Before the
visit of Pope John Paul the Second to Ireland in 1979 an Irish daily newspaper
asked me to write a speech I would like him to give in Phoenix Park. It was
published but I'm sure his speech writers did not notice ........
All of us in our own way worship this creating and redeeming God -
generation after generation of us finds new, fresh, enlightened ways of
worshiping Him are possible than we have dreamed of. We Jews, Muslims,
Christians, Humanists and so many others with rich and varied traditions,
beliefs and customs are very precious to each other, because we have so many
insights to share with each other, so many experiences of how God has accepted
and responded to our worship.
Let us appreciate each other.
I am aware that there is in Ireland today a feeling of
self-disgust. Even your own writers are competing with each other in
saying that you are evil people, prone to violence, hypocritical. My dear
friends, you are none of these things, any more than your brothers and sisters
in the rest of the world. We, you and I, are as Paul remarked about
himself with pride, citizens of no mean city. Always remember that, and
remember too that many of those who bitterly attack their fellow citizens today
would become friends with the same people tomorrow, would share if their fortunes
would be increased by doing so. It is the way of the world, and those of
us who belong to the Christian Church have many centuries of experience of what
the world's ways can be.
We also – and I speak of Christians because I am one of them –
have often done what we criticise in others, used the world's ways shamelessly
for our own advantage, pretending it was God's will that we should beat and
steal and conquer.
But Jesus Our Lord said that He “knew what was in man”.
Indeed He did and He has passed on to us some of that insight and knowledge,
which in spite of our materialistic values we have never completely lost.
I know that among those who kiss my hand today there are some men
who are unfaithful to their wives, who would betray their friends, would do
almost anything for money and power. I have heard it said that I too,
your Pope, desire power and the good life more than justice. Please do
not think I come to your Country, which has its own poverty still, although I
am permitted to see little of it, pretending that I do not live in splendour at
home or pretending that I would have considered refusing to become Pope because
a Pope has to live in a palace while most of his friends live in insecurity,
some in misery. Perhaps I should have refused, and said, No, I cannot be
one who dresses in fine linen, because that is the kind of person you find in
Kings' houses.... No, I cannot become your Pope, you surround your Pope
with ambassadors, and merchants, and important people…
Or perhaps I should have said, Yes, I shall become your Pope provided
you prepare a house for me, a house on a corner with two storeys and small
rooms.
Some of you, my friends in Ireland, join with your brothers and
sisters in other countries asking, sometimes demanding, that your Pope and your
bishops leave their fine houses, their palaces, give up the trappings of power
and in this way show that we are coming nearer to Christ.
My dear friend Archbishop Helder Camara says plainly and
bluntly, “One of the tasks of the Church is to liberate the Papacy.”
I come to you, dear friends, as a slave. So I look with
sympathy and longing on those men and women who find it necessary to kiss my
hand now and expedient to tell lies to their friends by evening. Because
we share a common humanity which needs not flattery but sympathy. Paul
said, Who can set me free from this kind of death? Only Christ. So it is
Christ in all His majestic simplicity that I propose to you today as one who by
what He has said, and done, and is, can liberate us, you from your slavery, I
from mine.
You are not particularly violent people. You share the
violence, but every human being inherits violence and lives and dies with it.
So do not condemn too easily those among you who are called so readily
“the men of violence”, as though they were the only ones. We all carry
weapons with us. Even I, your friend, your Pope, carry a weapon with me
wherever I go. It is the weapon of words. What destruction it
causes!
I know that there is more destruction, of minds most often, of
bodies sometimes, done in Ireland by words than by any other weapon. What
a shame that the pulpit which raises preachers high above the heads of
congregations should ever be used to make a destructive weapon more destructive
still. All our words should be healing words, not words of fire, and
threat, of frightening and intimidation. Do not be too ready, my friends,
to condemn the “men of violence”, because in doing so you may be condemning
yourselves; it may have been your pulpit, your school, your refusal to grant
the recognition of man’s dignity to every one of your citizens, your
destructive words that made your armed brothers what they are today.
No matter what he does, a human person cannot lose his humanity,
his essential dignity, he cannot become less human, because God has made us all
something more than human. No one can take dignity away from men and women
and children, because God created and renewed them and that is their gift for
ever.
I have asked my theologians and advisers to look at all your problems
again – it will be a task carried out in the privacy of their studies, as
monumental as the great public work of the Second Vatican Council – and most of
all the problems of those of our friends who have least. Sometimes I am
afraid that what we believe and teach about work has more to do with glorifying
the factories than liberating the workers. It has been said to me that
while we teach that to go on strike is a last resort we have not brought
forward proofs that this is so, and therefore we impose conditions on workers
in factories which should be unthinkable for the bankers or the
industrialists.There are even those who have said to me, the strike may be a
first, not a last resort. It sounds like a dangerous doctrine. All
the more reason why we should face it, examine it and with real love and
respect for each other find out what is the truth that will set us free.
I end as I began, dear friends, with thanks. Thanks to those
who enlightened me by disagreeing with me, who showed me ways of thinking
different from my own, who
enriched my life because they were different, who were able to
read so many of God’s secrets which would be forever a closed book to me had
they not shared their knowledge with me. We are precious to each other.
And my last word to you: By Monday evening I shall be gone and
already half forgotten. If there is to be any echo of my visit to your
house, let it be these words : Because God has made us His friends, we have
forgotten what the word “enemy” means.
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