PEACE AND WAR

First Interview — February 2016

I have never met Pope Francis. With the translator, Father Louis de Romanet, a friend, I step inside the modest residence at Saint Martha's House,just beside Saint Peter's Basilica. We are made to wait in a small, chilly room. Silence. A certain anxiety. All of a sudden, he comes in, warmly. Immediately, there is that deep and gentle gaze. We introduce ourselves. The discussions begin. Everything gradually becomes natural and direct. Something is happening. He replies seriously, the dialogue gets going, punctuated by laughter, which is very frequent throughout the twelve conversations. Humor, connivance, unfinished phrases and natural communication beyond words, in looks and gestures. No time limit. After an hour and a half he asks to stop because he has to go and see his confessor. I tell him he needs to. We laugh. We agree on a new date. He opens the door and leaves as simply as he came in. The intense emotion of seeing that white-clad silhouette disappearing. Obvious frailty, and the huge power of symbols. We talked about serious matters, peace and war, the place of the Church in globalization and history.

POPE FRANCIS: You go first.

DOMINIQUE WOLTON: In January 2016 in Lesbos you said something strange and beautiful: "We are all migrants, and we are all refugees." At a time when the European and Western powers are closing their doors, what can we say, apart from this magnificent phrase? What can we do?

POPE FRANCIS: There is something I said — and migrant children wore it on their T-shirts: "I'm not a danger, I am in danger." Our theology is a theology of migrants. Because we all are, since the call to Abraham, with all the migrations of the people of Israel, and Jesus himself was a refugee, an immigrant, and existentially, by virtue of our faith, we are migrants. Human dignity necessarily implies "being on one's way." When a man or a woman is not on their way, they are a mummy, they are a museum piece. The individual is not alive.

It isn't just a matter of "being" on the way, but of "making" one's way. You make your way. There is a Spanish poem that says: "you make your path by walking." And to walk is to communicate with others; when you walk, you meet people. Walking is perhaps at the root of the culture of meeting: people meet, they communicate, whether well, through friendship, or badly, through war, which is one extreme. Great friendship, and war too, are forms of communication, a communication of aggression of which mankind is capable. When I say man, I mean man and woman. When human individuals decide to stop walking, they fail. They fail in their human vocation. Walking, always being on the way, means always communicating. You may be on the wrong path, you may fall — as in the story of the thread of Ariadne, like Ariadne and Theseus, you may find yourself in a maze — but you walk, you walk, perhaps in the wrong direction, but you walk, you communicate. We have trouble communicating, but we communicate nonetheless. I say that because people who are "on their way" must not be rejected, because that would amount to a rejection of communication.

DOMINIQUE WOLTON: But migrants are being rejected and driven out of Europe?

POPE FRANCIS: If Europeans want to keep themselves to themselves, they'll have to have children! I think the French government launched actual plans, laws to give assistance to large families, but other countries didn't: they prefer the idea of not having children. For different reasons, using different methods.

DOMINIQUE WOLTON: In the spring of 2016, Europe signed a crazy agreement to close the border between Europe and Turkey.

POPE FRANCIS: That's why I keep coming back to the walking man. Man is fundamentally a communicating creature. A person who is mute, in the sense that he doesn't know how to communicate, is a person who cannot "walk," who cannot "travel ..."

DOMINIQUE WOLTON: A year and a half after those words that you said in Lesbos, the situation has got worse. A lot of people admired what you said, but afterward there was no follow-up. What would you say a year later?

POPE FRANCIS: The problem begins in the countries that the refugees come from. Why do they leave their home? Because of a lack of work, or because of war. Those are the two main reasons. Lack of work, because they have been exploited — I'm thinking of the Africans. Europe has exploited Africa ... I don't know if one can say that! But some examples of European colonization ... yes, they exploited Africa. I read that, with his first act of parliament, one African head of state proposed a law of reforestation for his country — and it was passed. The global economic powers had cut down all the trees. Reforestation. The land is dry from having been over-exploited, and there is no work. The first thing that needs to be done — and I said this when I spoke to the United Nations, to the Council of Europe, everywhere — is to find the sources of new jobs, and invest in them. It's also true that Europe needs to invest at home. Because there's an unemployment problem here too. The other reason for migration is war. If you invest, people will find jobs and won't need to leave, but if there is war, they will have to flee anyway. And who's making war? Who's giving them weapons? We are.

DOMINIQUE WOLTON: Not least the French ...

POPE FRANCIS: Really? Other nations too; I know they're involved with arms dealing on a bigger or smaller scale, with all those things. We supply them with weapons so that they destroy themselves. People complain that migrants are coming to destroy us. But we're the ones who are sending them the weapons! Look at the Middle East. It's the same thing. Who's supplying the weapons? To Daesh, to those who support Assad in Syria, to the anti-Assad rebels? Who's supplying the weapons? When I say "we," I mean the West. I'm not accusing any country in particular. The West — and some non-Western countries also sell weapons. We're the ones who supply the weapons. We cause chaos, people flee, and what do we do? We say: "Come on, sort yourselves out!" I don't want to express myself too harshly, but we have no right not to help the people who arrive here. They are human beings. A politician said to me, "The one thing that overrules all agreements is human rights." And there you have a European leader with a clear vision of the problem.

DOMINIQUE WOLTON: This attitude of rejection can also encourage hatred, because today, with the globalization of the image, the internet, television, the whole world can see...