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The poignant flood of laudatory words from the rulers of this world began to flow to express feelings that do not exist, to comply with protocol conveniences, to identify with everything they despise, to exhibit false commotions, to take advantage of an event that tomorrow they will no longer remember because it is essential to return to the petty and predatory life of the usual.

The death of Pope Francis is undeniably a loss for the world. Not as the head of the Catholic Church, but as a universalist and humanist man who knew how to avoid and circumvent the Vatican squabbles, centuries old, to dedicate himself to thinking and acting on the things of the world and humanity; the things that lead us down misguided paths, perhaps fatal and that the Pope, not as a saint but as a human being, tried to stop with his sensitivity and fraternal spirit.

The community of hypocrites that runs the world, leading us to precipices that Francis has identified as easily avoidable if men and women had the goodwill that goes far beyond the words of religious texts, now does not hesitate to take advantage of his death with vampiric boldness.

The Pope who is now leaving us, head of an institution that will hardly find another to match, because he will not know (nor will he want) to sail against the current with the courage and lucidity of Francis, leaves orphans the unprotected, the marginalized, the poor, refugees and migrants, the peoples of the peripheries, those who suffer in the flesh the effects of ecological crimes committed by those who fill their mouths with the (false) fight against climate change, in short, the millions of human beings who face the terrors of greedy wars imposed by the interests of dehumanized castes and the minorities of money.

The courage and lucidity of a pacifist

Francis was a courageous and lucid man. Courageous because he was not afraid to speak out against the executioners of the human being who, trying to lull us with soft conversations from which only lies remain, do not hesitate to create hells in life and threaten our existences. Lucid, because he knew how to read the world like few others in the international community, ruthlessly drawing the portraits of the wrongdoers and dissatisfied himself with the horrors of the wrongdoings, despite the fact that those affected always looked the other way, pretending that nothing was with them while, cynically, they made the usual salaams.

The Pope who is now leaving us has gone far beyond Catholicism and Christianity. Even within the institutions of his faith and the communities of believers, he was often not well accepted by traditionalist currents, the same ones that, at the same time, accommodate themselves, and even defend the worst that exists on the face of the Earth.

Francis has sealed his presence in the history of Catholicism and, above all, of humanity, because in his time he fought without hesitation the two true demons that persecute and slaughter human beings: neoliberalism and war.

The Argentine priest who suffered so much with his poor people cruelly handed over to the most extreme state of neoliberalism, was never meek towards this economic, social and political doctrine that despises human beings in the name of freedom, that oppresses them by plunging them into poverty as a path to the always distant and thus unattainable abundance, that kills them by guaranteeing them independence and sovereignty to which they are intrinsically averse. Inhumane globalist neoliberalism is its goal; social justice, respect for the human being, the dignity of life, peace and fraternal coexistence are the lights by which the late Pope was guided.

Francis was, for all this, a man against the current, in reality a foreign body in this world and who did not give up, until the end, to try to change it, to make it a suitable place for the flourishing of the dignity of the human being, of all human beings. For this reason, the Pope did not identify, and never ceased to condemn, this Western preciousness of being moved, justly, by the suffering and drama of the Ukrainians but despising and even being an accomplice in the slaughter and genocide of the Palestinian people. The Pope has never forgiven and would be able to forgive the segregationism and xenophobia that are in the DNA of hypocrites. He especially loved all peoples who were victims of wars, and not just the machetes with weapons.

On last Easter Sunday, in his last and strenuous words, Francis had the superhuman energy necessary to remember the poor, the despised, the persecuted minorities, the excluded from the peripheries, the victims of racism and xenophobia, refugees and migrants, showing solidarity with them as victims of greed and wars imposed on their countries. And he did not fail to blame, once again, the doctrine that he explicitly identified as responsible for these expressions of misery: capitalism and its extreme version, neoliberalism

A fighter for disarmament

And Francis, horror of horrors, defended peace.

Not an abstract peace as those who seek it and guarantee that it is at the end of wars proclaim. But rather the peace that they despise and forbid us to invoke and defend, under penalty of being considered traitors and servants of the enemies that lurk around us. The peace that is found by speaking, understanding and negotiating and not by spreading poverty and death because more weapons, more weapons, more and more sophisticated weapons are needed, capable of making the multitudes of innocent murdered people ever greater and overflowing the coffers of the tycoons of death.

It is true, Francis defended disarmament without sparing the arms industry and its visitors as one of the great scourges of this time. He even kept his last words uttered, with difficulty, on Easter Sunday to call for disarmament. Guess what: those who now say they mourn his disappearance never listened to him, they pretended to be deaf. For them, the Pope was someone they tried to identify with his despicable images and likenesses; not the Pope who never forgot the real victims of these hypocrites, refined merchants of the Temple.

The leaders and ruling cliques of the European Union, of Marcelo and those who go to the ends of the Baltic, now utter banal, protocol and circumstantial words, express feelings that they have only in their wallets and bank accounts, unwillingly pronounce the word peace while assembling armies and stuffing the European continent with weapons, putting on their most expensive and black suits to go on pilgrimage and line up, perhaps for the family photo, on the carpets of the Vatican. Francis would dispense with their presence, but they always think they are indispensable and welcome even when no one invites them. Lagarde, the lady of money, along with Von der Leyen, the lady of war and Costa, the drooling servant of all this, will not be lacking. From this you can see the type of people to whom we are entrusted and that the Argentine Pope, perceptiously, did not have much regard for.

Francis leaves many longings and a void that will probably not be filled so soon. The hierarchy of the Catholic Church, other than the immense multitude of the faithful, has great ability to correct its “errors” by moving and conspiring with an experience of two millennia in the silence of the Vatican corridors. As was the case of John Paul I, a promising good man who did not last more than 33 days in the chair of Peter the Fisherman, soon replaced by Wojtyla (or John Paul II), the Pope of neoliberalism, of imperial unipolarity, herald of a Catholicism with medieval resonances.

Francis was an older brother, wise and present to Catholics, non-Catholics and non-Christians, religious, agnostics and atheists, many of whom, not sharing his doctrine and philosophical concepts, admired him as a man and humanist, certain that they could trust him. She defended concepts of earthly life for which it is worth fighting to remove the world from the swamp where women and men degenerated by power and money are plunging it. These are sad days and, at the same time, days that the cafila of hypocrites and war fanatics yearns to be able to parade and shine.