Month: March 2024

Exile, migrants and the Holy Father (2)

Published on by Emmanuel L. Di Rossetti Leave a comment

Reflections on the various remarks of the Holy Father concerning migrants

Not all migrants arriving in Europe today are fleeing a catastrophic situation. They often arrive with big smiles. They don't all seem destitute. They show no nostalgia for their country and arrive in numbers to find another number. Melancholy is absent, because it is compensated by the communitarianism that they import and that they rediscover. Finally, they travel as single people, without wives or children, which should be intriguing. At least. That there is a will behind this seems obvious, even if the conspiracy label will be brandished at this sentence. The old-style migrants left an unfavorable situation to find not comfort, but rather to escape hell, without being sure of finding comfort, but armed with hope as I said above. They left with women and children, because they wanted to protect them. National feeling has disappeared among modern migrants, are they a-national? If so, what could make them a-national, a supra-nationality? Where do they find the money to make the crossing? During the Iraq War, Christian religious authorities noted that passports and visas had been widely distributed, where before the war it was extremely difficult to obtain one. Finally, the fact that the majority of its migrants are Muslims should also raise questions. When we know that a Muslim must die (and therefore live) in a Muslim land, we can only ask ourselves the question of their lack of desire to join a Muslim land. Especially since these are often much closer geographically than Europe. So many questions that Pope Francis never asks. So many questions that seem to make sense.

Exile, migrants and the Holy Father

Published on by Emmanuel L. Di Rossetti Leave a comment

Just listen to the captivating music of some tangos, Carlos Gardel, of course, Astor Piazzolla too, and others, who thus sang of exile, the distant, the inaccessible, to chase away their waves from the soul , their melancholy and live for the duration of a song in the combined happiness of their memories and their hopes, to feel the distress of someone who believes they have lost their country forever.

This conjugation is called hope. Where the soul vibrates to feel alive. Pope Francis, as a good Argentinian, feels in his veins the migration of his ancestors to this El Dorado, Argentina. That this modifies his vision of the migrant, whose overly generic name indicates from the start the difficulty of talking about him, is undeniable and proves to be a key to understanding his erratic speeches on the subject.

Exile forces the soul to reveal itself, and to veil. To reveal certain things in oneself that one did not know, that one ignored, that one kept hidden for fear of what they might conceal. Faced with exile, they emerge from oneself as if from nothing, become what they have always been, and dominate us. What merit forged in us by exile, often in spite of ourselves, because we refused to do so! Exile breaks down a barrier often erected in a hurry and without real thought. Man is a reaction animal. When he evolves in his usual element, he most often reacts to his own demons, resentments and mood swings. When he emerges from his cocoon, he reacts to survive by relying on what he believes in, often the fruit of his culture, but his nature is not foreign to it either. This rootedness protects him most of the time from self-disappointment, but not from melancholy, homesickness.

The expression, travel forms youth , comes from this experience. Exile forces the heart, mind and body to communicate differently with the soul which therefore reveals itself, but which also requires us to veil parts of our personality that it took for granted. Sometimes, these are revealed sections which veil other sections. What we believe turns out to be overestimated.

In exile, even certainties appear new.