Pope Francis urged Catholics to share their faith in the public sphere and to combat political polarization by supporting person-centred democracy.
“Let us not be fooled by easy solutions. Let us instead commit ourselves to the common good,” he said at a Catholic conference on democracy in the northern Italian city of Trieste on 7 July.
Francis was taking part in the final morning of the 50th Social Week of Catholics, an annual gathering of the Catholic Church in Italy aimed at promoting the Church’s social doctrine. The theme of the July 3-7 congress was “At the heart of democracy. Participating between history and the future.”
In his speech, the Pope spoke strongly of the importance of democracy, encouraging participation over partisanship and warning that ideologies are “seductive.”
“As Catholics, in this context, we cannot be content with a marginal or private faith,” the Pope told some 1,200 participants at the conference at the Generali Convention Centre. “This means not so much demanding to be heard, but above all having the courage to put forward proposals for justice and peace in the public debate.”
“We have something to say, but not to defend privileges. We must be a voice that denounces and proposes in a society that is often voiceless and in which too many have no voice.”
“This is political love,” Francis stressed, adding that “it is a form of charity that allows politics to live up to its responsibilities and to distance itself from polarizations, which impoverish and do not help us understand and face challenges.”
The congress of the Social Week of Catholics was held in Trieste, a port city located on a narrow strip of Italian territory in the extreme northeast of the country, bordered by the Adriatic Sea and Slovenia.
Pope Francis arrived in Trieste by helicopter from the Vatican in the early hours of 7 July. After addressing the event participants from all over Italy, he briefly met with representatives of other Christian traditions and with a group of migrants and people with disabilities.
The Pope then celebrated Mass for some 8,500 Catholics gathered in Trieste’s Piazza Unità d’Italia before boarding a helicopter to return to the Vatican.
Speaking of the Christian vision of democracy, the Pontiff cited a 1988 pastoral note from the Italian bishops, which said that democracy means “giving meaning to the commitment of all to the transformation of society; paying attention to people who are left outside or on the margins of the victorious economic processes and mechanisms; making room for social solidarity in all its forms; supporting the return of a caring ethic of the common good […]; giving meaning to the development of the country, understood […] as a global improvement of the quality of life, of collective coexistence, of democratic participation, of authentic freedom.”
“This vision, rooted in the Social Doctrine of the Church,” said Pope Francis, is not only valid “for the Italian context, but represents an exhortation for all human society and the path of all peoples.”
“Indeed, just as the crisis of democracy is transversal to different realities and nations, in the same way the attitude of responsibility in the face of social transformations is a call addressed to all Christians, wherever they are living and working, in all parts of the world,” he added.
The Pope also stressed the importance of combating the throwaway culture, as demonstrated by a self-referential power “incapable of listening to and serving people.”
He recalled the importance of the principles of solidarity and subsidiarity and condemned a certain attitude of “welfare” that does not recognize the dignity of people, calling it “social hypocrisy.”
“Everyone should feel part of a community project; no one should feel useless,” he said.