Pope Francis warned on Sunday against a budding “culture of rejection” and the lure of “ideological and populist temptations” during a visit to Trieste in northeast Italy, voicing concern about “the crisis of democracy.”
“Democracy is unwell in today’s world,” said the pope, speaking to an audience of a thousand at the Congress Centre, part of the closing session of the 50th Social Week organised by the Italian Catholic Church.
Although he did not single out any country, the fact that the Pope’s comments were made on the same day as France’s historic second round of legislative elections, in which the extreme right National Rally could have emerged victorious, was telling.
“Ideologies are seductive,” he pointed out in a nod to the German fable of the Pied Piper of Hamelin, “They entice you but they lead you to deny yourself.”
Concerned about the growing trend of voter apathy worldwide, the leader of the world’s 1.3 billion Catholics said, “I worry about the small number of people that vote: what does that mean?”
Listing obstacles to democracy such as corruption and illegality, self-referential power, social exclusion, marginalisation, and indifference, Pope Francis urged people to “move away from polarisations that impoverish.”
He lamented a prevailing “culture of rejection” that sculpts a society with no place for “the poor, unborn children, the frail, the sick, children, women, young people” and advocated the promotion of participation from early childhood.
The Pope arrived just before 8 a.m. in Trieste, a coastal city of 200,000 on the border with Slovenia.
His agenda for the day included a meeting with religious and academic representatives as well as immigrants and an open-air mass in the city’s central public square, before returning to the Vatican in the early afternoon.
