Below is the text of an interview with Pope Francis that was published in the newspapers a few days ago. Fnp is republishing it, capturing its depth and importance.
Pope Francis defends the elderly: “Abandoning them is a sin”
ROME - “The elderly are a wealth that cannot be ignored, but the culture of profit insists on showing the elderly as a burden, as dead weight. Not only do they not produce, but they are discarded. It is bad to see the elderly discarded: it is a sin.” During the general audience on Wednesday in St. Peter's Square, the Pope issued a warning about the condition of the elderly and the treatment that is often reserved for them within families.
During the audience, Pope Francis recalled an episode from when he was archbishop of Buenos Aires and visited a nursing home: “I asked a lady: how are you? How are your children? Good. Do they come to visit you? Yes, always. And when was the last time I came to visit you? At Christmas. And it was August… Eight months without a visit from your children, this is called a mortal sin, understand?”
“If we do not learn to treat the elderly well, that is how they will treat us,” said the Pope, who then recounted another episode off the cuff: “Once, when I was a child, my grandmother told us the story of an elderly grandfather who made a mess while eating because he could not bring the spoon with the soup to his mouth properly. The son, that is, the father of the family, had decided to move him from the common table and made a small table in the kitchen, so he would not make a bad impression when friends came for lunch or dinner. A few days later he found his little son playing with wood, a hammer and nails. 'What are you doing?' 'I'm making a table, Dad, so you can have it when you get old, so you can eat there.' Children,” the Pontiff commented, “are more aware than we are.”
The elderly, the Pope continued, “are men and women, fathers and mothers who have been before us on our same path, in our same home, in our daily battle for a dignified life. They are men and women from whom we have received much. The elderly are not aliens. The elderly are us: soon, soon, inevitably anyway, even if we don’t think about it”. “A culture of profit insists on making the elderly appear as a burden, a ‘dead weight’. Not only do they not produce, but they are a burden: in short – continued Bergoglio – they should be discarded. We don’t dare say it openly, but we do it! There is something vile in this habituation to the culture of waste. We want to remove our increased fear of weakness and vulnerability; but in doing so we increase in the elderly the anguish of being poorly tolerated and abandoned”.
“The elderly are all a little fragile. Some, however, are particularly weak, many are alone, and marked by illness. Some depend on indispensable care and the attention of others. Will we take a step back for this? Will we abandon them to their fate? A society without proximity, where generosity and affection without compensation – even between strangers – are disappearing, is a perverse society. The Church, faithful to the word of God, cannot tolerate these degenerations. A Christian community in which proximity and generosity were no longer considered indispensable, would lose its soul with them. Where there is no honor for the elderly, there is no future for the young”
