From Rome
With 10 young people from different countrieswho spoke Spanish and had various personal stories (a former Peruvian nun, a migrant, a victim of abuse, among others), the Pope Francisco He agreed to hold a meeting in Rome (outside the Vatican) that was recorded last June as a documentary and released by the Disney production company. Entitled “Amen, Francis Responds,” the documentary dealt with several hot topics, such as the abortion but also the migrations and the sexual abuse in the church.
Directed by two Spaniards, Jordi Évole, also a journalist, and Màrius Sánchez, the film wanted to show one of the most important people in the world faced with Young of today, who have doubts about religion, about life, about others, about their rights.
And according to some, rumors have already begun to spread that the Pope’s responses to young people will not be liked by many people and will cause new disputes within the Church.
The directors, as they declared to the press, wanted to have a “close and honest conversation between one of the most influential people in the world and ten young people between the ages of 20 and 25.” And this “was a unique opportunity to bring together two worlds that normally do not touch and that sometimes clash with the postulates of the Church,” they explained.
The first images show an empty chair, while Francisco is arriving at the place by car. The boys talk, sitting in different places, including on the floor, in a room that looks like an artist’s studio, and wearing completely casual clothes that surely reflect their youth. The Pope enters the room saying: “The program was that they were going to talk to the Pope. It’s boring talking to a priest…” and the boys laughed. “Ball to the center. The game begins,” Francisco said with a smile.
And then the questions and affirmations of the young people began to rain: do you have a cell phone?; If I were not a feminist, would I be a better Christian?; The problem of pedophilia in the Church?; I used to be a Catholic, a believer, but I am no longer a Catholic; People are disappointed in the Church, not in God; Abortion exists. What do we do with these women?; Doesn’t all of this create a contradiction for you?
The abortion
An Argentine girl, Catholic and in favor of abortion, gave the Pope a green handkerchief, symbol of those who fight for legal abortion. Francisco thanked him despite everything. However, he repeated what he has been saying for a long time about abortion: “Is it lawful to hire a hit man to kill a human life?”, Tacitly alluding to abortion doctors.
“I always tell priests that when a person in that situation approaches, with a conscience, because the mark left by an abortion on a woman is hard, please don’t ask too many questions and be merciful,” said the priest. Dad.
But he also stressed that abortion must also be looked at from a scientific point of view and with a certain coldness since embryology books teach that one month after conception, DNA is practically already delineated (where all the genetic information is). “It’s not a bunch of cells but a human life.” The question is then: “Is it lawful to eliminate a human life to solve a problem?”
One of the girls reminded her that abortion exists anyway and it is a problem that gets worse when there are obstacles and prohibitions.
The Pope then added: “You have to accompany a woman who aborts, you don’t have to send her to hell at once. But it is convenient to call things by their name: it is one thing to accompany the person who did this and another thing to justify the act”.
sexual abuse in the church
One of the boys told how he had been abused as a child by a priest. And over time he had seen that the criminal continued to teach minors.
Francis then spoke of “zero tolerance”, a phrase that the Church has been upholding since the final years of Benedict XVI’s pontificate and has become a little more effective with the various measures that Francis has taken.
“If, due to the number of years that have passed, the crime prescribes, I automatically lift the prescription. I do not want this to ever prescribe,” Francisco stressed, adding that “The drama of child abuse is more scandalous in the Church because, precisely where You have to take care of people, you destroy them.”
He acknowledged, however, that in certain places there may be people who “are doing the cleaning wrong.” “If we know that he is playing badly, let the complaint come and we clean up. Zero tolerance, that is the policy of the Church”. she stressed her.
“The culture of abuse is everywhere, unfortunately” – he added – “The Church is trying to prevent its priests and nuns from abusing” (…) “Today there is a fight against abuse (…) There is priests imprisoned everywhere”, he concluded.
Francis made reference to the campaign against abuse and to Vatican regulations to combat abuse that he himself recently updated to prosecute and sentence abusers. Despite everything, organizations that defend the abused maintain that these measures are not applied in all dioceses as they should and are not enough.
immigrants
“Migrations are a serious thing,” Francisco told the young people, given that in Europe, not all children are aware of what is happening with migrants and sometimes acts of racism and discrimination against them occur. A completely current issue in many countries of the world, particularly in Europe and Africa, but not only, migration continues without finding a solution and neither the European countries where they arrive (Italy and Spain, for example) nor the European Union have managed to find the best way to deal with the problem.
“The migrant has to be received, accompanied, promoted, integrated”said Francisco, the son of Italian migrants who arrived in Argentina in the second decade of the 1900s. “There are countries in Europe, I don’t want to mention them so as not to have a diplomatic problem, that have small cities or towns that are almost empty. Towns where there are 20 elderly people. , no more, and uncultivated fields. And these countries, which are suffering a demographic winter, countries with an average age of 46 years, do not receive migrants either.”
And doesn’t that seem selfish to you? asked one of the boys. “Behind that there is an awareness of exploitation. I use you, I don’t receive you as a brother, I use you” (…) “It’s the ghost of slavery” (…) “Colonialism is behind an immature immigration policy,” he concluded.
The youth followed with questions and comments. And at the end the Pope told them: “I learned a lot from you. It did me a lot of good. I thank you for the good you have done me.”