In what's sure to go down as another one of his controversial interviews, Pope Francis has effectively officially blessed Xi Jinping and the People's Republic of China at just the moment when it appears that the entire capitalist world has become dependent on the last great communist state.
His message that the world should not fear China's rise is sure to endear him to the authorities in Beijing, who have precious few Western leaders they can count on to be so unreservedly welcoming and positive towards their unelected autocratic rule - or rather, so apparently naive in equating the Chinese state with the Chinese people.
But as with all things with this maverick pontiff, there are some deep insights which are unpleasant to those of opposing viewpoints precisely because there's such a large degree of truth to them. Here are what I take to be the three big ones.
1. China - even communist China - is yet another non-Christian entity that Christians are called on today to stop judging and start loving as it is.
In case anyone forgets, the great Pope St. John Paul II brought about the fall of communism in the eastern bloc precisely because he was trusted by the communists themselves; he understood the peculiar aspirations and fears of his native Poland's atheist masters so well that they couldn't bring it upon themselves to stop surrendering more and more of their dictatorial authority - until they found themselves in open power-sharing negotiations with the opposition (Solidarity) by 1988.
To this day, it's a great scandal for Polish ultra-conservatives and ultra-nationalists that the communist regime wasn't violently overthrown with bombs, bullets, and prison or exile for its officials and enablers - that on the contrary, many minor communist bureaucrats remained in their posts into the 1990s.
The sad fact is, too many devout Christians easily come off as judgmental bigots when it comes to their attitudes towards non-Christian value systems, which whether secular or religious all share the common goal of collective human happiness. And Francis yet again exposes the root cause of such intolerance: a fear of what's different and unfamiliar, ultimately resulting from one's own lack of faith.
With China, this isn't just about Chinese communism, but China itself, as both a people and a culture. Which leads to the next point:
2. Just because it's not elected in the Western manner doesn't mean the Chinese state isn't representative of Chinese people, culture, and history.
Since China abandoned its pretenses of being a revolutionary socialist society in the 1980s, it has inevitably returned to a more benign autocracy based on its ancient Confucian and Legalist social and political philosophies, respectively: value systems that stress authority and hierarchy as unquestioned and unalienable realities in themselves, not subject to their subjects. Like all astute observers of China, Francis recognizes that this fundamental conservatism underlying Chinese culture and politics is deeply rooted, presenting a far greater challenge to Western-style democratization than any residual communist ideology could be.
Thankfully in this regard, even the democratic West is now confronting the limits of the usefulness of its freedoms. The right-wing backlash from the US to Poland indicates that conservative populists increasingly despise what they regard as the degradation of their societies into the chaos of hyper-consumerism, hyper-multiculturalism, and hyper-sexualization; this in turn only further fuels the enmity of the secular and liberal elite and its culture-war allies among racial, economic, and sexual progressives. What passes for "free press" these days is actually an extreme polarization of media into what are essentially rival propaganda mills that distort, omit, or outright fabricate the truth no less effectively than state-controlled media in unfree societies.
It is people who ultimately determine their political system and whose will is ultimately reflected in it: not only in its relative abundance or lack of freedom, but more critically in the constructive or destructive use of what freedom it does have. Only time will tell if this is an area in which, as Francis says, China actually has something to teach the West, just as it has something to learn from it.
That being said, while remaining on the topic of human freedom, here's the final, most important takeaway:
3. China's long-term change and reform in the right path depends on the free choice of its own people to come to terms with their history, not on any imposed revision of that history which purports to "set the record straight" by settling old scores.
What China - indeed, the whole world - desperately needs is a new culture characterized by the forgiving love of one's bitter enemies. In other words, a culture of Mercy (capital "M"), where "Mercy" essentially means "goodwill towards one who deserves ill-will."
This radical transformation will be catalyzed by those who, in Francis' words, take it upon themselves to come to terms with their own history. It is only through this thorough introspection of one's own past that one is informed by one's own conscience that he or she has no right to pass judgment on a fellow man or woman - that there is a God who, in being absolutely forgiving of one's own sins and faults, ordains that our true contentment is found in being absolutely forgiving of the sins and faults of others.
This is true freedom: the intimate knowledge and experience of forgiveness that liberates the soul from the debts it holds against its oppressors - beginning with itself.
Until we experience this kind of Divine Mercy, we can never be free: we condemn ourselves to the slavery of our past history, of our present circumstances, and of all those who we perceive to owe us a debt on account of offense, loss, or injury.
Under this most cruel and insidious interior bondage, we are not agents of peace and reconciliation, but instead wield the sword of Vengeance, which destroys not sin but the sinner - ourselves no less than our enemies.
But free of it, we are worthy to carry the sword of Mercy, which saves the sinner by destroying sin - and converts our enemies into our friends and allies.
The ultimate reason that dictatorships survive - just as democracies fail - is that outward freedom in the hands of an inwardly unfree people leads to chaos and destruction, not stability and prosperity. And ultimately, the only hope for the lasting triumph of democracy - of the outward freedoms protected by laws - is the undergirding victory of Mercy that liberates the inner human spirit.
This crucial distinction is the real matter at hand for China - and the whole world - in this third millennium.
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