Monday
Pope Leo continues to impress, most recently with a rousing endorsement of literature. To be sure, the endorsement doesn’t match that of his predecessor, with Pope Francis’s writing that literature is “absolutely essential to our spiritual, intellectual, and physical well-being.” In my post about Francis’s encyclical, I wrote that it was “one of the most extraordinary defenses I have encountered, up there with those of Sir Philip Sidney and Percy Shelley.”
Although Leo is no Francis when it comes to literature—in his defense, he is a mathematician—his words are nevertheless welcome. Speaking on the occasion of Turin’s International Book Fair, which ends today, he wrote, “There is a need for literature that helps recognize the dignity of every person, especially the most vulnerable, and that increasingly becomes a school of fraternity and peace.”
Leo didn’t specifically single out novels, but fiction, going back to the Romantic poets, has expanded empathy for vulnerable groups. As I note in my book, figures like William Wordsworth entered the lives of the vulnerable, setting in motion sympathy for
the urban poor (Charles Dickens), American slaves (Harriet Beecher Stowe), Dorset dairy maids (Thomas Hardy), French coalminers (Emile Zola), Nebraska pioneers (Willa Cather), Harlem residents (Langston Hughes), African American sharecroppers (Jean Toomer), African American homosexuals (James Baldwin), bankrupted Oklahoma farmers (John Steinbeck), Laguna Pueblo war veterans (Leslie Marmon Silko), transplanted Pakistanis (Hanif Kureishi), West Indian immigrants (Zadie Smith), American lesbians (Alison Bechdel), and on and on.
I should also have mentioned children, a particular focus of Leo’s. The book festival’s theme was “The World Saved by Kids,” a reference to the work by Italian novelist and children’s author Elsa Morante, leading Leo to observe, “In a time that seems suffocated by the horrors of war, and by the chill of indifference, children, with their innate ability to see the world with fresh eyes, ignite a light of hope in society.”
Morante wrote World Saved by Kids in 1968 in the wake of “the great youth movement exploding against the funereal machinations of the organized contemporary world.” She believed that only the young could truly hear her revolutionary call.
Leo concluded his message with the hope “that the event may inspire renewed awareness of the importance of culture in fostering dialogue and concord.”
Vatican News concluded the news item by noting the Leo’s words echoed comments he made earlier to the Vatican Publishing House. There he said that “reading nourishes the mind, helps cultivate a conscious and well-formed critical sense, and guards against fundamentalisms and ideological shortcuts.” He added that everyone should read books, which are “an antidote to closed-mindedness, which manifests in rigid attitudes and reductive views of reality.”
Yes, yes, yes!
