Pope Francis has already surprised us on more than one occasion during his atypical pontificate, beginning with his refusal to call himself “pope” but simply the bishop of Rome, as in the beginning of Christianity, and abandoning all the trappings of the classical papacy, from the vestments inherited from the Roman emperors to living in a hotel outside the Vatican palaces. And now he has surprised the conformist Roman Curia again with a letter in which he advises seminarians to read the pure and hard literature of the classics, citing, for example, Marcel Proust, Tseliot or Jorge Luis Borges.
The Pope explains, even with personal confessions, that reading the novels and poems of the classics is a therapy and recalls that at the age of 28 he was a professor of literature and that since then “he loves tragic authors. “Finding a good book,” he says, “can be an oasis that helps us face the storms until we achieve serenity.” And he gives himself as an example: “I love tragic writers because we can all feel their works as our own, as an expression of our own dramas, of our inner emptiness, of our own loneliness.”
According to Francisco, reading the classics, even the most heartbreaking, “can open up spaces of internalization within us that prevent us from locking ourselves away in the obsessive and anomalous ideas that haunt us.” For him, “a good book at least helps us face the storms until we achieve serenity.”
The Pope confesses: “I adore tragic authors because we can all feel their works as an expression of our own dramas. Deep down, we cry for our own dramas, for ourselves and for our own emptiness, for our own shortcomings and our own loneliness.”
According to Francis, by reading the classics “we immerse ourselves, for example, in the existence of prostitutes, of the child who grows up without his parents, of the bricklayer’s wife or of the old woman who is still waiting for her prince charming.” For Pope Francis, reading a classic is a way of “facing the storms until we achieve serenity.”
In his letter to the bishops, the Pope regrets that literature, that of the classics, “is not considered essential in the formation of future priests.” Reading Francis’ document reminds me that of the six popes I have personally known through my work as a journalist, none would have dared to advise that candidates for the priesthood who are required to remain celibate, in addition to reading the Bible, read the classics of world literature.
Pope Francis’ letter urging those aspiring to the priesthood to read the literature of the classics reminded me of an anecdote from when I was a high school student in a religious school. Not only were we not allowed to read literature and poetry, but even the Bible, the Old Testament, seemed inappropriate because of its stories about sex.
I remember the scandal of the parents when they found out that I was secretly spreading a rather spicy poem by García Lorca among us. It was a drama and there were punishments. Literature and poetry, in the seminaries, have always been things of the devil, of sin.
Perhaps Pope Francis, who has had to face the delicate and shameful issue of paedophilia in the Church, which is resisting ending the mandatory celibacy of those aspiring to the priesthood, wanted to get ahead of the game and make it clear that sex is not synonymous with sin, that priests have been married for centuries, that even Jesus was married, to the Gnostic Magdalene, to whom he first appeared after the resurrection, before his own mother.
If Francis surprised us when he became Pope, revolutionizing the entire imperial apparatus of previous popes, he is now doing it again by advising those aspiring to the priesthood to read one of the great taboos still alive in Christianity: the hard and pure reading of the classics of literature.
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