Pope Francis is comfortable with poetry, evident from his first interview to America magazine where he shared his love of Dostoevsky, Hölderlin, Hopkins, and Manzoni, and also as poetry increasingly punctuates his writings, most especially in Querida Amazonia (2020). His engagement with literature is deeply personal as he cites experience of teaching students in Santa Fe, where he argues that reading “out of a sense of duty” puts people off and while we can be guided, literature always commits us personally.
There are, at least, two moments in the letter that speak into the space that Catholic social teaching envisages and shapes. In one of those moments, the Pope appreciates the empathetic value of reading literature in a way that is socially fruitful, whereby the reader can “develop an imaginative empathy that enables us to identify with how others see, experience and respond to reality”. The Pope takes this well-established view further to argue that active engagement with literature is also a school for solidarity:
“[w]ithout such empathy, there can be no solidarity, sharing, compassion, mercy. In reading we discover that our feelings are not simply our own, they are universal, and so even the most destitute person does not feel alone.”
We find ourselves relating to a particular character, a story that is near to our own, and we live vicariously through the choices of others in the literary landscape. By extension, undergoing novelty, confusion, conflict, or difficulty in what we read of others humbles and challenges us. As the letter suggests, rather than seeking to arrive at a judgement of a character or moral situation we find an “impetus towards greater listening”. Literature, then, meets the reader somewhere between affinity and difference, and for Pope Francis this is a dynamic that flexes the muscles of solidarity.
In a creative moment, Pope Francis describes a full chorus of literary characters with:
“the weeping of an abandoned girl, an elderly woman pulling the covers over her sleeping grandson, the struggles of a shopkeeper trying to eke out a living, the shame of one who bears the brunt of constant criticism, the boy who takes refuge in dreams as his only escape from a wretched and violent life.”
A clear principle that emerges is that a literary text is always a social text; not only in terms of the imagination and production of the text itself, but also in the ways a text shapes a reader. This challenges those who are dismissive of the role of literature in formation (of priests, but more clearly as humans) because literature ultimately is a return to reality rather than an escape because it requires our effort and asks of our time.
Reading this letter helps shed light on previous letters written by Pope Francis to members of popular movements, whom he describes as social poets, operating where “State protection is hardly visible”, moving “beyond philanthropy” in the face of their own powerlessness in “hoping to catch some crumbs that fall from the table of economic power”. Social poets’ concerns are even described alliteratively by the Pope with his three T’s “Trabajo (work), Techo (housing), and Tierra (land and food)” and three L’s in English of “land, lodging, and labour”.
The poetic aspect of these individuals is found precisely in their capacity to see the world not in terms of problems to be resolved, but in relation to human activity and potential: envisioning a possible good that is also intergenerational.
An imaginative capacity, developed also through contact with literature, pushes us to conceive of ideas and cultural practices that are not stifled by the limits of time and space as defined solely by financial-economic demands. And is it not the most marginalised people who have been forcibly poetic by continually inventing means of survival?
A few questions to ponder:
- what’s the last book you read and how has it impacted you?
- is there a particular character or story you relate to in a powerful way? Why?
- how does it feel reading some of these ideas about literature? Is this something new or have you considered it before?
- in what ways does literature help you grow in empathy and solidarity?
- you might think that literature began with the popular printed word. However, have you thought that fictional storytelling has been a human activity for thousands of years and, perhaps, fulfils a deep human need?
