A little over a century ago, Louis Bouilhet (1822-1869), a friend of Flaubert, published The Dovea poem in which he evoked the end of this paganism that the Emperor Julian had dreamed of restoring in Rome after the Christianization of the Empire.
Behold, in the ruins of a temple, the last priest of the gods:
“He hid a white dove under his robe; / Last priest of the gods, he still brought / On the last altar the last hecatomb… / And the emperor wept, — for his dream was dead! »
For Christ and his pope who were then triumphant, Bouilhet predicted a similar fate:
“You will also know, bent under the anathema, / The disaffection of peoples and kings, / So poor and so lost that you will no longer even have, / To lie down there in peace, the breadth of your cross! »
Pope Francis is not at that extreme, but his temples are empty when they are not vandalized or burned, he is weak and alone under the contradictions, more and more manifest, that his job entails.
It is carried by 2000 years of history which it must in turn carry in a context where the whole of the past is too often reduced to the faults of which it was the place, at the risk of a purification à la Pol Pot, which is to start all over again.
He is a king elected by princes in a world where it is the majorities that make the truths and the laws. He is a man surrounded by men at a time when women are gaining ground on all fronts.
At the head of an institution where he has to deal with bankers who have not all taken the vow of poverty, he bears the name of the poor among the poor, François d’Assise.
The Church has often betrayed Christ. Pope Francis knows this and he also knows that, to avoid being complicit in this betrayal, many believers opt for an individual spirituality, which deprives the Catholic Church of the new blood it needs at this time.
If it is not excluded that the distinct spiritualities one day form institutions purer than the Church, there will always be a contradiction between a message like that of the Gospels and any institution. What Simone Weil, among others, understood well: “Strong means are oppressive, pure means are ineffective. »
This is why, however true and beautiful a message may be, to carry it into the cottages a vehicle is needed capable of making its way in a world where a minimum of force is necessary for the dissemination of all the messages.
The common house
To make their message heard, the Aboriginal peoples, who had themselves become an institution, needed the material resources of the Canadian government and the media. Without the Church and the resources it still has, the pope could not have come to them. The encyclical Laudato Ifpublished in 2015, just before the Paris agreements on the environment, could well be the ideal tree to bear the fruits of this encounter.
An excerpt: “Everything is connected, and as human beings we are all united […] with tender affection, to brother sun, to sister moon, to sister river and to mother earth. Today, believers and non-believers, we agree on the fact that the earth is essentially a common heritage, the fruits of which must benefit everyone. […]. The principle of subordination of private property to the universal destination of goods […] is a “golden rule” of social behavior. […] The Christian tradition has never recognized as absolute or untouchable the right to private property. »
In this text, we reconnect with a sacred related to that for which the Aboriginal people themselves are nostalgic. The same conception of the common house and of private property follows. If the filmmaker Frédéric Back were still alive, he would be the ideal intermediary between the author of Laudato If and First Nations. His cinematographic work can play the same role. At the top, the spirit of Laudato If in movies like The man who planted trees and The river of great waters ; at the base three Native American myths: Abracadabra, Inon or the Conquest of Fire, The creation of birds.
A beautiful dream
1980s. Claude Arbour, a young self-taught ecologist who adopted the Amerindian vision of the world, admirer of Frédéric Back, lived permanently, often alone, on the shores of Lake Villiers a few kilometers from La Manouane, an Atikamekw reserve. He has, among other missions, devoted himself to the reintegration of ospreys (fisher eagles) in this region. He dreamed of leading his young friends on the reserve on similar adventures while encouraging them to push their pride so far as to tear up government checks.
This dream must not die. May many young people from La Manouane and elsewhere complete their traditional knowledge of their flora and fauna through the study of natural sciences, to become the proud guardians of their territory and, why not, shine through a pedagogy centered about life. Such a pedagogy could serve as a model for a white majority whose children are plagued by screen addiction. This would be a beautiful reversal of influences.
Aside from symbolic gestures such as the co-management of a few national parks, everything remains to be done in this reversal. Taking advantage of the Pope’s visit to include him in his support for the education of young Aboriginal people would be a strong gesture on the part of Canada: it would then be more easily forgiven for having entrusted, in the case of the residential schools, the execution of its decisions to the Churches without giving them the means to live up to past… and current expectations.