suffering and the wants of a people but also allows you to support and encourage the potential alliances that are forming. The abstract paralyzes, but focusing on the concrete opens up possible paths.

This theme of helping others has stayed with me these past months. In lockdown I’ve often prayed for those who sought all means to save the lives of others while giving their own. I don’t mean they were careless, or reckless; they didn’t seek death, and did their best to avoid it, even if sometimes they couldn’t because they had inadequate protection. But they did not prefer saving their own lives to saving others’. So many of the nurses, doctors, and caregivers paid that price of love, as did priests and religious and ordinary people whose vocation is service. We return their love by grieving for them, and honoring them.

Whether or not they were conscious of it, their choice testified to a belief: that it is better to live a shorter life serving others than a longer one resisting that call. That’s why, in many countries, people stood at their windows or on their doorsteps to applaud them in gratitude and awe. They are the saints next door, who have awoken something important in our hearts, making credible once more what we desire to instill by our preaching.

They are the antibodies to the virus of indifference. They remind us that our lives are a gift and we grow by giving of ourselves: not preserving ourselves but losing ourselves in service.

What a sign of contradiction to the individualism and self-obsession and lack of solidarity that so dominate our wealthier societies! Could these caregivers, sadly gone from us now, be showing us the way we must now rebuild?

---

We are born, beloved creatures of our Creator, God of love, into a world that has lived long before us. We belong to God and to one another, and we are part of creation. And from this understanding, grasped by the heart, must flow our love for each other, a love not earned or bought because all we are and have is unearned gift.

How are we persuaded otherwise? How did we become blind to the preciousness of creation and the fragility of humanity? How did we forget the gifts of God and of each other? How to explain that we live in a world where nature is suffocated, where viruses spread like wildfire and bring down our societies, where heartbreaking poverty coexists with inconceivable wealth, where entire peoples like the Rohingya are consigned to the dustheap?

I believe that what has persuaded us is the myth of self-sufficiency, that whispering in our ears that the earth exists to be plundered; that others exist to meet our needs; that what we have earned or what we lack is what we deserve; that my reward is riches, even if that means that the fate of others will be poverty.

It is moments like these, when we feel a radical powerlessness that we cannot escape on our own, that we come to our senses and see the selfishness of the culture in which we are immersed, that denies the best of who we are. And if, at such moments, we repent, and look back to our Creator and to each other, we might remember the truth that God put in our hearts: that we belong to Him and to each other.

Perhaps because we have recovered, in lockdown, a little of that fraternity our hearts had painfully missed, many of us have begun to feel an impatient hope that maybe the world could be organized differently, to reflect that truth.

We have neglected and mistreated our ties with our Creator, with creation, and with our fellow creatures. But the good news is that an Ark awaits us to carry us to a new tomorrow. Covid-19 is our Noah moment, as long as we can find our way to the Ark of the ties that unite us: of love, and of a common belonging.

The Noah story in Genesis is not just about how God offered a path out of destruction, but about all that followed. The regeneration of human society meant a return to respecting limits, curbing the reckless pursuit of wealth and power, looking out for the poor and those living on the edges. The introduction of the Sabbath and the Jubilee—moments of recovery and reparation, forgiving debts and restoring relationships—were key to that regeneration, giving time for the earth to bounce back, for the poor to find fresh hope, for people to find their souls again.

That is the grace available to us now, the light in the midst of our tribulation. Let us not throw it away.

---

Sometimes, when I think about the challenges before us, I feel overwhelmed. But I’m never hopeless. We are accompanied. We are being sifted, yes, and it is painful; many of us feel powerless and even afraid. But there is also an opportunity in this crisis to come out better.

What the Lord asks of us today is a culture of service, not a throwaway culture. But we can’t serve others unless we let their reality speak to us.

To go there, you have to open your eyes and let the suffering around you touch you, so that you hear the Spirit of God speaking to you from the margins. That’s why I need to warn you about three disastrous ways of escaping reality that block growth and the connection with reality, and especially the action of the Holy Spirit. I’m thinking of narcissism, discouragement, and pessimism.

Narcissism takes you to the mirror to look at yourself, to center everything on you so that’s all you see. You end up so in love with the image you created that you end up drowning in it. Then news is only good if it’s good for you personally; and if the news is bad, it’s because you are its chief victim.

Discouragement leads you to lament and complain about everything so that you no longer see what is around you nor what others offer you, only what you think you’ve lost. Discouragement leads to sadness in the spiritual life, which is a worm that gnaws away at you from the inside. Eventually it closes you in on yourself and you can’t see anything beyond yourself.

And then there’s pessimism, which is like a door you shut on the future and the new things it can hold; a door you refuse to open in case one day there’ll be something new on your doorstep.

These are three ways that block you, paralyze you, and cause you to focus on those things that stop you from moving ahead. They are all in the end about preferring the illusions that mask reality rather than discovering all we might be able to achieve. They are siren voices that make you a stranger to yourself. To act against them, you have to commit to the small, concrete, positive actions you can take, whether you’re sowing hope or working for justice.

One of my hopes for this crisis we are living is that we come back to contact with reality. We need to move from the virtual to the real, from the abstract to the concrete, from the adjective to the noun. There are so many real, “flesh-and-blood” brothers and sisters, people with names and faces, deprived in ways that we have not been able to see, listen to, or recognize because we have been so focused on ourselves. But now some of these blindfolds have fallen away, and we have a chance to see with new eyes.

The crisis has made visible the throwaway culture. The Covid health measures have exposed, for example, how many of our brothers and sisters do not have housing where social distancing is possible, nor clean water to wash. Think of so many families who live on top of each other in our cities, in the villas miseria, as in Argentina we call the slums and shantytowns, of so many places around the world. Think of the migrant holding centers and refugee camps where people can spend years unwelcome in any place, crammed together. Think of the way they are denied the most elemental rights: to hygiene, to food, to a dignified life, of how refugee camps turn dreams of a better life into torture chambers.

Talking to some shantytown priests during the pandemic, I asked them: How does a family in a shantytown observe social distancing to avoid contamination? How do they obey the health regulations without clean water? The crisis exposes these injustices. What will we do about them?

If Covid gets into a refugee camp it can create a real catastrophe. I’m thinking for example of the camps in Lesbos, which I visited in 2016 with my brothers Bartholomew and Ieronymos, and of films I’ve seen of the way migrants are exploited in Libya.² You have to ask: Is this drama just about Covid or is it also about what Covid has uncovered? Is this just a virus pandemic and an economic meltdown, or is it about widening our gaze, the way we take in all these human dramas?

Look at the U.N. statistics about the children without schooling in Africa, the children going hungry in Yemen, and many other tragic cases. Just look at the kids. It’s clear that being stopped in our tracks by Covid has to make us think about all this. What worries me is that already there are plans afoot to restore the socioeconomic structure that preceded Covid, ignoring all those tragedies.

We have to find ways for those who have been cast aside to act, so that they become the agents of a new future. We have to involve people in a common project that doesn’t just benefit the small number who govern and make decisions. We have to change the way society itself operates in the wake of Covid.

When I speak of change I don’t just mean that we have to take better care of this or that group of people. I mean that those people who are now on the edges become the protagonists of social change.

That’s what’s in my heart.

---

Let’s consider a big obstacle to change, the existential myopia that allows us defensively to select what we see. Existential myopia is always about holding on to something we’re afraid to let go of. Covid has unmasked the other pandemic, the virus of indifference, which is the result of constantly looking away, telling ourselves that because there is no immediate or magic solution, it is better not to feel anything.

We see it in the story of the poor man Lazarus in Luke’s Gospel. The rich man was his neighbor; he knew perfectly well who Lazarus was—even his name. But he was indifferent, he didn’t care. To the rich man, Lazarus’s misfortune was his own affair. He probably said “Poor thing!” every time he passed him at the gate, peering at him over an abyss of indifference. He knew Lazarus’s life but didn’t let it affect him. This is what ends up creating a breach between the indifference that we feel on the one hand and our thoughts on the other. Hence people judge situations without empathy, without any ability to walk for a time in the other’s shoes.

I saw a photography exhibition here in Rome. One of the photos was called just that: Indifference. A lady is leaving a restaurant in winter, well wrapped up against the cold: leather coat, hat, gloves, all the apparel of the well-to-do. At the door of the restaurant a woman is seated on a crate, poorly dressed, shivering in the street, holding out her hand to the lady, who looks elsewhere. That photo touched a lot of people.

Here in Italy you often hear people say che me ne frega when you have a problem. It means “So what? What’s it got to do with me?” In Argentina we say: y a mí qué? They’re little words that reveal a mindset. Some Italians claim you need a healthy dose of menefreghismo—“so-whatism”—to get through life, because if you start worrying about what you see, how are you ever going to relax? This attitude ends up armor-plating the soul; that is, indifference bulletproofs it, so that certain things just bounce off. One of the dangers of this indifference is that it can become normal, silently seeping into our lifestyles and value judgments. We cannot get used to indifference.

The attitude of the Lord is completely different, at the opposite pole. God is never indifferent. The essence of God is mercy, which is not just seeing and being moved but responding with action. God knows, feels, and comes running out to look for us. He doesn’t just wait. Whenever in the world you have a response that is immediate, close, warm, and concerned, offering a response, that’s where God’s Spirit is present.

Indifference blocks the Spirit by closing us to the possibilities that God is waiting to offer us, possibilities that overflow our mental schemes and categories. Indifference doesn’t let you feel the motions of the Spirit that this crisis must provoke in our hearts. It blocks the chance of discernment. The indifferent person is closed to the new things that God is offering us.

That’s why we must become aware of this so-whatism and open ourselves to the blows that reach us now from every corner of the globe.

When that happens, we are flooded by doubts and questions: How to respond? What can we do? How can I help? What is God asking of us at this time?

And in asking these questions—not rhetorically, but silently, with attentive hearts, perhaps before a lit candle—we open ourselves to the action of the Spirit. We can start to discern, to see new possibilities, at least in the little things that surround us, or that we do each day. And then, as we commit to those small things, we start to imagine another way of living together, of serving our fellow beloved creatures. We can begin to dream of real change, change that is possible.

---

In these difficult times, I take hope from the last words of Jesus in Matthew’s Gospel: “I am with you always, to the end of the age” (Matthew 28:20). We are not alone. That is why we need not be afraid to go down into the dark nights of problems and suffering. We know that we don’t have the answers all ready and neatly packaged, yet we trust that the Lord will open for us doors we had no idea were there.

Of course, we hesitate. Faced with so much suffering, who does not balk? It is fine to tremble a little. Fear of the mission can, in fact, be a sign of the Holy Spirit. We feel, at once, both inadequate to the task and called to it. There is a warmth in our hearts that reassures us the Lord is asking us to follow Him.

When we face choices and contradictions, asking what God’s will is opens us to unexpected possibilities. I describe these new possibilities as “overflow,” because they often burst the banks of our thinking. Overflow happens when we humbly set before God the challenge we face, and ask for help. We call this “discernment of spirits,” because ...