Barcelona (AFP) By Daniel Bosque 14/06/2014
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| Pope Francis |
Benedict last year became the first
pope to resign since the Middle Ages, retiring from public life to live in a
former monastery inside the Vatican City walls.
"Since we live longer, we get
to an age at which we can no longer carry on with things," the 77-year-old
Francis said in a wide-ranging interview with the Vatican correspondent of
Barcelona-based daily La Vanguardia.
The pontiff said Benedict made a
"great gesture" when he left his position as leader of the Church,
opening the door to the possibility of emeritus popes.
"I will do the same as he did:
ask the Lord to show me when the moment comes and tell me what to do, and he
will tell me for sure," said the spiritual leader of the world's 1.2
billion Roman Catholics.
The pope alluded to his mortality
when admitting that he took a risk when he avoided riding in the closed-in
"popemobile".
"I cannot greet the people and
tell them I love them inside a sardine can, even if it is glass," he said,
describing the protection as a "wall".
"It is true something could
happen to me but let's be realistic, at my age I do not have much to
lose," the pope said.
Following his first visit to the
Middle East as pope last month, the pontiff criticised fundamentalism in
Christianity, Islam and Judaism as a form of violence.
Pope Francis (right) greets Pope
emeritus Benedict XVI during the canonisation mass of their predece …
"A fundamentalist group, even
if it kills no one, even it strikes no one, is violent. The mental structure of
fundamentalism is violence in the name of God."
Asked about religious violence in
the Middle East, Francis, who made his first visit to the region as pope last
month, said it was a "contradiction".
"Violence in God's name does
not fit with our times. It is something old. With historical perspective, we
have to say that we Christians, at times, have practiced it," he was
quoted as saying.
"Today it is unimaginable."
- 'It's madness' -
Anti-Semitism, the pope said, seemed
to be linked more to the right-wing than to the left, though he could not
explain why.
"And it still continues. We
even have people who deny the Holocaust, which is madness."
Pope Francis said he was worried
about drives for independence in lands such as Scotland and Catalonia.
The Argentine pontiff said
separatism was understandable in cases such as former colonies and the former
Yugoslavia, but said these models did not apply in all cases.
"Any division worries me,"
he said.
He cited cases such as Scotland, the
northeastern Spanish region of Catalonia and the northern Italian region of
Padania, saying these did not have the same history of "forced
unity".
"There are obviously peoples
with cultures so diverse that they cannot be stuck together even with glue. In
the case of Yugoslavia that is very clear but I wonder where it is so clear in
other cases of peoples who until now have been together," he was quoted as
saying.
Pope Francis reserved harsh
criticism for the global economic system, saying it leaves millions of young
unemployed, puts money ahead of people and survives on the profits of war.
"It's madness," the pope
said.
"We discard a whole generation
to maintain an economic system that no longer endures, a system that to survive
has to make war, as the big empires have always done," Francis said.
AFP
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