The interview with Monsignor Pesce, pastoral coordinator of the Central sector of the diocese of Rome and in charge of the Office for Social Pastoral Care, Labour and the Custody of Creation
By Simone Baroncia
(translated by the FCAPP for the monthly newsletter)
Rome, Tuesday 12, November 2024 14:00 (ACI Stampa).
‘The prayer of the poor rises up to God… Let us reflect on this Word and “read” it on the faces and in the stories of the poor we meet in our days, so that prayer may become a way of communion with them and a way of sharing their suffering’: so begins Pope Francis’ message for the eighth day of the poor, “The prayer of the poor rises up to God”, which is celebrated next Sunday, a prayer that must become “a way of communion with them and a way of sharing their suffering”. And in contexts of war, this prayer takes on the form of a cry, for which the Pope makes himself the spokesman, returning to stigmatise the horror experienced in some parts of the world.
We asked Monsignor Francesco Pesce, pastoral coordinator of the Central sector of the diocese of Rome and in charge of the Office for Social Pastoral Care, Labour and the Custody of Creation, to explain why the prayer of the poor rises up to God: ‘The prayer of the poor reaches heaven and no one can stop it because it is a vocation, a call from God Himself; it breaks the mafia-like interweaving between the hope of the poor and the cunning of the rich. The prayer of the poor does not stop until it has reached heaven, which the Bible reminds us is ‘the satisfaction of the just and the restoration of equity’. We must put ourselves in the prayer of the poor: Paul calls them ‘those who wait in love for his manifestation’. The prayer of the poor struggles against many obstacles, but the Lord knocks them all down; he knocks down the obstacle of the law, because the poor no longer accept small compromises in order to survive; he also knocks down ideological barriers, our moral and cultural presumptions’.
In what way can one work for the liberation of the poor?
‘Religious freedom, the economy as a service and not as prevarication, social justice that guarantees fairness, peace as a vocation for the whole world, the dignity of all life, the care of our ‘common home’, the migration issue, the challenge of technological innovation, the defence of a culture and ethics of democracy, are tracks that the Church’s social doctrine indicates, and within which we measure our identity as citizens and believers. The political dimension is the space in which we verify the effectiveness of the reading of the signs of the times offered by the Church’s social magisterium. The conviction is that we need to create a social reality nourished by a spiritual vision that also passes through the ability to make our proposals become political instances on which we can debate. It is not about being good; it is about proclaiming the Kingdom’.
How is it possible to combine poverty and justice?
‘Social or political power, economic power, religious power shape the life of a community. That is why it must be read and possibly understood. Power does not come by itself but is thought out, desired, conquered, and for this to happen it needs not only those who seek it but those who then, by suffering it or accepting it, legitimise it. Those who seek it must create spaces of visibility for themselves in order to communicate why they demand it and what they offer in return. In this dynamic he necessarily needs ‘collaborators’ who recognise his role and function, who are obedient and faithful to the design of change that power, economic, political, religious, social, wants to pursue, to the point of paradoxically becoming its guarantors. It is necessary to investigate the profound sense and the recognisable evidence of this close relationship between those who exercise and those who suffer, deliberately or not, the consequences of power’.
In what way is it possible to ‘make the prayer of the poor our own and pray with them’?
‘Authentic prayer is a relationship with the Father. The word Father is the truest and He prefers it. But if we pray well, we often feel that we prefer silence. The true word that expresses God is the non-word, it is silence, it is facing our limits, and raising our prayer to the Father or just remaining still and silent. Prayer then is taking responsibility for the world in which we live. What does Abraham do? Abraham prays to God to spare the sinful city: ‘Will there be fifty, forty, thirty, twenty, ten righteous?’ He worries about the city. As children we were taught to leave distractions outside the church; I would urge us to fill prayer with distractions, that is, to fill it with concern for the whole world. How can we isolate ourselves if next to us there is a world suffering, the poor crushed, so many victims of justice and bullying? We must be concerned about this, pray for this’.
‘And how can we not remember here, in the city of Rome, St Benedict Joseph Labre (1748-1783), whose body rests and is venerated in the parish church of Santa Maria ai Monti. A pilgrim from France to Rome, rejected by many monasteries, he spent the last years of his life poor among the poor, spending hours and hours in prayer before the Blessed Sacrament, with the rosary, reciting the breviary, reading the New Testament and the Imitation of Christ. Not even having a small room in which to stay, he habitually slept in a corner of the ruins of the Colosseum, as a ‘wanderer of God’, making his existence an unceasing prayer that went up to Him’. Why did Pope Francis propose Saint Benedict Joseph Labre in his message?
‘Saint Benedict Joseph Labre sustains us in that great adventure of the Spirit that is our life of faith. He bore witness that the Word of God is a Word of love that God pronounces on us, on the world, on history, and that caresses our lives, often so difficult in so many days, like a gentle wind. He testified that the Word of God is an effective Word that works what it was sent to do. He bore witness that the Word of God carries within it the groaning of all flesh on its way to the fullness, of God. He bore witness here in Rome that a Church at prayer with Peter and for Peter is a Church on the way to the Risen One.
His testimony continues down the centuries. Our society wants to be inspired by the great principles of equality and fraternity, dear to the Enlightenment, and by Christian principles, but it finds itself doing an impossible job of squaring the circle. It pretends to want to include the excluded (the immigrant, the illegal immigrant, the homeless, the convict) within itself, within its cities, but it cannot; why can’t it?
It does not succeed because it should challenge itself, in its own constituent principles, and it does not have the courage, or rather, we do not have the courage. St Benedict Joseph Labre had the courage to challenge himself, the society and the Church of his time; St Benedict Joseph Labre is a witness for all times, of the dignity of man, of every man’.
So in what way is it possible to ‘be a friend of the poor’?
‘I would answer with another question: who are the poor today? They are those who are always with us: ‘For you always have the poor with you’ (Mt 26:11). They are men and women, names and surnames, there are millions of them, and they are exactly like the Word of God, a double-edged sword that penetrates the civil and Christian conscience of each one of us; they are the perennial scandal of a modern society that has built its ‘camp’ has surrounded it with impassable walls and has cynically, secretly and mercilessly left behind a pile of discarded stones. We can be friends of the poor then by simply being with them, throwing away so much useless ballast, with a style of sobriety in our personal choices, and I would also like to add, with cameras off, without showing every moment on social networks what we are doing‘; often there is a spectacularisation of service to the poor, which is annoying, egocentric and narcissistic, and the opposite of what Jesus did’.