Pope Francis has this week addressed the European Parliament and the Council of Europe in Strasbourg, calling leaders to a reawakened sense of society and the human person.
The two speeches were given on a brief four-hour visit to eastern France. In both speeches, Pope Francis emphasised the need for the European Union to focus on what was truly important, and not let narrow and reductionist views of the human person and society become the norm for the future of the European continent.
In his first speech at the European Parliament, Pope Francis encouraged parliamentarians to remember the vision of the human person at the foundation of the European Union: that the person is not “a citizen or an economic agent”, but someone “endowed with transcendent dignity”.
In speaking on dignity, the Holy Father applauded the EU’s continual commitment to human rights, but warned against detaching rights from the duties of people in a social context. He said, “unless the rights of each individual are harmoniously ordered to the greater good, those rights will end up being considered limitless and consequently will become a source of conflicts and violence.”
Pope Francis also noted the combination of selfish lifestyles and individualism leading to loneliness. Such practices and ideas view persons as “mere cogs in a machine” and “items of consumption”. Such a situation, the Holy Father said, produces “the result that… whenever a human life no longer proves useful for that machine, it is discarded with few qualms, as in the case of the terminally ill, the elderly who are abandoned and uncared for, and children who are killed in the womb.” The solution for Pope Francis is in a reconnection of Europe with the “transcendent dimension”.
Finally, Pope Francis urged European Parliamentarians to allow the gifts of each human person to grow through “the fundamental cell” of the family, to promote care for the environment, to “restore dignity to labour”, and to issue a combined response to care for migrants journeying across the Mediterranean.
In his second speech given at the Council of Europe, Pope Francis offered a guide for the Council in the form of a poplar tree, which can only withstand the winds in its tall branches through being deeply rooted in truth. Such a truth, the Holy Father said, is opposed to selfishness and an “individualistic conception of rights”. He said, “This kind of individualism leads to human impoverishment and cultural aridity, since it effectively cuts off the nourishing roots on which the tree grows.”
Pope Francis invited the Council of Europe to be reinvigorated through intercultural and inter-generational dialogue across all aspects of European society to provide a way forward for the continent.
The four-hour visit marked the shortest recorded apostolic journey in history.
