Tenderness

Bless the beasts and the children.

In his Christmas Day homily, Pope Francis asked for more tenderness, especially for all the millions of children threatened by war, famine, arrogance, fanaticism and neglect. It was a homily described as exceptionally “somber” by Vatican observers, considering this was a day reserved for joyousness by all of Christendom.

There was cause to be somber.

A few days before, scores of schoolchildren were slaughtered by the Taliban in Pakistan. They were killed, in the Taliban’s own announcement, because these schoolchildren were enrolled in a military school and would eventually become soldiers.

The reasoning is absurd, but the act was done. It was an act of insanity, one of many that infected this year.

Weeks before, Islamic State militants in Syria issued a decree allowing the rape of women and the enslavement of children. It is a barbaric decree, drawing from the most malevolent reading of the Sharia. It serves to justify the pillage already being carried out by militants of this bizarre movement.

At about the same time this decree was made public, Islamic State gunmen were reported to have executed 200 of their own foreign fighters. This happened after the foreign fighters who travelled to Syria, willing to fight the oppressive Assad regime before getting caught up in the ideological anomaly that is the Islamic State, expressed the desire to return to their home countries. Filipinos are thought to be among those slaughtered by their erstwhile comrades.

The Islamic State’s bloodlust seems boundless. Hundreds of thousands of ethnic and religious minorities in areas of Iraq occupied by the militants have fled to the mountain wilderness after entire villages were massacred — for no reason except that they were different.

The protracted civil war in Syria takes its daily toll. Millions of Syrians are now refugees in camps across the border in Turkey, Jordan and Lebanon. Hundreds of thousands of children face the specter of starvation each day and are denied the opportunity for school.

Months before, the Islamist Boko Haram kidnapped hundreds of schoolgirls in eastern Nigeria. A global campaign to free the girls, the extremists have continued their kidnapping sprees, adding more hostages. In a recent statement, the Boko Haram announced they have married off the girls to their fighters.

The Islamist militants, whether in Nigeria or Syria or Afghanistan frown on western education generally and on the education of girls in particular. This year’s Nobel Peace Prize went to an Afghan schoolgirl shot in the head for courageously insisting on girls getting an education.

All over the world, millions of women and children are trafficked. Pope Francis knows of this phenomenon only too well. Recently, he spearheaded a multi-faith initiative to bring the resources and moral capital of all the faiths in a crusade to end modern-day slavery.

This crusade will likely gain traction in the coming period. We can trust the Vatican under Pope Francis to provide the drive for this humane crusade. On this crusade rests the possibility of liberation for so many modern-day slaves.

Timeliness is among Pope Francis’ best virtues.

With wit and with disarming spontaneity, he has called up the real issues that bother his flock.  Without diminishing the dogma on which his church stands, he has shown remarkable openness on matters the clergy usually chose to keep a studied silence on: sexual predators and gay rights, devout divorcees and single parents.

On matters of modern lifestyle choices, such as the freedom to choose gender identity, there is nothing in the dogma solidified through the ages that constitutes a basis for church policy.

In the same manner, there is nothing in the church’s own history that sets a definitive tone for tolerance in the face of violent fundamentalism. The church once upon a time imposed its own creed with the same violent methods used by Islamic fundamentalists.

Modern civilization confronts the virus of intolerance. It is a virus that encourages genocide and slavery, massacres and terrorism in the name of some crudely imagined caliphate or simply a disdain for the personal freedoms opened up by modern life.

In the face of that virus, Pope Francis pleads for “tenderness.”

“Tenderness” opens a way for dialogue, clears the way for understanding and helps protect against scourge of illiberalism that pesters humanity today. It promotes humane responses to inhuman situations.

Everywhere there is exasperation. The community of nations cannot seem to act in concert to prevent the gross misery produced by the civil war in Syria. We are all overwhelmed by the Boko Haram in Nigeria and its equally brutal counterpart in Somalia.

The only way the world’s powers could react to the ISIS in Iraq and Syria, the Al Qaeda in Yemen and the Taliban in Afghanistan and Pakistan  is to keep attacking them with drones. That might momentarily limit the capacity of militants to inflict terror but they do not cure the curses of intolerance and callousness and arrogance that drive acts of pure evil we have seen in abundance.

The language of secular liberalism that opened up so much space for personal freedom over the past two centuries and shaped the modern civilization we now enjoy cannot suffice to counter the surge of illiberalism we have seen of late. Most illiberal movements define liberalism itself as the enemy. Because of that, dialogue is constrained.

Pope Francis worked his magic the past month to bring both the US and Cuba to reestablish diplomatic relations. His plea for reinvigorated tenderness might work some magic against the inhumane scourge of vehement fundamentalism that harms children most of all.