Archive | April, 2025

The Legacy of Pope Francis for Africa and Interfaith Dialogue, by Professor Hussein Solomon (University of the Free State)

23 Apr

Editor’s Note: Like many of you I have my own reflections on the death of Pope Francis, much of which is in the form of a concern that the next Pontiff will favor doctrinal conformity over compassion and justice for the growing number of victims of war, poverty and oppression. But more on that later. Here, our colleague Hussein Solomon reflects on his own interfaith path and specifically honors this important piece of Pope Francis’ legacy.

The passing of Pope Francis on 21 April 2025 placed me in a deeply reflective mood. I recalled my early interactions with the Catholic Church. As a non-white, growing in South Africa in the 1970s, my parents did not wish me to have an apartheid education but at the same time could not afford to send me to a private school. The next best option was St. Anthony’s Catholic School in Durban. Here I found myself, a Muslim boy, amongst Catholics, non-Catholic Christians and Hindus. The nuns and priests were always respectful of other faiths and those of us who were not Catholic were allowed to skip mass if we chose – I never did – as well as go to Friday prayers. I loved the religious classes taught by nuns where the first principle stressed to us was respect for all faiths. At the age of 8, I was exposed to interfaith dialogue and it became an intrinsic part of my life.

During the anti-apartheid struggle, different faith groups, bandied together in the United Democratic Front to demonstrate against the divide and rule policies of the National Party. Following school, when I opted to go to university, it was Catholic Archbishop Denis Hurley who paid for my tuition fees. Later, in life, when involved in conflict resolution in various African countries, it was Catholic friends who provided me deep insights into the various ethnic and religious dimensions of a conflict. Later still, when working with Global Action to Prevent War in mobilizing support for a United Nations Emergency Peace Service (UNEPS) it was my Catholic and Jewish friends who joined me in this collective effort to help save humanity from the scourge of war.

Pope Francis’ papacy reflected the values of interfaith dialogue, respect and striving to create a more peaceful world which was so ingrained into my being by the likes of Sister Meryl as a young boy. When Cardinal Jorge Bergoglio was elected pope on the 13th March 2013, he opted to be named after St Francis of Assisi. At the time, many did not realize how significant this was. It was St Francis of Assisi who in 1219 travelled to Egypt with Crusaders besieging Damietta and walked unarmed into the Muslim camp Here he met with Sultan Al Kamil, the Governor of Egypt and nephew of Saladin. The sultan was so impressed with the sincerity of this friar that he gave him permission to visit all the sacred places in the Holy Land. This was the first attempt to bridge the deepening Muslim-Christian divide.

In both his personal and professional life, Pope Francis was a bridge-builder between faiths. He was known for the strong friendships he forged with the likes of Rabbi Abraham Skorka in Argentina as well as the Grand Imam of Al Azhar, Al-Tayeb. He was the first pope to visit the Arabian Peninsula. He also met with Iraqi top Shia cleric – Grand Ayatollah Sistani in Najaf in 2021. Much of the Pope’s thinking on interfaith dialogue was set out in the Declaration on Human Fraternity for World Peace and Living Together which was endorsed by the Grand Imam of Al Azhar. Here these two leaders rejected extremist violence and called on all to cherish the values of tolerance and fraternity. Following this, the Pope wrote an encyclical, Fratelli tutti which focused on the theme of fraternity. Fittingly, it was dedicated to Sheikh Al-Tayeb. The Pope also travelled to the most populous Muslim nation in the world – Indonesia – where he met Grand Imam Nasrauddin Umar at the Istiqlal Mosque. This is the world’s largest mosque. Here, these two religious leaders signed the Joint Declaration of Istiqlal on Fostering Religious Harmony for the Sake of Humanity.

The Pope’s approach is sorely needed in the African context with Muslim-Christian sectarian strife reinforcing ethnic violence and other fissures in society. The African context occupied the pope’s mind early in his papacy. In 2015, he travelled to Bangui, the capital of the Central African Republic undergoing the throes of war. The conflict saw Muslim Seleka and Christian anti-balaka militias engaged in an orgy of violence. He decided to visit a mosque and a church in Bangui and drove with the highest-ranking Muslim and Christian clerics in the country in his Popemobile through the streets of Bangui stressing interfaith dialogue and why peace was a human imperative. I know of no other world leader who could or would have done this.

The Pope was well aware that his high-level engagement with other religious leaders would not on it own ensure communal harmony and for this reason, he insisted that these initiatives should also take place at the grassroots level inside communities to complement and reinforce what was happening at the higher level. Pope Francis also realised that sectarian strife was also fuelled by poverty and relative deprivation. In circumstances of scarcity, grievances take root and conflict becomes inevitable. For this reason, the papacy also focused on poverty alleviation, economic development and the creation of inclusive societies.

It is hoped that whoever succeeds Pope Francis continues with his sterling legacy of interfaith dialogue globally but especially in Africa where Catholicism and Islam are the two fastest growing faiths.

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The Fallacies of Friction: A Holy Week Reflection, Dr. Robert Zuber

13 Apr

Where there is power, there is resistance. Michel Foucault

The friction between ‘what is’ and ‘what could be’ burns you, stirs you up, propels you. Marcus Buckingham

Occasionally when people in the grip of obsessive resentment were pouring out their ire and grievances, something in them, some small trace of self-awareness, heard themselves as others might, and was surprised to find they didn’t sound quite as blameless, or even as rational, as they’d imagined themselves to be. Robert Galbraith

Every grievance you hold hides a little more of the light of the world from your eyes until the darkness becomes overwhelming. Donna Goddard

Poetry is about the grief. Politics is about the grievance. Robert Frost

When we make grievance our traveling companion, it blocks out light, it distorts our perspective, it consumes our hearts until there is nothing left. Merida Johns

Our culture is not this thing to be seen from a distance. We need to be embracing the friction of it all – that is where the energy is. — Doug Aitken

Change means movement. Movement means friction. Saul Alinsky

I have been quiet in this space but not quiet. In other formats I have been doing my small part at national level to counter the grievance which has become a form of embedded cruelty and at international level commenting on the peculiar brand of diplomatic indifference which refuses even to uphold the core principles which gave rise to the institutions which we have entrusted with peace and security in the first instance.

In these strange times, in some ways a throwback to manifestations of the human condition we foolishly thought we had consigned to history, I and many others have taken up the task of creating friction for those who believe they are above the impacts of their own bad work, those who believe that their lofty positions and distorted policies exempt them (or should) from resistance to the point where such is deemed an evil impediment to the fulfillment of their desires – a grievance and even vengeance-driven remaking of political culture in their own image.

As some of you know, I have long worried that my own country has become essentially ungovernable, full of people fleeing to the safety of bubbles where we can nurture our self-serving ideas and petty grievances without friction, without interference. We have become a nation of trolls with little taste for subtlety or even self-reflection. We “root” for people and ideas rather than examine their legitimacy and intent. Our collective arrogance blots out almost all of the inclinations we might otherwise have to humility, reflection or self-awareness, let alone to service.

What I just alluded to has been true of my country for some time. The current crisis is a symptom of a larger and more systemic problem which cuts across political and even religious affiliations. Our hearts are largely consumed by violence and greed, much more than is helpful for a society which seems to have misplaced its creeds, a society which is increasingly turning its backs on veterans, on the elderly and disabled, or on those seeking refuge from governments deemed even more cruel than our own. We have “drunk the kool aid” even when we aren’t thirsty and by so doing contributed to a society which seems comfortable with mass firings of government employees, mass dismantling of our health systems and mass deportations of non-criminal legal residents. A society where its leaders huddle to embrace a God of violence, riches and vengeance as though there had not been a subsequent message focused on forgiveness, humility and reconciliation attributed to Jesus of Nazareth. A society where what is true is reduced to what someone can convince us is true.

This society has needed and now needs even more the friction which communicates categorically “this is not OK.” This is not good enough. We will not return to a time long past when enfranchisement was for the few not the many, when a cruel but not so unusual hierarchy kept too many people in the places that they were “assigned” ostensibly by a God who ordained our lofty patterns of discrimination.

You’ve heard all this from me before, this indication that what we are now living through is a culmination of sorts, a culmination of increasingly inadequate leadership and a distracted, self-interested populace which has lost sight of all that must happen in this world – the good, the bad and the sometimes ugly – in order for us to enjoy the blessings that we too often forget we have.

In this current climate, I and others continue to resist, continue to provide a bit of friction to a government and a system that has convinced itself that its cruel judgments have some sort of divine sanction. But in this season of Ramadan (now concluded) of Passover and of the Christian Holy Week, we cannot allow ourselves the luxury of resisting a false religious narrative with one of our own making.

Indeed, we must remind ourselves that resistance is not righteousness, that to overquote Reinhold Niebuhr, “the evils against which we contend are the fruits of illusions similar to our own.” Resistance is an obligation for many as it is for me, but it is not a “counter-crusade.” It is not about swapping out one perverse view of God’s favor for another.

In this Holy season, we must also remind ourselves of the costs associated with being that source of friction which not all of us provide but which all of us need. This is the friction which helps us to be better versions of ourselves, refusing to divert our gaze from cruelty and poverty to which none should be subjected, refusing to allow the chores of the present to divert our attention from the needs and aspirations of those who follow.

But the friction which people like me attempt to apply in our now-adrift society cuts in many directions. We who attempt this work, including the work of inspiring resistance in others, are not immune from the responsibilities and impacts of that resistance – to challenge what we see while trying to be better than what we see. But also to acknowledge that friction wears us down too. Friction takes a toll on us too.

And this toll is in part a function of the culture of resistance itself – seeing the glass as forever half-empty, slipping into patterns of language that ascribe things to people – including evil –that apply in full measure to only a handful of humans, failing to appreciate the spring flowers, or poetry and music, or a thrilling sports match, so that we can get in one more “cut” of friction, one more pithy response to a systemic “monster” which remains much more formidable than people like me will ever be.

Indeed the consequences of resistance, of creating friction day after day, can produce their own grievances which serve neither our own work in the world nor the interests of those to whom we seek to connect.  More than anything else, we must never lose touch with the people whose lives have been upended through policies which are anything but “people-centered.” Indeed, such loss of touch helps explain the predicament we now find ourselves in.

I’m a bit beaten up now but will spend this Holy Week recalibrating my own resistance and the effects it is having (or not having) on matters internal and external to myself, including on those whose response to the gravity of these times remains to be inspired.  For those of you already in the friction business, even part time, we need to ensure that our voices and actions have all the impact that is possible.  It’s going to be a slog for now as what “is” continues to lag well behind what could be.  Let’s commit to locating the formula that can bring more hope to the world and ensure timely and healthy responses from ourselves.

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