o not be afraid. Open the doors to the power of
savior of Christ. Open the frontiers of the States, the economic and political systems, the vast horizons of culture and development”. In launching this message from the balcony of St. Peter’s Square right after his election on 22 October 1978, John Paul II announced that his Pontificate would not be restricted to the Vatican, but openly directed at the age and in particular toward the World’s South, toward the poorer nations where 80% of the world population lives, increasingly lacking elementary resources and always more on the margin of
globalization.
It is in this world of the poor, among the most unfortunate people and most desperate populations, that his pontificate encountered the largest echo and that his message arose more hope. He above all proclaimed himself the voice of the voiceless: already in May 1980, in Burkina-Faso, he solemnly said, “Here I will be the voice of those without a voice, the voice of the innocent that died because without bread and water”.
In Calcutta, in February 1986, with Mother Theresa he insisted: “Let the poor of Mother Theresa and all the poor of the world speak… let the voiceless speak”. But in many occasions his speeches underlined the lack of respect of human rights: in February 1981, in the presidential building of Malacanang, in Manila, in the Philippines under martial law, before the president Ferdinando Marcos with a face of stone and his visibly nervous wife Imelda, John Paul II declared that the rights of man must not be violated “even in a situation of emergency”.
Eight years later, Suharto was the Indonesian dictator to hear the Pope, on return from East Timor, affirming that brutal force cannot impose the unity of a nation. In March 1983, it was the turn of Jean-Claude Duvalier, the dictator of Haiti, addressed before 150,000 people at the airport of Porte-au-Prince: “Something needs to change here: divisions, injustice, excessive inequalities, degradation of the quality of life, misery, hunger and fear”.
But it is in Africa that the Pope expressed his major concerns; in Burkina-Faso, in January 1990, he declared: “The available resources are in decline, the land becomes sterile on immense surfaces, malnutrition is chronic for the tens of millions of human beings and death takes away too many children”. In September of the same year in Tanzania he reiterated: “The young Africans are profoundly tormented by the lack of hope obscuring their future. In many aspects, in its spiritual and human dimension, the world reflects the original chaos”.
John Paul II on the other hand also underlined the scourge of the bad administration of the public system; before the Bishops of 29 African nations, in Cameroon in September 1995, he intervened lashing out at “the corrupt governments that, in connivance with private, local or foreign interests, deviate national resources and transfer public funds on private accounts in foreign banks”.
He never however failed to encourage this “forgotten” continent, inexhaustible source of material goods, but also and above all spiritual goods, too often neglected; in this regard we like to remember the phrase pronounced by him in 1990, in the Republic of ex-Zaire: “Christ, himself, is African!".
(From MISNA)