Wednesday, April 30, 2025

Why Zelensky won’t — and can’t — sell out Ukraine for Trump’s peace deal


Zelensky faces a dangerous choice: reject Trump's flawed peace deal or risk Ukraine's sovereignty.

I believe that Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky and his Ukrainian negotiating team have already concluded that the peace deal that U.S. President Donald Trump is trying to force through simply cannot be sold to the Ukrainian public.     

The Trump proposal appears to require Ukraine to accept the loss of Crimea and other Russian-occupied territories, without receiving any security assurances in return. It even demands that Ukraine abandon its bid to join NATO. Given that Ukraine’s sovereignty and territorial integrity are enshrined in its constitution, it's hard to imagine Zelensky being able to secure legislative approval for such a deal — and he knows that.

For Zelensky, it must already be clear that Trump is pulling out all the stops to deliver on Putin’s agenda. Trump wants a reset in U.S.-Russia relations and appears willing to do whatever it takes to achieve that — including making concessions at Ukraine’s expense.

Trump sees Ukraine as the weaker partner in all this — a country to be bullied into accepting a deal that suits him and Putin, but not Ukraine. He seems unconcerned with whether the deal is acceptable to the Ukrainian people, or whether it would destabilize Ukraine politically, economically, and socially. That’s not his problem.

Trump appears focused solely on signing any deal — no matter how bad for Ukraine — as quickly as possible, securing headlines for delivering "peace," and perhaps even chasing the Nobel Peace Prize he so desires.

So, what is Zelensky’s strategy now?

I believe Zelensky knows that Trump will try to strike a deal with Putin regardless of what happens in Ukraine, as long as it results in normalized U.S.-Russia relations. He also knows Trump and Putin will try to pin the blame on him — and Ukraine — for any breakdown in peace talks. We saw signs of that last week, when Trump attacked Zelensky for stating the obvious: Ukraine cannot legally accept the loss of Crimea. Politically, that would be suicide for Zelensky and could spark a revolution at home.

It seems Zelensky is playing for time. He likely understands that Trump will eventually walk away from the negotiations, taking Putin with him. In the meantime, Ukraine still has access to a significant portion of the $61 billion U.S. military aid package approved under former U.S. President Joe Biden's administration. Zelensky likely wants to draw down as much of that support as possible — and secure additional European financial and military assistance — before rejecting any Trump-brokered deal.

Ideally, Zelensky wants to force Putin to walk away from the talks. But given Trump’s admiration for Putin, that seems unlikely. In the meantime, Zelensky is trying to buy time for Ukraine’s military and defense industry to strengthen its position and fill the gaps left by a potential U.S. pullback — gaps that are significant in areas like Patriot missiles, HIMARS, and ATACMS. The goal is to build enough resilience to sustain a long war, hoping that time will yield strategic advantages — whether through shifts in U.S. politics, such as the midterms, or mounting challenges for Putin inside Russia, as we saw with the Wagner Group uprising.

Whatever Trump and Putin agree to, without Ukraine’s participation, Russia simply lacks the military capacity to capitalize on it through a renewed offensive. In the end, this could be a poisoned chalice for Putin: gifted a "win" in Ukraine by Trump, but unable to follow through because of his own — and Russia’s — shortcomings.

-Timothy Ash, Kyiv Independent

Editor’s Note: The opinions expressed in the op-ed section are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the Kyiv Independent.

 

Tuesday, April 29, 2025

“Are you ready for the fight?”

 


There has been a change afoot in the Democratic Party for a while now as its leaders shift from trying to find common ground with Republicans to standing firmly against MAGAs and articulating their own vision for the United States.

That shift burst dramatically into the open last night when Democratic Illinois governor J.B. Pritzker gave a barn-burning speech to Democrats in New Hampshire. After walking out to the American Authors song “Go Big or Go Home,” Pritzker urged Democrats to stop listening to “do-nothing political types” who are calling for caution at a time when Americans are demanding urgent action, and to “fight—EVERYWHERE AND ALL AT ONCE.”

Pritzker highlighted three ordinary Americans who are opposing the Trump administration and Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency by building communities to protest, hanging an upside-down flag on the face of Yosemite National Park’s famous cliff El Capitan, and welcoming Vice President J.D. Vance to Sugarbush Resort in Vermont with a snow report calling attention to the administration’s attacks on veterans, people with disabilities, LGBTQ+ Americans, immigrant workers, and people of color. He urged Democrats to lead with the same passion.

He listed the positions on which he wants Democrats to stand firm, beginning: “It’s wrong to snatch a person off the street and ship them to a foreign gulag with no chance to defend themselves in a court of law.”

This is not about immigration, he said, but about the Constitution. “Standing for the idea that the government doesn’t have the right to kidnap you without due process is arguably the MOST EFFECTIVE CAMPAIGN SLOGAN IN HISTORY,” he said. “Today, it’s an immigrant with a tattoo. Tomorrow, it’s a citizen whose Facebook post annoys Trump.”

Pritzker tore into the MAGA myth that Democrats want rapists and murderers on the streets, saying that Democrats do not want undocumented immigrants who are convicted of violent crimes to stay in the country. He called for “real, sensible immigration reform.”

But, he said, “Immigration—with all its struggles and its complexities—is part of the secret sauce that makes America great, always. Immigrants strengthen our communities, enrich our neighborhoods, renew our passion for America’s greatness, enliven our music and our culture, enhance understanding of the world. The success of our economy depends upon immigrants. In fact, forty-six percent…of Fortune 500 companies were founded by immigrants or the children of immigrants.” Trump’s attacks on immigrants, he said, are likely to make the U.S. economy fail.

Indeed, he suggested, making America fail is the point of the Trump administration's actions. “We have a Secretary of Education who hates teachers and schools,” he said. “We have a Secretary of Transportation who hates public transit. We have an Attorney General who hates the Constitution. We have a Secretary of State, the son of naturalized citizens—a family of refugees—on a crusade to expel our country of both.

“We have a head of the Department of Government Efficiency— an immigrant granted the privilege of living and working here, a man who has made hundreds of billions of dollars after the government rescued his business for him—who is looking to destroy the American middle class to fund tax cuts for himself.

“And we have a President who claims to love America but who hates our military so much that he calls them ‘losers’ and ‘suckers’ and who can’t be bothered to delay his golf game to greet the bodies of four fallen US soldiers.

“And we have a Grand Old Party, founded by one of our nation’s bravest Presidents, Abraham Lincoln—who today would be a Democrat, I might add—... so afraid of the felon and the fraud that they put in the White House that they would sooner watch him destroy our country than lift a hand to save it.”

He called on Democrats to “stop wondering if you can trust the nuclear codes to people who don’t know how to organize a group chat. It’s time to stop ignoring the hypocrisy in wearing a big gold cross while announcing the defunding of children’s cancer research. And time to stop thinking we can reason or negotiate with a madman. Time to stop apologizing when we were NOT wrong. Time to stop surrendering, when we need to fight.

“Our small businesses don’t deserve to be bankrupted by unsustainable tariffs. Our retirees don’t deserve to be left destitute by a Social Security Administration decimated by Elon Musk. Our citizens don’t deserve to lose healthcare coverage because Republicans want to hand a tax cut to billionaires. Our federal workers don’t deserve to have, well, a 19-year-old DOGE bro called Big Balls destroy their careers.

“Autistic kids and adults who are loving contributors to our society don’t deserve to be stigmatized by a weird nepo baby who once stashed a dead bear in the backseat of his car.

“Our military servicemembers don’t deserve to be told by a washed-up Fox TV commentator, who drank too much and committed sexual assault before being appointed Secretary of Defense, that they can’t serve this country simply because they’re Black or gay or a woman.

“And if it sounds like I’m becoming contemptuous of Donald Trump and the people that he has elevated, it’s because... I am. You should be too. They are an affront to every value this country was founded upon.”

Pritzker called on Democrats to be “bold and our ideas fearless…. And we must deliver on that agenda for working families and for the real people who truly make America great.”

“I understand the tendency to give in to despair right now,” he said, “But despair is an indulgence that we cannot afford in the times upon which history turns. Never before in my life have I called for mass protests, for mobilization, for disruption. But I am now.

“These Republicans cannot know a moment of peace. They have to understand that we will fight their cruelty with every megaphone and microphone that we have. We must castigate them on the soap box and then punish them at the ballot box.

“They must feel in their bones that when we survive this shameful episode of American history with our democracy intact—because we have no alternative but to do just that—that we will relegate their portraits to the museum halls reserved for tyrants and traitors.”

“Cowardice can be contagious,” Pritzker said, “But so too can courage…. Just as the hope that we hold onto in the darkness, shines with its own...special light.

“Tonight, I’m telling you what I’m willing to do...is fight—for our democracy, for our liberty, for the opportunity for all our people to live lives that are meaningful and free. And I see around me tonight a roomful of people who are ready to do the same.”

“So, I have one question for all of you,” Pritzker said. “Are you ready for the fight?”

—Heather Cox Richardson

 

Monday, April 28, 2025

Bill Arthrell said he was going to napalm a dog on April 22, 1970

 


Bill said he was going to napalm a dog “For your amusement and edification.” Everyone was invited, and there was no admission charge. Bill said he was going to napalm the dog in front of the student union building on April 22, 1970, at noon.

Noon came, and hundreds gathered to protest Bill’s announced napalming of an innocent dog. They were intent on stopping Bill by any means necessary. Police were out in force. The County Prosecutor kept watch. An animal welfare officer, dressed in official animal welfare officer uniform, waited, with collar and leash in hand, to take the dog into protective custody. A little old lady handed out flyers for the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals.

Bill, dressed in a suit and tie, arrived at noon.

Bill addressed the crowd. Scientifically, objectively, clinically, he described napalm and it’s effects on flesh. The crowd directed its anger at Bill. Bill asked the crowd “How many of you have come here today to see me napalm a dog?” The crowd booed.

Bill asked the crowd “How many of you are willing to take action to stop me from napalming the dog?” The crowd growled and shook their fists.

Bill said: “I have some news for you. There is no napalm. There is no dog. You’ve come to stop me from committing a very immoral act. Good for you. But realize, it’s not happening to just one dog, it’s happening to tens of thousands of people compliments of the U.S. military, and we don’t seem to hear their screams. And just because it’s on the other side of the world doesn’t make it any less real or any less painful. So please, take your wonderful morality and apply it to the war in Vietnam and not just to this protest here today. Thank you for your morality.”

There was silence. Then applause. Bill walked quietly through the crowd back to his dorm room. Without violence, without argument or shouted slogans, with only a creative mind, an eye for guerrilla theater, and a sense of humor, Bill made his point and got others to look at and see things in a way they hadn’t before.

Twelve days later, May 4th, 1970, two hundred yards to the east of where Bill had spoken, students gathered and acted on their morality, protesting the expansion of the Vietnam War into Cambodia. That afternoon, 13 students shed their blood, shot by the National Guard. 4 died.

Bill was among the demonstrators there on May 4th, 1970, protesting the war and the National Guard’s presence at Kent State University. Bill was not shot, but the trauma scarred Bill for life. Bill spent most of his career teaching high school in inner city Cleveland. Bill struggled with his mental health, and he shared his struggles openly. Bill never let go his commitment to the cause of peace and social justice.

Bill’s most recent cause was freedom for the people of Ukraine. Bill traveled to Ukraine several times, working with refugees from the war in the Donbas, and serving as an election monitor. Bill Arthrell died in a car accident in 2022, well before his time. 

Live in power; rest in peace.


Thank you to Howard Crombie for writing and providing this story.

Sunday, April 27, 2025

The Pale Blue Dot

     

Background    

The 4.5 billion-year-old Earth is the only known astronomical object to harbor life, giving rise to billions of species of stunning diversity, including ours, Homo sapiens. It has formed the backdrop of an estimated 110 billion human lives.

At 13.1 septillion pounds and 25,000 miles in circumference, the third planet from the sun long formed the horizon of all human experience and knowledge (watch overview).

Recent discoveries have revealed our home planet’s relative size and location in the universe: a pale blue dot within the Orion Spur, located 26,000 light-years from the center of the Milky Way Galaxy, one of 100,000 galaxies within the Laniakea Supercluster.

Formation

Early Earth is theorized to have formed alongside the other planets within a solar nebula, where a massive cloud of spinning, interstellar gas and dust contracted under its own gravity and flattened into a hot disk (watch visualization).

The core of the disk became dense with lighter elements like hydrogen, eventually heating up and triggering nuclear fusion, forming the sun. Solar wind pushed lighter elements farther out into the system, while heavier metals like iron gathered into increasingly larger masses known as planetesimals in a process called accretion to form the Earth and other inner rocky planets.

As the protoplanet grew, heat from the colliding material and radioactive decay differentiated Earth’s heavier iron-rich core from its lighter rocky mantle, giving rise to Earth’s magnetic field and long-term stability. Various models suggest Earth’s formation took tens of millions of years.

Two billion years later, Earth changed dramatically when cyanobacteria, a microbe, evolved to generate energy from sunlight (i.e., photosynthesis) and release oxygen as a byproduct into the atmosphere during the Great Oxidation Event.

Structure and Composition

Earth is the densest planet in the solar system and the most massive of the four rocky terrestrials. Shaped into a sphere by gravity, Earth is flattened at its poles and bulges at its equator due to its roughly 1,000-mile-per-hour eastward spin (Jupiter spins 28 times faster).

By analyzing seismic waves, researchers theorize that a solid, 9,800-degree Fahrenheit inner core is surrounded by an outer core of liquid iron and nickel—common elements that consolidate into solids at high pressures.

Above the core, a slow-moving rocky mantle moves the crust's tectonic plates, causing volcanoes and earthquakes (see overview).

Earth’s spin combines with the core’s electrical conductivity and extreme heat to produce a magnetic field that protects its surface from damaging solar winds, cosmic rays, and deep space radiation. This so-called geodynamo process is expected to last for billions of years.

Surface and Climate

Situated within the solar system’s “Goldilocks zone,” Earth is the only planet with conditions able to sustain liquid surface water, key to the formation of life. Roughly 71% of its surface is water; the rest is land. An estimated 300 million planets in our galaxy are located in similar zones.

The Earth’s five-layer atmosphere traps solar energy and maintains an average global surface temperature of 59 degrees Fahrenheit. Roughly 21% is oxygen, crucial for respiration but highly flammable. Nitrogen (78%) dilutes the oxygen and prevents rapid combustion.

Seasons result from the Earth’s 23.4-degree tilt in relation to the orbital plane. Ice ages last millions of years and result from shifting climatic conditions—like ocean currents and the position of tectonic plates—that drop average temperatures by double digits.

We live amid the fifth major ice age, though we are in the middle of a warmer interglacial period that began 11,000 years ago.

 -1440 Daily Digest


Saturday, April 26, 2025

 


In late February, I wrote about the risks to democracy when a president comes after judges. The context then was federal judges. Calls were coming from people like Utah Senator Mike Lee and Elon Musk to impeach federal judges who stood in the way of DOGE. El Salvadoran strongman-president Nayib Bukele advised that getting “corrupt" judges out of the way were essential.

The federal judiciary is doing a remarkable job of standing up to unconstitutional conduct by the Trump administration. We know the administration doesn’t like it. Because it’s hard to defend the clearly unconstitutional they are resorting to political chicanery, trying to convince Americans that since Trump won the election he should be able to do anything he wants to do; no judge should be able to gainsay him.

In other words, Trump is rejecting the compromise at our heart of system, where three coequal branches of government share power in order to prevent the emergence of a tyrant.

On Friday, we saw the arrest of a state court judge in Wisconsin. She was arrested at her courthouse and charged with interfering with an immigration arrest. The message is clear: If they can arrest judges, no one is safe.

I will have a lot to say about the case later on today, but in advance, I want to refer you to the previous post; one that is now sadly predictive of where we are. It’s titled, “When They Come for the Judges.” I wrote I am reminded again, as we are likely to be endlessly over the course of the next few months, of the words of the German pastor and theologian Martin Niemöller, who wrote:

“First, they came for the socialists, and I did not speak out—because I was not a socialist. Then they came for the trade unionists, and I did not speak out—because I was not a trade unionist. Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out—because I was not a Jew. Then they came for me—and there was no one left to speak for me.”

The words reflected his early complicity in Nazi Germany and later change of heart. It seems like an extreme example. But they are coming for the judges. And not just the judges. Already they have come for federal employees, transgender people, immigrants, lawyers, the press, epidemiologists, scientists, and more. The time for all of us to speak up and join forces to protect each other is now, before it is too late.

Read the full post here.

The good news today is that many Americans understand the risk of ignoring an attack like this and are already aware and protesting.

We’re in this together,

-Joyce Vance

 

Friday, April 25, 2025

Russia's War Against Ukraine


     From the Ukraine Daily:                                               

Ukraine's willingness to hold talks with Russia already 'a big compromise,' Zelensky says. "I believe that we were attacked, our territories were occupied. Tens of thousands of people were killed; many children and adults were buried alive. And the fact that Ukraine is ready to sit down at the negotiating table after a full ceasefire with the terrorists who organized all this on our land is a big compromise," President Volodymyr Zelensky said.

'Vladimir, stop!' — Trump 'not happy' with Russia's deadly attack on Kyiv. "I am not happy with the Russian strikes on Kyiv. Not necessary, and very bad timing. Vladimir, Stop!" U.S. President Donald Trump said on the Truth Social platform.

Trump says Russia has shown willingness for peace by not taking over all of Ukraine, calls it 'pretty big concession.' “Stopping the war, stopping from taking the whole country, pretty big concession,” Donald Trump said on April 24 when asked what Russia has offered as part of a potential peace deal.

North Korean missile used in deadly Russian strike on Kyiv, Zelensky says. "If the information that this missile was made in North Korea is confirmed, it will be further proof of the criminal nature of the alliance between Russia and Pyongyang," Zelensky said in a statement.

Russia expected London talks to collapse but allies showed unity, Zelensky says. "Russia does not like the alliance around Ukraine, because Ukraine, if it is alone, is an easier target for Russia," President Volodymyr Zelensky said.

Shoigu threatens Europe with nuclear weapons if Russia is faced with 'unfriendly actions.'Sergei Shoigu also said any European future peacekeeping forces deployed to Ukraine would be seen by the Kremlin as a provocation.

Trump says both Russia and Ukraine 'want peace', sets deadline for deal. "So we are thinking very strongly that they both want peace," Trump said during a meeting with Norwegian Prime Minister Jonas Gahr Store. "But they have to get to the table."

US to back Ukraine's right to maintain sufficient army in talks with Russia, Bloomberg reports. The issue is expected to be raised by U.S. Special Envoy Steve Witkoff during a meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin in Moscow on April 25.

Trump says 'nobody is asking' Ukraine to recognize Crimea as Russian. "Nobody is asking (President Volodymyr) Zelensky to recognize Crimea as Russian Territory, but if he wants Crimea, why didn’t they fight for it eleven years ago when it was handed over to Russia without a shot being fired?" U.S. President Donald Trump wrote.

After Russia's deadly attack on Kyiv, Vance reposts denunciation of Zelensky. At the time of writing, U.S. Vice President JD Vance has not condemned or commented directly on the strike.


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Darya Kozyreva, 19 Years Old, Imprisoned for Quoting a Poem

 


Darya Kozyreva, 19, has been sentenced to nearly three years in a Russian penal colony for quoting a poem and remembering the suffering of Mariupol. Her “crime”? Using words to oppose Putin’s war. Free speech is not a crime: tell that to Putin’s American friends who love to preach about it—until it’s inconvenient. When poetry becomes dangerous, tyranny has already won. Defend freedom. Spread her story.

Commentary: 

All attempts by western media to understand and explain Putin’s resentment and xenophobia toward the West, his intentions and rationalizations for war, such as his all-consuming ambition to restore the Soviet Union, his claim that Ukraine is not a sovereign country and belongs to Russia, his desire to eradicate the Ukrainian language and culture, his desire to aid the Separatists in their autonomy in the Donbas region, and his belief that the minority-aligned fascist militias in southeastern Ukraine and NATO’s eastern expansion are serious threats to Russia’s sovereignty... None of the above can justify Russia's indiscriminate raping, torturing, killing and imprisoning innocent Ukrainian people and the kidnapping of Ukrainian children.  


-Glen Brown

 

Thursday, April 24, 2025

Trump's Threats against 60 Minutes

 


No need to add anything to this! For nine straight weeks, CBS’s “60 Minutes” has held the Trump administration’s feet to the fire, refusing to back down despite a barrage of legal threats and presidential tantrums. 

The most recent episode tackled Trump’s controversial policies on Ukraine—where correspondent Scott Pelley interviewed President Zelenskyy at a bombed site—and Greenland, highlighting local resistance to Trump’s annexation ambitions. These are just the latest in a series of hard-hitting segments: previous weeks have exposed the administration’s dismantling of USAID, the firing of government watchdogs, and the chilling effects of Trump’s executive orders on diversity and equity.

Trump’s response has been as predictable as it is alarming. He’s called “60 Minutes” a “dishonest Political Operative,” demanded the FCC strip CBS of its license, and is pursuing a $20 billion lawsuit over their coverage—especially an interview with Kamala Harris he claims was unfairly edited. He’s even pressed his own FCC appointee to punish CBS and other critical outlets, a move right out of the authoritarian playbook: using government power to silence dissent and intimidate journalists.

In an era when too many media organizations shy away from confronting power, “60 Minutes” is showing what real journalism looks like. As Lesley Stahl put it, the show is “fighting for our life” and standing up for the First Amendment. When the stakes are this high—when a sitting president is openly threatening the free press—media courage isn’t just admirable, it’s essential for democracy to survive.

-60 Minutes


Breathing Is Now a Political Act: The GOP Has Made Clean Air a Partisan Weapon. If you want your children to grow up with lungs that work, you better start voting like your life—and theirs—depends on it…

 


Breathing is no longer a basic human right in America: it’s now a political battleground.

Over 156 million Americans are inhaling toxic air today, not because we don’t know how to fix it, but because the Republican Party has decided that clean air is something only Democrats care about. While children gasp through inhalers and wildfires choke entire cities, Trump and his fossil-fueled allies are dismantling environmental protections with surgical cruelty. This isn’t ignorance — it’s policy. It’s profit. It’s war on your lungs, your family, and your future.

The American Lung Association just released a new report documenting how over 156 million Americans are breathing poisonous air. Trump and the Republicans don’t give a damn; if anything, they’re enthusiastic about it.

Fossil fuel billionaires and the industry that made them rich have been major patrons of Republican politicians ever since Ronald Reagan floated into the White House in 1980 on a tsunami of oil and coal money. Donald Trump is no different.

Claiming that climate science research “promotes exaggerated and implausible climate threats, contributing to a phenomenon known as ‘climate anxiety,’ which has increased significantly among America’s youth,” the Trump regime last week cut millions from a Nobel Prize winning scientist’s program’s collaboration between the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and Princeton University.

Last month they also attacked the Renew America’s Schools program that provides funding for more than 3,400 schools across the country to install heat pumps, insulation, electric school busses, and other efforts to reduce their carbon footprints.

Lost in the news of Trump’s latest stock market pump-and-dump scheme for insiders and his kidnapping legal US citizens for foreign rendition, they also announced last Friday that they were zeroing out funding for the nation’s premiere annual climate change analysis, the U.S. Global Change Research Program, and the 13 agencies that collaborate on the National Climate Assessment. The report is mandated by Congress, but Trump is ignoring the law.

This follows by a few weeks EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin’s announcement that the official position of the US government’s warning of climate change will soon be reversed. As Politico reported on March 12th: “President Donald Trump’s environmental chief announced Wednesday that he will seek to overturn the federal government’s core scientific finding about the dangers of greenhouse gases — along with 30 other key regulatory actions stretching back years or decades.”

The report added that that Zeldin will also be gutting CO2 limits for coal-fired power plants, tailpipe emissions, methane leaks, and ending a program requiring major industries to report their CO2 emissions. In other words, “To hell with the health of our children and our climate; there’s money to be made and campaign contributions to be solicited!”

Tuesday of last week, Trump signed an executive order declaring war on individual state initiatives to dial back carbon emissions, ordering the Department of Justice to “stop the enforcement” of such state laws.

The EO specifically attacked “climate Superfund” programs in Vermont and New York that would have required fossil fuel companies to reimburse those states for damages caused by climate change-fueled storms, as well as going after California’s cap-and-trade carbon credit auctions. Fossil fuel oligarchs are, no doubt, breaking out the champagne. And the dark money for attack ads against Democrats in 2026 and 2028.

This widespread and wholesale destruction of programs intended to research and fight climate change will directly damage the future of young people in America, but Trump and the GOP frankly don’t give a damn. There are, after all, big bucks to be made and campaign contributions to be collected.

This insanity began in its modern form when five corrupt Republicans on the US Supreme Court ruled in their 1978 Bellotti decision (written by Lewis Powell) that money was the same thing as “free speech,” protected by the First Amendment, and that corporations are “persons,” protected by the Bill of Rights and the 14th Amendment. That floated Reagan into office in 1980 on a tsunami of oligarch money, as I noted in The Hidden History of the Supreme Court and the Betrayal of America.

Five corrupt Republicans on the Court doubled down on that in 2010 with Citizens United, which led to an absolute explosion of billionaire money in politics. As a result, in 2024 just 150 billionaire families spent $2.6 billion to elect candidates, money that went to the GOP on a more than 2:1 basis.

And now, in a manner demonstrative of a fully corrupt banana republic mindset, the Trump administration and Republicans in Congress are giving the fossil fuel industry everything they could want. In addition to the outrages listed above, in just the first three months of this regime, they have further gifted the industry by exempting Coal Plants from Mercury and Air Toxics Standards (MATS): 

The Trump administration granted two-year exemptions to 47 coal-fired power plants, allowing them to bypass MATS regulations. This decision increases the risk of mercury pollution, which can cause neurological damage (particularly in children) and respiratory illnesses. ​

— Declaring a National Energy Emergency: Trump declared a national energy emergency to accelerate fossil fuel development, weakening environmental reviews and potentially increasing pollution. ​

— Rolling Back Vehicle Emissions Standards: The administration overturned emissions standards for vehicles, leading to increased air pollution and associated health risks. ​

— Reducing EPA Enforcement: Under Trump, the EPA brought fewer cases against polluters and sought lower penalties, diminishing deterrents against environmental violations. Now Musk and his Doge teenagers are further gutting the EPA itself.

— Weakening Methane Emission Regulations: The administration rolled back rules limiting methane emissions from oil and gas operations, contributing to climate change and air quality issues. ​

— Providing Direct Channels for Pollution Exemptions: Fossil fuel companies were given a direct email line to request exemptions from air pollution regulations, undermining public health protections. ​

— Eliminating Climate and Environmental Justice Webpages: The removal of federal climate and environmental justice webpages hindered public access to crucial information for addressing pollution and climate impacts and served to hide or cover up Trump’s naked corruption. ​

— Reversing the Clean Power Plan: The administration replaced the Clean Power Plan with the Affordable Clean Energy rule, which could lead to thousands of additional premature deaths annually due to increased air pollution. ​

— Cutting Funding for Environmental Protections: Significant budget cuts to the EPA and other environmental programs reduced the capacity to monitor and enforce pollution controls. ​

— Reducing Public Land Protections: The administration reduced the size of national monuments and opened protected lands to fossil fuel extraction, threatening ecosystems and biodiversity. ​

— Rolling Back Clean Water Protections: By narrowing the definition of “protected waters,” the administration allowed more pollutants to enter waterways, affecting drinking water and aquatic life. ​

— Undermining Scientific Research: Policies were enacted to limit the use of scientific studies in policy-making, particularly those related to environmental and public health research. ​

— Reversing the Paris Climate Agreement Commitment: The U.S. withdrawal from the Paris Agreement under Trump signaled a retreat from global efforts to combat climate change. ​

— Promoting Fossil Fuel Exports: The administration lifted restrictions on fossil fuel exports, encouraging increased production and consumption globally, contributing to greenhouse gas emissions. ​

— Reducing Air Quality Monitoring: Cuts to air pollution monitoring programs made it more difficult to detect and address harmful emissions, posing risks to public health but increasing the profits and impunity of the fossil fuel industry.

Trump and Republican cronies in his administration and Congress are committed to trading millions of cases of asthma, childhood cancers, and environmental damage — not to mention the thousands who are dying every year from climate-change-related violent weather, floods, and fires — in exchange for blood-money cash.

Republicans refuse to do town halls, refuse to answer questions about this, and hide behind a timid media that’s afraid to even ask serious questions about this criminal corruption of the protective role of government.

Which leaves it up to us.

— Get out in the streets as often as possible.
— Call your representatives, particularly if they’re Republicans (only 4 or 5 Republicans in the House and Senate could change the course of history).
— Make your voice heard on social media, letters to the editor, calling into to talk radio, and sharing messages like these with friends and family.
— Contribute, if you can, to politicians who are taking brave stands against the oligarchy.

This is not just politics — it’s a slow-motion slaughter disguised as deregulation.

Republicans won’t answer for it, won’t debate it, and won’t hold town halls to face the people they’re sacrificing. The media tiptoes. The billionaires cheer. And Trump signs away your children’s futures with a grin and a pen.

But here’s the truth they don’t want us to grasp: If we want our children to grow up with lungs that work, we better start working and voting like our lives — and theirs — depend on it.

This isn’t just about air. It’s about whether democracy itself can breathe.

Tag—you’re it.

-Thom Hartmann


Breathing Is Now a Political Act: The GOP Has Made Clean Air a Partisan Weapon


Wednesday, April 23, 2025

The Trump Administration’s War on Children

 


The clear-cutting across the federal government under President Donald Trump has been dramatic, with mass terminations, the suspension of decades-old programs and the neutering of entire agencies. But this spectacle has obscured a series of moves by the administration that could profoundly harm some of the most vulnerable people in the U.S.: children.

-Consider: The staff of a program that helps millions of poor families keep the electricity on, in part so that babies don’t die from extreme heat or cold, have all been fired. The federal office that oversees the enforcement of child support payments has been hollowed out. 

-Head Start preschools, which teach toddlers their ABCs and feed them healthy meals, will likely be forced to shut down en masse, some as soon as May 1. 

-And funding for investigating child sexual abuse and internet crimes against children; responding to reports of missing children; and preventing youth violence has been withdrawn indefinitely.

-The administration has laid off thousands of workers from coast to coast who had supervised education, childcare, child support and child protective services systems, and it has blocked or delayed billions of dollars in funding for things like school meals and school safety.

These stark reductions have been centered in little-known children’s services offices housed within behemoth agencies such as the Department of Health and Human Services and the Department of Justice, offices with names like the Children’s Bureau, the Office of Family Assistance and the Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention. 

In part because of their obscurity, the slashing has gone relatively overlooked.

“Everyone’s been talking about what the Trump administration and DOGE have been doing, but no one seems to be talking about how, in a lot of ways, it’s been an assault on kids,” said Bruce Lesley, president of advocacy group First Focus on Children. He added that “the one cabinet agency that they’re fully decimating is the kid one,” referring to Trump’s goal of shuttering the Department of Education

Already, some 2,000 staffers there have lost or left their jobs. The impact of these cuts will be felt far beyond Washington, rippling out to thousands of state and local agencies serving children nationwide.

=The Department of Education, for instance, has rescinded as much as $3 billion in pandemic-recovery funding for schools, which would have been used for everything from tutoring services for Maryland students who’ve fallen behind to making the air safer to breathe and the water safer to drink for students in Flint, Michigan

-The Department of Agriculture, meanwhile, has canceled $660 million in promised grants to farm-to-school programs, which had been providing fresh meat and produce to school cafeterias while supporting small farmers.

-t the Department of Health and Human Services, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the agency’s secretary, has dismissed all of the staff that had distributed $1.7 billion annually in Social Services Block Grant money, which many states have long depended on to be able to run their child welfare, foster care and adoption systems, including birth family visitation, caseworker training and more. 

-The grants also fund day care, counseling and disability services for kids. (It is unclear whether anyone remains at HHS who would know how to get all of that funding out the door or whether it will now be administered by White House appointees.)

-Head Start will be especially affected in the wake of Kennedy’s mass firings of Office of Head Start regional staff and news that the president’s draft budget proposes eliminating funding for the program altogether. That would leave one million working-class parents who rely on Head Start not only for pre-K education but also for child care, particularly in rural areas, with nowhere to send their kids during the day.

-Some local Head Start programs are already having to close their doors, and many program directors are encountering impediments to spending their current budgets. When they seek reimbursement after paying their teachers or purchasing school supplies, they’re being directed to a new “Defend the Spend” DOGE website asking them to “justify” each item, even though the spending has already been appropriated by Congress and audited by nonpartisan civil servants.

-Next on the chopping block, it appears, is Medicaid, which serves children in greater numbers than any other age group. If Republicans in Congress go through with the cuts they’ve been discussing, and Trump signs those cuts into law, kids from lower- and middle-class families across the U.S. will lose access to health care at their schools, in foster care, for their disabilities or for cancer treatment.

The Trump administration has touted the president’s record of “protecting America’s children,” asserting in a recent post that Trump will “never stop fighting for their right to a healthy, productive upbringing.” The statement listed five examples of that commitment. Four were related to transgender issues (including making it U.S. government policy that there are only two sexes and keeping trans athletes out of women’s sports); the other was a ban on COVID-19 vaccine mandates at schools that receive federal funding.

The White House, and multiple agencies, declined to respond to most of ProPublica’s questions. Madi Biedermann, a Department of Education spokesperson, addressed the elimination of pandemic recovery funding, saying that “COVID is over”; that the Biden administration established an “irresponsible precedent” by extending the deadline to spend these funds (and exceeding their original purpose); and that the department will consider extensions if individual projects show a clear connection between COVID and student learning.

An HHS spokesperson, in response to ProPublica’s questions about cuts to children’s programs across that agency, sent a short statement saying that the department, guided by Trump, is restructuring with a focus on cutting wasteful bureaucracy. The offices serving children, the statement said, will be merged into a newly established “Administration for Healthy America.”


Programs that serve kids have historically fared the worst when those in power are looking for ways to cut the budget. That’s in part because kids can’t vote, and they typically don’t belong to political organizations. International aid groups, another constituency devastated by Trump’s policy agenda, also can’t say that they represent many U.S. voters.

This dynamic may be part of why cuts on the health side of the Department of Health and Human Services — layoffs of doctors, medical researchers and the like — have received more political and press attention than those on the human services side, where the Administration for Children and Families is located. 

That’s where you can find the Office of Child Support Services, the Office of Head Start, the Office of Child Care (which promotes minimum health and safety standards for child care programs nationally and helps states reduce the cost of child care for families), the Office of Family Assistance (which helps states administer direct aid to lower-income parents and kids), the Children’s Bureau (which oversees child protective services, foster care and adoption) and the Family and Youth Services Bureau (which aids runaway and homeless teens, among others).

All told, these programs have seen their staffs cut from roughly 2,400 employees as of January to 1,500 now, according to a shared Google document that is being regularly updated by former HHS officials. (Neither the White House nor agency leadership have released the exact numbers of cuts.)

Those losses have been most acutely felt in the agency’s regional offices, five out of 10 of which — covering over 20 states — have been closed by the Trump administration. They were dissolved this month without notice to their own employees or to the local providers they worked with. 

It was these outposts that had monitored Head Start programs to make sure that they had fences around their playgrounds, gates at the top of their stairs and enough staffing to keep an eye on even the most energetic little ones. 

It was also the regional staff who had helped state child support programs modernize their computer systems and navigate federal law. That allowed them, among other things, to be able to “pass through” more money to families instead of depositing it in state coffers to reimburse themselves for costs.

And it was the regional staff who’d had the relationships with tribal officials that allowed them to routinely work together to address child support, childcare and child welfare challenges faced by Native families. Together, they had worked to overcome sometimes deep distrust of the federal government among tribal leaders, who may now have no one to ask for help with their children’s programs other than political appointees in D.C.

In the wake of the regional office cuts, local child services program directors have no idea who in the federal government to call when they have urgent concerns, many told ProPublica. “No one knows anything,” said one state child support director, asking not to be named in order to speak candidly about the administration’s actions. “We have no idea who will be auditing us.”

“We’re trying to be reassuring to our families,” the official said, “but if the national system goes down, so does ours.”

That national system includes the complex web of databases and technical support maintained and provided by the Office of Child Support Services at HHS, which helps states locate parents who owe child support in order to withhold part of their paychecks or otherwise obtain the money they owe, which is then sent to the parent who has custody of the child. 

Without this federal data and assistance, child support orders would have little way of being enforced across state lines.

For that reason, the Trump administration is making a risky gamble by slashing staffing at the federal child support office, said Vicki Turetsky, who headed that office under the Obama administration. She worries that the layoffs create a danger of system outages that would cause child support payments to be missed or delayed. (“That’s a family’s rent,” she said.) The instability is compounded, she said, by DOGE’s recent unexplained move to access a highly confidential national child support database.

But even if the worst doesn’t come to pass, there will still be concrete consequences for the delivery of child support to families, Turetsky said. 

The staff members who’ve been pushed out include those who’d helped manage complicated, outdated IT systems; without updates, these programs might over- or undershoot the amount of child support that a parent owes, misdirect the money or fail to give notice to the dad or mom about a change in the case.

When Liz Ryan departed as administrator of the Department of Justice’s juvenile division in January, its website was flush with opportunities for state and local law enforcement as well as nonprofits to apply for federal funding for a myriad of initiatives that help children. There were funds for local police task forces that investigate child exploitation on the internet; for programs where abused children are interviewed by police and mental health professionals; and for court-appointed advocates for victimized kids. Grants were also available for mentoring programs like Big Brothers Big Sisters and the Boys & Girls Clubs of America.

But the Trump administration removed those grant applications, which total over $400 million in a typical year. And Ryan said there still hasn’t been any communication, including in what used to be regular emails with grant recipients, many of whom she remains in touch with, about whether this congressionally approved money even still exists or whether some of it might eventually be made available again.

A spokesperson for the Office of Justice Programs within the DOJ said the agency is reviewing programs, policies and materials and “taking action as appropriate” in accordance with Trump’s executive orders and guidance. When that review has been completed, local agencies and programs seeking grants will be notified.

Multiple nonprofits serving exploited children declined to speak on the record to ProPublica, fearing that doing so might undermine what chance they still had of getting potential grants. “Look at what happened to the law firms,” one official said, adding that time is running out to fund his program’s services for victims of child abuse for the upcoming fiscal year.

“I never anticipated that programs and services and opportunities for young people wouldn’t be funded at all by the federal government,” Ryan said, adding that local children’s organizations likely can’t go to states, whose budgets are already underwater, to make up the funding gap. 

“When you look at this alongside what they’re doing at HHS and the Department of Education and to Medicaid, it’s undercutting every single effort that we have to serve kids.”

-Eli Hager, a ProPublica reporter who writes about issues affecting poor and working-class people across the country.

 

Tuesday, April 22, 2025

Trump Chaos Continues

On Easter Sunday, Pope Francis performed his final public act when he waved to worshippers in St. Peter’s Square. He died today at 88. Born in Argentina, he was the first Pope to come from the Americas. He was also the first Jesuit to serve as Pope, bringing new perspectives to the Catholic Church and hoping to focus the church on the poor.

The stock market plunged again today after Donald J. Trump continued to harass Federal Reserve chair Jerome Powell. The threat of instability if Trump tries to fire Powell, added to the instability already created by Trump’s tariff policies, saw the Dow Jones Industrial Average fell 971.82 points, or 2.48%; the S&P 500 dropped 2.36%, and the Nasdaq Composite fell 2.55%. The dollar hit a three-year low, while the value of gold soared. Journalist Brian Tyler Cohen noted that since Trump took office, the Dow has fallen 13.8%, the S&P 500 is down 15.5%, and the Nasdaq is down 20.5%.

Hannah Erin Lang of the Wall Street Journal reported that “[t]he Trump rout is taking on historic dimensions.” She noted that the Dow Jones Industrial Average “is headed for its worst April performance since 1932,” when the country was in the midst of the Great Depression. Scott Ladner, chief investment officer at Horizon Investments, told Lang: “It’s impossible to commit capital to an economy that is unstable and unknowable because of policy structure.”

The Trump administration announced on April 11 that it would withhold from Harvard University $2.2 billion in grants already awarded and a $60 million contract unless Harvard permitted the federal government to control the university’s admissions and intellectual content. Today, Harvard sued the government for violating the First Amendment and overstepping its legal authority under the guise of addressing antisemitism.

The complaint notes the “arbitrary and capricious nature” of the government’s demands, and says, “The government has not—and cannot—identify any rational connection between antisemitism concerns and the medical, scientific, technological, and other research it has frozen that aims to save American lives, foster American success, preserve American security, and maintain America’s position as a global leader in innovation.”

University president Alan Garber explained that the freeze would jeopardize research on “how cancer spreads throughout the body, to predict the spread of infectious disease outbreaks, and to ease the pain of soldiers wounded on the battlefield.”

He continued: “As opportunities to reduce the risk of multiple sclerosis, Alzheimer’s disease, and Parkinson’s disease are on the horizon, the government is slamming on the brakes. The victims will be future patients and their loved ones who will suffer the heartbreak of illnesses that might have been prevented or treated more effectively. Indiscriminately slashing medical, scientific, and technological research undermines the nation’s ability to save American lives, foster American success, and maintain America’s position as a global leader in innovation.”

Harvard is suing the departments of Health and Human Services, Justice, Education, Energy, and Defense, the General Services Administration (GSA), the National Institutes of Health, National Science Foundation, NASA, and the leaders of those agencies.

After news broke yesterday that Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth had disclosed classified information on a second unsecure Signal chat—this one on his unsecure personal cell phone—and his former spokesperson told Politico the Pentagon was in “total chaos,” and he fired three of his top aides, media articles today wrote that officials were looking for a new Secretary of Defense.

But Hegseth blamed the media for the exposure of his Signal chats, and Trump stood by Hegseth. According to Dasha Burns, Eli Stokols, and Jake Traylor of Politico, the president doesn’t want to validate the stories about disarray at the Pentagon by firing Hegseth. “He’s doing a great job,” the president told reporters. “It’s just fake news.”

While the visible side of the administration appears to be floundering, new stories suggest that the less visible side—the “Department of Government Efficiency”—has dug into U.S. data in alarming ways.

On April 15, Jenna McLaughlin of NPR reported on an official whistleblower disclosure that as soon as members of the “Department of Government Efficiency” (DOGE) arrived at the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB), they appeared to be hacking into secure data. While they claimed to be looking for places to cut costs, the behavior of the DOGE team suggested something else was going on. 

They demanded the highest level of access, tried to hide their activities in the system, turned off monitoring tools, and then manually deleted the record of their tracks, all behaviors that cybersecurity experts told McLaughlin sounded like “what criminal or state-sponsored hackers might do.”

Staffers noticed that an IP address in Russia was trying to log in to the system using a newly created DOGE account with correct username and password and later saw that a large amount of sensitive data was leaving the agency. Cybersecurity experts identified that spike as a sign of a breach in the system, creating the potential for that data to be sold, stolen, or used to hurt companies, while the head of DOGE himself could use the information for his own businesses. 

“All of this is alarming," Russ Handorf, who worked in cybersecurity for the FBI, told McLaughlin. "If this was a publicly traded company, I would have to report this [breach] to the Securities and Exchange Commission.” When the whistleblower brought his concerns to someone at NLRB, he received threats.

“If he didn’t know the backstory, any [chief information security officer] worth his salt would look at network activity like this and assume it’s a nation-state attack from China or Russia,” Jake Braun, former acting principal deputy national cyber director at the White House, told McLaughlin.

McLaughlin noted that the story of what happened at the NLRB is not uncommon. When challenged by judges, DOGE has offered conflicting and vague answers to the question of why it needs access to sensitive information and has dismissed concerns about cybersecurity and privacy. The administration has slashed through the agencies that protect systems from attack and Trump has signed an executive order urging government departments to “eliminate…information silos” and to share their information.

Sharon Block, the executive director of Harvard Law School's Center for Labor and a Just Economy and a former NLRB board member, told McLaughlin: “There is nothing that I can see about what DOGE is doing that follows any of the standard procedures for how you do an audit that has integrity and that's meaningful and will actually produce results that serve the normal auditing function, which is to look for fraud, waste and abuse…. The mismatch between what they're doing and the established, professional way to do what they say they're doing...that just kind of gives away the store, that they are not actually about finding more efficient ways for the government to operate.”

On April 18, Makena Kelly and Vittoria Elliott of Wired reported that DOGE is building a master database that knits together information from U.S. Customs and Immigration Services, the Internal Revenue Service (IRS), the Social Security Administration, and voting data from Pennsylvania and Florida. This appears to be designed to find and pressure undocumented immigrants, Kelly and Elliott reported, but the effects of the consolidation of data are not limited to them.

On April 15 the top Democrat on the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, Gerald Connolly of Virginia, asked the acting inspector general at the Department of Labor and the inspector general at the NLRB to investigate “any and all attempts to exfiltrate data and any attempts to cover up their activities.” Two days later, he made a similar request to the acting inspector general for the Social Security Administration.

Connolly wrote: “I am concerned that DOGE is moving personal information across agencies without the notification required under the Privacy Act or related laws, such that the American people are wholly unaware their data is being manipulated in this way.”

On April 17, Christopher Bing and Avi Asher-Schapiro of ProPublica reported that the administration is looking to replace the federal government’s $700 billion internal expense card program, known as SmartPay, with a contract awarded to the private company Ramp. Ramp is backed by investment firms tied to Trump and Musk.

While administration officials insist that SmartPay is wasteful, both Republican and Democratic budget experts say that’s wrong, according to Bing and Asher-Schapiro. “SmartPay is the lifeblood of the government,” former General Services Administration commissioner Sonny Hashmi told the reporters. “It’s a well-run program that solves real world problems…with exceptional levels of oversight and fraud prevention already baked in.”

“There’s a lot of money to be made by a new company coming in here,” said Hashmi. “But you have to ask: What is the problem that’s being solved?”

—Heather Cox Richardson

 

Monday, April 21, 2025

Pope Francis Has Left Us by La Civiltà Cattolica


“The novel, literature, you see, reads the human heart. It helps us embrace desire, splendor and misery. It is not theory. It is helpful for preaching to know the heart…” [1] That is what Francis told me when I interviewed him in 2016, near the end of our meeting. Ten years after his election to the papacy (March 13, 2013), we want to go in search of the formation of his thinking and pastoral attitude. We are doing so by retracing his readings. It will be a way to understand Jorge Mario Bergoglio’s pontificate from a different perspective.

Pope Francis has always been passionate about literature. Novels and poetry accompanied him in his formation. In a 2009 interview, he said that literature, from a young age, me gustaba mucho. In fact, his memories as a reader go back to childhood, when his father read books aloud after dinner. There was no television.

In this article I would like to reconstruct the path of his reading along with the literary references scattered throughout his texts and interviews. I will try to give some pointers to build a map, a path among the texts that have shaped his way of thinking.

Creativity, imagination and language

As a young Jesuit, Bergoglio taught literature at the Colegio de la Inmaculada Concepción, a Jesuit school in Santa Fe. There he developed the conviction that creative experience was decisive. He was 28 years old and did “a somewhat risky thing.” [2] He had to get his pupils to study the classics of Spanish literature, but the boys did not like them. They asked, instead, to read authors like García Lorca. So, Bergoglio decided that they would study works like El Cid at home, and during the lessons he would cover the authors the boys liked best.

More importantly, he also began to get them to write. Eventually, he decided to ask Borges to read two short stories written by his boys. He knew Borges’ secretary, who had been his piano teacher. Borges liked those stories very much. So, Bergoglio suggested he write the introduction to a collection of them[3]

This experience of the past has an echo today. It is striking that Francis has written the preface to the poems of a young poet, Luca Milanese, who in 2020 published a volume entitled Rime a sorpresa (Surprise Rhymes).[4] It would not be remarkable, I think, to read a papal text juxtaposed with the work of a poet who has entered the culture and sensibility of entire generations, perhaps one as far back as Dante. Bergoglio himself, in fact, published an apostolic letter, Candor Lucis Aeternae, to mark the 7th centenary of the death of the Sommo Poeta. But it has never happened before that a pontiff would write a one-page introduction to the work of a young poet.

In his preface, the pope notes that Milanese’s poetry stems from a spontaneous ability to “see connections even where there seemingly are none; he knows how to grasp in seemingly random things a new, different depth.” Poetry makes one see links, connections, correspondences. I know from his students that Bergoglio, as a young professor, loved to teach Baudelaire, whom he has also quoted as pope. Perhaps there is an echo of the symbolic density of his Correspondances in his introduction to Milanese.

It is also significant that he wanted to write, on June 20, 1981, the preface to a collection of poems by the Argentine Jesuit Osvaldo Pol, entitled De destierros y moradas. Francis wrote, “The poetic word has dwellings of flesh in the human heart and – at the same time – feels the weight of wings that have not yet taken flight.”[5] This is another important definition of poetry. It absorbs the feelings, the passions, the carnality of desire. That is why its weight is not that of wings that, once they have taken flight, are no longer felt. On the contrary, the poem feels this weight, because the wings still touch the earth. And so they express it.

Why this poetic passion, which also manifests itself by accompanying texts by poets not “canonized” by critics, even ones by young students? Bergoglio knows that lack of imagination is a serious problem for faith. We lack powerful images that help us “imagine” the truths we believe. This is, for example, one of the reasons why he loves “popular piety”: it is a golden reservoir of strong images that are grafted deeply into the collective imagination of a people.

It is in this sense that we should understand the appeal made by the pontiff in his preface to the volume The Divine Plot, Jesus in Reverse Angle[6]: “I make an appeal,” Francis wrote, “in this time of crisis of the world order, a time of war and great polarizations, of rigid paradigms, of serious climate and economic challenges. We now need the genius of a new language, of powerful stories and images, of writers, poets and artists capable of shouting the Gospel message to the world, of making us see Jesus.”[7] The call was immediately taken up by director Martin Scorsese, who wrote a script about Jesus that could become a film.[8]

To express his thinking, Francis often uses images. This is not just an expressive strategy, but, more importantly, a way of thinking. Speaking to the community of La Civiltà Cattolica on February 9, 2017, he lucidly said, “I really like poetry and when I can I continue to read it. Poetry is full of metaphors. Understanding metaphors helps make thinking agile, intuitive, flexible, acute. Those with imagination do not become rigid; they have a sense of humor, always enjoying the sweetness of mercy and inner freedom.”[9]

So many times, in fact, as pope he has used, and continues to use, images taken from poetry, even in his most important documents. For example, in his apostolic exhortation Amoris Laetitia, dedicated to conjugal love, Francis felt the need to use poetic language. And so he quoted Jorge Luis Borges, Octavio Paz and Mario Benedetti. In another exhortation, Querida Amazonia, he cited as many as 17 writers and poets, mostly Amazonian and popular, but also Mario Vargas Llosa and Pablo Neruda. In his papal communication Francis includes the poetic and symbolic logos as an integral part of his discourse. This is definitely significant.

The logic of ‘incomplete thinking’: Dostoevsky and Benson

But there is a peculiar aspect of poetic expression that Bergoglio loves. We have already understood it in the pedagogical choices related to his teaching. “I love tragic artists,” Francis told me during a 2013 interview.

On a couple of occasions, I also have had the opportunity to continue the discussion with the pontiff, discussing this or that writer. One example is Dostoevsky. I knew that the great Russian novelist was among Bergoglio’s most beloved writers. He repeated this several times subsequently, including during the press conference on the flight back from Bahrain. 

But which work in particular does he favor? The Brothers Karamazov? That is what I imagined. It can be remembered that as archbishop, on the occasion of the canonization of the Roplatan martyrs, on May 27, 1988, Bergoglio quoted The Brothers Karamazov: “Whoever does not believe in God will not believe in God’s people either.”[10But when asked directly, “What do you like of Dostoevsky?” Pope Francis replied, Notes from Underground. Later, in my 2016 interview, he described it as “a jewel.”[11]

In this 1864 novel, the Russian writer describes a frustrated man who is resentful of a world that is despicable in his eyes: a man with no name and no qualities, “neither bad nor good, neither dishonest nor honest, neither a hero nor an insect.” Though aware of what good is, he sinks deeper and deeper into a state of wickedness, amid unfulfilled desires and resolutions of revenge. In his “notes,” soliloquy alternates with recollections of episodes in his life, laying bare his soul.

I want to dwell here on one aspect of this passion for tragedy: the fact that it testifies to the complexity and contradictory nature of human experience, of life. Bergoglio loves tensions, “polar opposites,” as Romano Guardini, who was a great interpreter of Dostoevsky and had a great influence on Bergoglio’s thought, called them.

In Notes from Underground, Dostoevsky wrote that it is not necessarily “two plus two equals four,” but could also be “two plus two equals five.” In fact, “two plus two equals four is no longer life, gentlemen, but the principle of death,” the novella declares. Calculating, conceptual and abstract thinking fails to grasp life and its real contradictions. 

After all, one of the cornerstones of Bergoglio’s thinking is that reality always comes before the idea, and the complexity of the polyhedron is superior to the equidistances of the sphere. Did he learn this from Dostoevsky? Certainly from Guardini he learned that Dostoevsky described the existence of his characters by considering two poles in tension: “the moment of fullness of existence, the undefined, the fluid element elusive to all form, the sudden and unpredictable.”[12]

This seems to me a crucial point for understanding Francis, because this infraction of the rigid logic postulated by the great Russian writer can also be seen as the basis of what Francis, in my 2013 interview, had called “incomplete thinking” or “open-ended thinking,” which has nothing rigid about it.

Along these same lines is a reflection that Francis shared with the Jesuits of La Civiltà Cattolica, referring to Baudelaire, an author that – as I have already pointed out – the young Bergoglio made his students study carefully: “I was thinking of Baudelaire’s verses about Rubens  where he writes that la vie afflue et s’agite sans cesse, / Comme l’air dans le ciel et la mer dans la mer

Yes, life is fluid and stirs without ceasing as the air stirs in the sky and the sea in the sea.” He continued: “Life is not a black and white picture. It is a color picture. Some light and some dark, some muted and some vivid. But still nuances prevail.”[13]

The need for “incomplete thinking” can be detected in Francis’ passion for the dystopian novel Lord of the World, by Robert Hugh Benson. In this work, a charismatic world leader emerges and leads many to think that he represents the way beyond the divisions, constituted, for example, by nations and religions, into a broader and more inclusive humanism. Here appear, then, the fruits of the lie of an abstractly humanitarian ideal, of so-called “single thinking” or, as Francis called it on his trip to Bahrain, “isolated thinking.”

On April 4, 2005, Bergoglio wrote on the “imperialist conception of globalization.” To describe it, he said that “it is conceived as a perfect, clean sphere. All peoples merge into a uniformity that nullifies the tension between diversities. Benson predicted all this in his famous novel Lord of the World. This globalization constitutes the most dangerous totalitarianism of postmodernity.”[14] “Incomplete thinking” whereby two plus two do not always make four is the opposite of globalized, “isolated” and “single thinking.”

A literature of the people: Hernández, Güiraldes and Marechal

Bergoglio makes his own the definition of a “classical” work derived from Cervantes: “Children have it in their hands, young people read it, adults understand it, and old people praise it.”[15] The “classic” work is that which everyone can somehow perceive as their own, not a small group of refined connoisseurs. This lets us understand a fundamental aspect of the pontiff’s literary passion: the “classic” for Bergoglio is always “popular.”

But by “popular” he also means that it has a connection with the people, because it expresses their genius. This leads him, in his apostolic journeys, to refer to writers and poets from the places he visits, such as Miklós Radnóti in Hungary, or Abai in Kazakhstan. In Colombia it is Gabriel Garcia Marquez, in Chile Gabriela Mistral, in Mexico Octavio Paz.

This link between people and art is evident in Bergoglio’s love for a work that, by his own admission, is not a masterpiece: the Argentine epic poem Martín Fierro, written by José Hernández in 1872. Bergoglio wrote an extensive reflection on this work, in which he sees in the poem “a narrative, a kind of ‘staging’ of the drama of the constitution of a collective and inclusive sentiment.” Francis is also fond of Don Segundo Sombra, by Ricardo Güiraldes, the last masterpiece of that gaucho literature that had given birth to Martín Fierro.

The invitation to read the national poem is meant to awaken the “desire to keep alive that dream of a homeland of brothers and sisters that has guided so many men and women in this land.”[16]  In fact, this work gives shape to the desire for a society in which everyone finds a place: the porteño trader, the coastal gaucho, the northern shepherd, the northeastern artisan, the native and the immigrant, insofar as none of them wishes to have everything for him or herself, expelling the others from the land. 

His accents in speaking of Martín Fierro are reminiscent of the democratic and popular romanticism of a Walt Whitman, a contemporary of Hernández, who fields the Dakota carpenter and the California miner, the mechanic and the bricklayer, the boatman and the shoemaker.

The Argentine mosaic is no less than that of the United States because of immigration. It should not be forgotten that Bergoglio is the son of immigrants, and his interest in the topic of migration is, among other things, connected to this experience. There is no time here to talk about his passion for Nino Costa’s poetry and Luigi Orsenigo’s novels describing it. But it is necessary to talk about Bergoglio’s great interest in Leopoldo Marechal, a classic writer of Argentine literature, because he well expresses the value of the unity of a people on the basis of diversity and mestizaje.

Francis had told me about Marechal in the 2013 interview,[17] referring to three of his works, Adán BuenosayresEl Banquete de Severo Arcángelo and Megafón o la guerra. Marechal’s masterpiece is his first work, published in 1948, where he described the “city of the brothers, Philadelphia.” The work narrates a symbolic three-day voyage by the poet Adàn within the geography of a metaphysical Buenos Aires, a great melting pot of races and languages, a productive and cheerful metropolis with countless immigrants (Spanish, Italians, Germans, Russians, Syro-Lebanese…). 

What binds Francis to Marechal is the common deep experience of belonging to the homeland, Argentina. In his lecture for the 13th Archdiocesan Day of Social Pastoral Care, which he attended in Buenos Aires on October 16, 2010, Bergoglio quoted him as saying, “We are a new people, a ‘childlike homeland…,’ as Leopoldo Marechal wrote.”[18]

But the link with the writer is, in particular, the fascination of such an international city. It is caught in a truly Dantean – but also Dostoevskian – descent into the metropolitan “underground.” Dante’s influence is recognized in the seventh book of the novel entitled Viaje a la Oscura Ciudad de Cacodelphia, an obvious parody of Inferno. Marechal, but also Julio Cortázar of The Reward Journey, helped Bergoglio reflect on and imagine the value of mestizaje, which he explained well to the Jesuits in Mozambique: “Mixing makes you grow, it gives you knew life. 

It develops racial mixing, change and gives originality. The mixing of identities is what we have experienced, for example, in Latin America. There we have everything: Spanish and Indian, the missionary and the conqueror, the Spanish lineage, people’s mixed heritage. Building walls means condemning yourself to death. We can’t live asphyxiated by a culture as clean and pure as an operating theater, aseptic and not microbial.”[19] How much imagination these statements deploy!

But there is also the description of Philadelphia that is striking in Adán Buenosayres. Mixture and differences composed in harmony build citizenship, and thus Philadelphia, which, Marechal writes, is the “city of brothers, among the metropolises of the world. A peaceful and happy multitude will walk its streets: the blind will see the light, the denier will affirm what he has denied, the exiled will tread the native soil, and the damned will finally be redeemed…”[20] As the rose reigns among flowers, so the “city of brothers” will reign among the metropolises of the world, Marechal writes. The city is home to all who live it in their differences and intersections. How can we not see here the background of the encyclical Fratelli Tutti?

The poetics of the ‘middle class’: Malègue and Manzoni

Therefore, art is not a “laboratory” for experimenting with cultural and expressive dynamics: instead, it is part of the flow of history, part of humanity’s journey on earth. If anything, it is an advanced frontier, but not an elitist club. In this sense, it is illuminating how important the work of French writer Joseph Malègue is to Bergoglio. Francis said in the 2013 interview, “I see holiness in the people of God, their daily holiness. There is a ‘middle class of holiness’ that we can all be part of, the one Malègue talks about.”[21] Born in 1876 and dying in 1940, Malègue is known for his unfinished trilogy Pierres noires. Les Classes moyennes du Salut. Some French critics called him “the Catholic Proust.”

Describing what he means by the “middle class of holiness,” Francis said, “I see holiness in the patient people of God: a woman who raises children, a man who works to bring home bread, the sick, elderly priests who have so many wounds but smile because they have served the Lord, nuns who work so hard and live a hidden holiness. This for me is the common holiness.”[22] The pope manifested his link to Malègue’s pages at the beginning of his Gaudete et Exsultate, the apostolic exhortation “on the call to holiness in the contemporary world.”

We are not far from the reasons why he read another great novel, I Promessi Sposi (The Betrothed) by Alessandro Manzoni, four times. He had spoken about it in the 2013 interview with a very personal recollection, “I have read the book I Promessi Sposi three times and I have it now on the table to read it again. Manzoni has given me so much. My grandmother, when I was a child, taught me by heart the beginning of this book: ‘That branch of Lake Como, which turns south, between two unbroken mountain chains…’.”[23]

In a later interview, he recalled his first connection with this novel: “Grandmother used to read us a few chapters of I Promessi Sposi, and even helped us memorize them. Recently I picked them up again, because every time you open them you find something new in them. Often my father would recite parts of I Promessi Sposi to us from memory and then explain them to us.”[24]  One cannot help but notice how Bergoglio’s passion for Manzoni’s novel is the result of readings in the family context, of personal memories that have the warmth of affection, of the presence of his grandmother and father.

Manzoni’s work is the novel of “mechanical and petty businesspeople” who become instruments of divine providence. Stories and history are intertwined, traversing tribulations. On this historical plane, human machinations are revealed, and God’s consolations are experienced. Lucia, who rightfully belongs to the “middle class of holiness,” is persecuted by human meanness. It is she who carries the proclamation of God’s mercy. 

This is the profound meaning of the dramatic encounter with the captor, the Unnamed, to whom the announcement of God’s mercy is made: “What can I, a petty person demand, if not that you show mercy to me? God forgives many things for a work of mercy!”

Bergoglio is clearly impressed by works that display mercy, a literature of mercy. I like to recall here that, on his trip to the Holy Land, he referred to terrorists with the powerful expression of “poor criminal people.”[25] This definition echoes Christ’s choice before the Grand Inquisitor, as Dostoevsky presents it to us in The Brothers Karamazov: a kiss on the lips of the one who announces to him the death sentence; a kiss that does not change his mind, but that makes his lips tremble and “burns the heart.”

But Dante, too, is for Bergoglio a poet of God’s mercy, which – as he writes in his apostolic letter Candor Lucis Aeternae[26]– “always offers the possibility of change, conversion, new self-awareness and discovery of the path to true happiness.” This is evidenced, for example, by the figure of the Emperor Trajan, a pagan but placed in Canto XX of Paradise, or by King Manfred, excommunicated but placed by Dante in Purgatory, who thus recalls his own end and the divine verdict: But infinite goodness has such great arms, / that it takes what turns to it (Purg. III). It is a perfect summary of Francis’ vision of God’s mercy.

For Bergoglio, the choice of Christ before the Grand Inquisitor is close to that of Lucia before the Unnamed, which he has well in mind, so much so that he quoted him, for example, at a key moment at the beginning of his pontificate, namely in Lampedusa, on July 8, 2013, in these words, “The figure of Manzoni’s Unnamed returns. The globalization of indifference makes us all ‘unnamed,’ nameless and faceless perpetrators.” We note how Manzoni and Benson converge here.

The figure of the shepherd: from Manzoni to Hugo

In I Promessi Sposi there is mention of Federigo Borromeo, for whom, Manzoni writes, “there is no just superiority of man above men, except in their service.” This chapter of I Promessi Sposi in which the figure of Cardinal Federigo is described in his encounter with the Unnamed should be better investigated to find elements of the Bergoglian vision. We recall that Paul VI also quoted it in his General Audience of October 9, 1968.

Reference to Manzoni’s work is also found in the book Francis wrote in dialogue with Austen Ivereigh. Ivereigh rightly notes the novel presents “various priestly characters: the cowardly curé Don Abbondio, the holy cardinal archbishop Borromeo, and the Capuchin friars who serve the lazaretto, a kind of field hospital where the infected are rigorously separated from the healthy.”[27] He asks the pontiff how he sees the mission of the Church in light of the novel and the pandemic crisis. Bergoglio answers, “Cardinal Federigo really is a hero of the Milan plague. 

Yet in one of the chapters he goes to greet a village but with the window of his carriage closed to protect himself. This did not go down well with the people. The people of God need their pastor to be close to them, not to over-protect himself. The people of God need their pastors to be self-sacrificing, like the Capuchins, who stayed close.”[28]

Francis had indirectly quoted this passage from I Promessi Sposi in Brazil, giving an interview to Gerson Camarotti of broadcaster Rede Globo on July 25, 2013. When Francis arrived in Rio de Janeiro, in fact, mistakes were made in the security system and his car became caught up in the crowd. The pope commented, “Before leaving I went to see the popemobile that was to be brought here. It had so many windows. If you go to see someone you love so much, friends, with a desire to communicate, do you go to visit them inside a glass case? No. I could not come to see this people, who have such a big heart, behind glass . And in the car, when I go on the streets, I roll down the window, so I can put out my hand and say hello.”[29] It is clear, then, that Bergoglio developed various pastoral considerations from frequent reading of I Promessi Sposi.

It is in Victor Hugo that Francis finds a fine example of a pastor. In a text accompanying the reissue of a book by Cardinal Carlo Maria Martini on the figure of a bishop, Bergoglio notes that Martini refers to Monsignor Bienvenu, bishop of Dignes, a character in Les Miserables. He writes, “Those pages of Victor Hugo describing that pastor deserve rereading. I like them very much and they inspire me.” And so he quotes Hugo describing Monsignor Bienvenu. 

He quotes this character extensively when describing the bishop as a doctor in a field hospital: “He bent over those who were in agony and those who were dying. The universe appeared to him as an immense sickness; he felt everywhere the fever, he listened everywhere to the suffering and, without trying to unravel the enigma, he sought to soothe the sore.” He concludes by quoting, “‘Love one another’: […] he aspired to nothing more, and in this was all his doctrine.”[30]  It really sounds like the epitome of the pastor according to Bergoglio.

‘Homo viator’ on a mission: Virgil, Pemán and Tolkien

But what for Bergoglio is the relationship between human beings and the events of history? If I had to choose a poet in whom the pontiff finds his mentor, I would say Virgil. In his Message to Educational Communities on April 23, 2008, then-Cardinal Archbishop Bergoglio of Buenos Aires had said that humanity has always conceived of life as a journey, and man as a wayfarer, homo viator. In the Bible, this is certainly the case: just think of Abraham. 

But “in every human history and mythology,” he writes, “the fact is stressed that the person is not a quiet, sedentary being, but rather ‘on the way,’ called, ‘vocato’ – hence the term ‘vocation’ – and when a person does not enter into this dynamic, then he or she is annihilated as a person, or corrupted. More than that, setting out is rooted in an inner restlessness that impels us to ‘come out of ourselves’.”

In particular, Bergoglio refers to Aeneas, who, “faced with Troy in ruins, overcomes the temptation to stop and rebuild the city and, taking his father on his shoulders, begins to climb the mountain toward a peak that will be the foundation of Rome.”[31] This image is indelible in the pontiff’s mind. It is an icon.
The following year, in his extensive conversation with Sergio Rubin and Francesca Ambrogetti, he said of the Virgilian hero, “Beware, Christian patience is not quietist or passive. 

It is the patience of St. Paul, the one that involves carrying history on one’s shoulders. It is the archetypal image of Aeneas who, as Troy burns, lifts his father on his shoulders – Et sublato montem genitore petivi – lifts his history on his shoulders and sets out, in search of the future.”[32]

These two quotations from Virgil are an indication that this work has given the future pontiff much food for thought. Stopping is a temptation: Aeneas chooses the risk of leaving, of going up, and doing so carrying his elderly father on his shoulders. One can, therefore, seek the future only by carrying the past, history and memory on one’s shoulders.

As pontiff, Francis has fully taken up this Virgilian echo, revealing how much the Aeneid has been etched in his imagination. In particular, he did so in the interview given to Austin Ivereigh during the pandemic. At the very end of that interview, he added, referring to Aeneid II, 800-804: “What comes now to mind is another verse of Virgil’s, at the end of Book 2 of the Aeneid, when Aeneas, following defeat in Troy, has lost everything. 

Two paths lie before him: to remain there to weep and end his life, or to follow what was in his heart, to go up to the mountain and leave the war behind. It’s a beautiful verse. Cessi, et sublato montem genitore petivi (“I gave way to fate and, bearing my father on my shoulders, made for the mountain”). This is what we all have to do now, today: to take with us the roots of our traditions and make for the mountain.”[33] Here, then, is how the icon that the then-archbishop of Buenos Aires had already well captured returns.

It should also be noted that Francis, on October 23, 2018, during the presentation of the book La Sagezza del tempo (The Wisdom of Time)[34] on the relationship between young and old, asked for an icon to be projected that was the work of the iconographic atelier of Bose: one that depicts a young monk carrying an elderly brother on his shoulders. 

In fact, it is the same image of Aeneas carrying Anchises on his shoulders. The pope commented, “You see a young man who was able to take upon himself the dreams of the elderly and carry them forward, to make them bear fruit. This perhaps will be an inspiration. You can’t carry all the elders on your shoulders, but their dreams, yes, and carry them forward, carry them: that will do you good.”

But Francis went further, emphasizing the theme of memory. He affirmed, “What comes to my mind is a verse from the Aeneid in the midst of defeat: the counsel is not to give up, but save yourself for better times, for in those times remembering what has happened will help us. Take care of yourselves for a future that will come. And remembering in that future what has happened will do you good.”[35] The pope was evidently concerned that the post-pandemic time would be imagined as going backward, into simple oblivion.

Forgetting the lived experience is the greatest temptation when one wants to build the future. Francis said again, “What comes to mind is another line from Virgil (Aeneid I, 203): . . . meminisce  iuvabit (it will be good to remember). We need to recover our memory because memory will come to our aid. This is not humanity’s first plague; the others have become mere anecdotes.” He continued: “We need to remember our roots, our tradition packed full of memories.”[36]

In the encyclical Fratelli Tutti, the analysis of present history is broader than the pandemic.  Francis is reminded of Virgil’s famous verse that evokes “the tears of things” (No. 34). The pope was referring to the passage in the first book of the Aeneid, verse 462, in which Aeneas speaks to Achates of the images of war they are viewing and says: Sunt lacrimae rerum et mentem mortalia tangunt (“Tears fall for man’s fate, and human suffering touches the heart”).

One of the reasons for this suffering is certainly the “Third World War in pieces.” In the volume Vi chiedo in nome di Dio (I ask you in the name of God), edited by Hernan Reyes Alcaide, the pope writes, “More than two thousand years ago the poet Virgil shaped this verse, ‘War does not give salvation!’ One can hardly believe that since then the world has not learned lessons from the barbarity that marks conflicts between brothers, compatriots and countries. War is the clearest sign of inhumanity. That heartfelt cry still resounds.”[37] There is no memory, nothing is being learned.

Bergoglio’s reception of Virgil is in the line of so many literary scholars, as well as men and women of culture for whom the reception of a classic is a fruitful relationship between past and present it is the resumption of the thread that unites present and past experience; it is the possibility of regeneration through  a text of yesterday in order to derive a map for charting our future.

Aeneas is the hero on the road who is aware  in himself of the sense of mission. Bergoglio is very sensitive to this image, which he also finds in contemporary literature. In particular he cites Tolkien, who – writes the future pontiff – “takes up in Bilbo and Frodo the image of the person called to walk, and his heroes know and act, by walking, the drama that is unleashed between good and evil. The ‘person walking’ denotes a dimension of hope; “entering” into hope. Outside of us and in us there is something that calls us to make the journey. To go out, to walk, to carry through, to accept the bad weather and to give up shelter … this is the journey.”[38]

Bergoglio also finds this figure of the hero traveling on a mission in Il divino impaziente (The Impatient Divine) a drama about St. Francis Xavier by Spanish writer José María Pemán. Francis quoted him on July 31, 2013, at St. Ignatius Church in Rome, as an emblem of the anxiety to evangelize without hesitation or delay, so well portrayed in “that beautiful piece by Pemán,” as he called it. It is the same anxiety that pervades Francis’ entire pontificate.

* * *

Meeting the ecclesial movements at the Vigil of Pentecost on May 18, 2013, the pope quoted Manzoni’s novel, “Do not speak much, but speak with all your life.” Here he was referring in particular to the chapter of I Promessi Sposi he loves most, the one about the conversion of the Unnamed, where we read, “Life is the paragon of words.” Here is the point: life is the paragon of words, and therefore the poetic word that Bergoglio loves is the one that has an intimate relationship with life and provides the images, metaphors and terms to express it.

By constructing a map of Bergoglio’s readings, it is possible to better understand his vision and perhaps even discover the roots of his way of understanding the world and of being a pastor. We have emphasized the importance of tragedy that presents the contradictory nature of life. We discovered how much the pope loves literature that expresses the soul of a people but is also able to give him insight into that multifaceted and mestizo future that Marechal helps us think of and imagine.

Interweaving the reading of Hernández, Malègue, Dostoevsky and Manzoni, one senses the humanity Bergoglio has in his heart. It extends as if within a square. It starts from the straightforward folk dimension of Renzo and Lucia to the gaucha humanity of the characters in Martín Fierro’s epic; it continues from les classes moyennes de la sainteté to the brutality of the social life of the Dostoevskian anti-hero, the man of the “underground,” who finds his way out in Virgil’s words about Aeneas’ mission, or Tolkien’s words about Frodo, all called to go out and walk their path.
DOI:
[1].    J. M. Bergoglio – Pope Francis, Nei tuoi occhi è la mia parola. Omelie e discorsi di Buenos Aires 1999-2013, Milan, Rizzoli, 2016, XX.
[2].    A. Spadaro, “Intervista a Papa Francesco”, in Civ. Catt. 2013 III 473.
[3].    Cf. J. Milia et al, L’età felice, Milan – Rome, Corriere della Sera – La Civiltà Cattolica, 2014, 237 f.
[4].    L. Milanese, Rime a sorpresa, Todi (Pg), Tau, 2020.
[5].       O. Pol, De destierros y moradas, Buenos Aires, Diego de Torres, 1981.
[6].    A. Spadaro, Una trama divina. Gesù in controcampo, Venice, Marsilio, 2023.
[7]. Pope Francis, “Chi dite che io sia?”, ibid., 10.
[8]. M. Scorsese, “Screenplay for a possible film about Jesus”, in Civ. Catt. English Ed., February 2023.
[9]. Pope Francis, “Address to the community of La Civiltà Cattolica”, in Civ. Catt. English Ed., 2017.
[10].   J. M. Bergoglio – Pope Francis, Nei tuoi occhi è la mia parola…op. cit., XVII.
[11].   Ibid., XX.
[12].   R. Guardini, El universo religioso de Dostoyevski, Buenos Aires, Emece, 1954, 350.
[13].   Pope Francis, “Address to the community of La Civiltà Cattolica”, op. cit.
[14].   Francis, “Prólogo” to G. Carriquiry, Una apuesta por América Latina, Buenos Aires, Editorial Sudamericana, 2005.
[15].   A. Spadaro, “Intervista a Papa Francesco”, op. cit., 472.
[16].   J. M. Bergoglio – Pope Francis, Nei tuoi occhi è la mia parola…op. cit., 160.
[17].   A. Spadaro, “Intervista a Papa Francesco”, op. cit., 472.
[18].   J. M. Bergoglio – Pope Francis, Nei tuoi occhi è la mia parola..opcit., 807.
[19]. A. Spadaro, “The Sovereignty of the People of God. The pontiff meets the Jesuits of Mozambique and Madagascar”, in Civ. Catt. English Ed. September 2019.
[20]. L. Marechal, Adán Buenosayres, Florence, Vallecchi, 2010, 342f.
[21]. A. Spadaro, “Intervista a Papa Francesco”, op. cit., 459.
[22].   Ibid.
[23].   Ibid., 471.
[24].   D. Agasso, “Quei 400 cappelletti della nonna e i libri letti da papà, io e il mio Natale in casa Bergoglio”, in La Stampa, December 24, 2021.
[25].   Francis, Meeting with refugees and youth with disabilities at Bethany Beyond the Jordan Latin Church, May 24, 2014.
[26].   Id., apostolic letter Candor Lucis Aeternae. On the seventh centenary of Dante Alighieri’s death, March 25, 2021.
[27].   A. Spadaro, “Pope Francis and the Coronavirus Crisis”, April 2020, in laciviltacattolica.com/pope-francis-and-the-coronavirus-crisis/; A. Ivereigh, “Pope Francis says pandemic can be a place of conversion”, in The Tablet, April 2020.
[28].   Ibid.
[29].   “Per una Chiesa vicina. Intervista di Papa Francesco all’emittente televisiva Rede Globo”, in L’Osservatore Romano, August 1, 2013.
[30].   Papa Francesco, “Postfazione”, in Papa Francesco – C. M. Martini, Il vescovo, il pastore. L’autorità nella Chiesa è sempre “al servizio”, Cinisello Balsamo (Mi), San Paolo, 2022, 115f.
[31].   J. M. Bergoglio – Pope Francis, Nei tuoi occhi è la mia parola…op. cit., 624f.
[32].   Id., El jesuita. Conversaciones con el cardenal Jorge Bergoglio, S.I., Buenos Aires, Vergara, 2010,
[33].   A. Ivereigh, “Pope Francis says pandemic…”, op. cit.
[34].   Pope Francis, La saggezza del tempo. In dialogo con Papa Francesco sulle grandi questioni della vita, Venice, Marsilio, 2018. The volume was officially presented at the Augustinianum Institute, Rome, in a meeting of young and old in the presence of Francis. It was a special event in the context of the 15th Ordinary General Assembly of the Synod of Bishops on the theme “Youth , Faith and Vocational Discernment” (3-28 October 2018).
[35].   A. Ivereigh, “Pope Francis says pandemic…”, op. cit.
[36].   Ibid.
[37].   Pope Francis, Vi chiedo in nome di Dio. Dieci preghiere per un futuro di speranza, Milan, Piemme, 2022.
[38].   J. M. Bergoglio – Pope Francis, Nei tuoi occhi è la mia parola…op. cit., 625