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In 2021, during a visit to the Greek island of Mytilene, Pope Francis delivered one of the finest speeches I've ever read: > This great basin of water, the cra
by fforflo 1y ago
In 2021, during a visit to the Greek island of Mytilene, Pope Francis delivered one of the finest speeches I've ever read:
> This great basin of water, the cradle of so many civilizations, now looks like a mirror of death. Let us not let our sea (mare nostrum) be transformed into a desolate sea of death (mare mortuum). Let us not allow this place of encounter to become a theatre of conflict. Let us not permit this “sea of memories” to be transformed into a “sea of forgetfulness”. Please brothers and sisters, let us stop this shipwreck of civilization!
> We are in the age of walls and barbed wire. To be sure, we can appreciate people’s fears and insecurities, the difficulties and dangers involved, and the general sense of fatigue and frustration, exacerbated by the economic and pandemic crises. Yet problems are not resolved and coexistence improved by building walls higher, but by joining forces to care for others according to the concrete possibilities of each and in respect for the law, always giving primacy to the inalienable value of the life of every human being
Worth reading in full https://www.vatican.va/content/francesco/en/speeches/2021/december/documents/20211205-grecia-rifugiati.html https://www.vatican.va/content/francesco/en/speeches/2021/de...
- contrarian1234 1y agoWith no opinion one way or another on the pope.. In the modern world this is a weird criteria to judge people on. I assume like every modern politician, he doesn't write his own speeches. A quite google search seems to confirm it https://cruxnow.com/church/2015/02/does-the-pope-write-his-own-speeches https://cruxnow.com/church/2015/02/does-the-pope-write-his-o...
- ralfd 1y agoThe link says: > My suspicion is that Pope Francis may have more to do with crafting his own speeches than did previous pontiffs, because Pope Francis’ talks strike me as more spontaneous, conversational, and unfiltered. Anyway, a public figure is still giving the direction and “plot points” to their speech writer.
- wat10000 1y agoWho cares? He said it. The words are his responsibility. If his speech had advocated for grinding orphans into a nutritious paste, we wouldn’t be defending him on the basis that he didn’t write those words. He chose to read them and give them his official backing.
- stavros 1y agoThat's because we mean "credit for how well-written the thing is", whereas you mean "credit for agreeing with the meaning".
- amfarrell617 1y agoHe still is responsible for the team that wrote it.
- serf 1y agoa publisher is responsible for a book, but the credit of the thing is poured onto the author. why?
- navigate8310 1y agoBecause the book is plastered with the author's as well as the publisher's name. Their separation is easily comprehensible. Whereas when an orator delivers, the separation of the writer is not so apparent. It is automatically assumed the orator is the writer.
- j_timberlake 1y agoThis is a perfect example of a motte and bailey. The "motte" is that people should be judged badly for parroting horrible ideas they heard (which makes sense) and the "bailey" is that people should be praised just for parroting nice things they heard (which doesn't make sense).
- collingreen 1y ago
- mym1990 1y agoJFK didn't write his own speeches either for the most part, he was still a heck of an orator.
- ForOldHack 1y agoA friend of mine was one of his speech writers. JFK would change words and construction depending on how he liked it. The speech writers learned and he made less and less changes. What you don't know is he would try things out on the golf course with his friend Buddy Hackett.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- aredox 1y agoThat pope was part of the Jesuits. If you don't know who the Jesuits are, let's just say they are amongst the most academically trained, most intellectual catholic religious orders there is. Even if Pope Francis gave the charge of writing his speeches to someone else, that would be an heavy responsability for that person.
- Aidevah 1y agoIsn't Mytilene a city while the island itself is called Lesvos?
- fforflo 1y agoTechnically yes, but they're used interchangeably nowdays. Plus, the official transcript mentions "Mytilene" so I wanted to follow that. Although I use Lesvos myself.
- stavros 1y agoCan confirm, I never realized until now that Mytilene is just the city, I've always wondered why we have two names for the island.
- ryao 1y agoI had no idea anyone still used the term “mare nostrum”. I believe it began to be used during the Roman Empire when the Romans had conquered all lands surrounding the Mediterranean. Back then, the term meant the sea belonged to them and no one else. That meaning no longer applies in the modern day, so using it today would mean “we all share this” rather than the original meaning. His use of the term was a clever way to invoke shared history.
- parsimo2010 1y agoYou are correct that most people do not use the term any more. But the Pope isn't like most people. It's an informal requirement that the Pope be able to speak Latin and Italian is commonly used in the Vatican (being surrounded by Italy probably has something to do with that). Even though Francis was not as fluent as his predecessors in Latin and Italian, he certainly understood it better than most and his speechwriters probably were probably proficient in Latin.
- dhosek 1y agoAs the child of Italian immigrants to Argentina, Francis was quite fluent in Italian. He’s old enough that his formation would have included significant Latin instruction as well. I would guess that Benedict’s Latin skills were superior, but Francis was reasonably conversant in the language from what I understand. The thing that I found interesting was during trump’s visit to the Vatican, he asked trump’s Slovenian wife if she was feeding him potica which indicated a surprising level of knowledge of the cuisine of a country which is largely insignificant on the world stage (as someone who’s half Slovene and has a loaf of potica on his kitchen counter, I think I can safely make that declaration).
- senderista 1y agoWell of course Slovenia is Italy's neighbor, but I guess that's more surprising from a non-Italian.
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- Imustaskforhelp 1y agoI am really sorry for pope francis's death. I truly am. But to me, this was the first time that I ever saw that vatican has its .va and vatican.va .... Out of curiosity, Who hosts the holy servers? Again I don't want to demean anyone's death.
- philsnow 1y ago> Out of curiosity, Who hosts the holy servers? The Dicastery for Communcation [0]. They're ASN 8978, and geolocation for all their IP addresses says that they're actually in the Vatican city state. [0] https://www.comunicazione.va/en.html https://www.comunicazione.va/en.html
- topak3000 1y ago[dead]
- Imustaskforhelp 1y agoSorry for late response but damn.. I didn't expect this name to be such crazy good. I am still enchanted by this name. Dicastery for Communication, sounds like some committee within Game of throne whom Viseris or Littlefinger (most likely Viseris) would have been the head of.
- trizuz 1y agoIronically, the Vatican has very high border walls of them all. Maybe the highest in the world even. https://www.sheridan.com/wp-content/uploads/NL_vatican-city-walls.jpg https://www.sheridan.com/wp-content/uploads/NL_vatican-city-...
- gnulinux996 1y agoSmall correction; the name of the island is Lesbos