By John L. Allen Jr.

ROME (Crux) — By sheer coincidence, Pope Francis spent last Sunday in southern Italy, in the city of Matera, which has long been a symbol of the poverty and neglect that’s enveloped Italia meridionale, meaning the southern part of the country since the theoretical unification of the nation in 1870.

Sunday was also the day Italians went to the polls to elect a new government, and it’s entirely possible that the pope’s southern hosts that day may just have identified the “Pope Francis” party in national affairs.

At the big-picture level, the main international headline from Sunday’s results has been the sweeping victory for post-fascist politician Giorgia Meloni and her conservative “Brothers of Italy” party, making Italy the latest instance of a broader European trend towards nationalist right-wing populism.

Although Pope Francis and his Vatican team have kept a deliberately low profile, presumably, he isn’t thrilled with the result since the rise of this sort of populism has been a recurrent source of anxiety for the pontiff.

That outcome, however, was widely foreseen. To the extent there was a surprise, it was an unexpected comeback for Italy’s “Five Star Movement,” which was founded in 2009 as an insurgent anti-establishment progressive force but went into government in 2018 and quickly lost much of its cachet. Although the movement lost half of its national vote compared to four years ago, politics is about perception as much as reality.

Heading into Sunday’s vote, the Five Stars, now led by former Italian Prime Minister Giuseppe Conte, were forecast at around 10% nationally. Instead, they garnered a robust 16%, right on the heels of the 19% claimed by the establishment Democratic Party, making them the third-largest political party in the country.

Most strikingly, the Five Star Movement emerged as the de facto new governing party in the Italian south. They were the top vote-getters in each of the seven southern provinces of Basilicata (where Matera is located), Campania, Calabria, Molise, Puglia, Sardinia, and Sicily.

Those regions were the component parts of the “Kingdom of Two Sicilies” that ruled southern Italy prior to unification with a strongly Catholic monarchy. It was where Pope Pius IX, for example, took refuge in 1848 when he was driven out of Rome by a brief-lived revolution, and to this day, levels of religious practice across the south, including weekly Mass attendance, remain higher than in the more secularized north.

By all accounts, what propelled the Five Star Movement to its southern victory was support for the so-called reddito di cittadinanza, or “citizen’s income,” basically a minimum income law. At the moment, a low-income family with three kids could qualify for up to 10,000 tax-free Euro a year, depending on eligibility requirements.

The reditto di cittadinanza was originally proposed by the Five Star Movement and adopted when it was in power in 2019. Conte made defending the minimum income the party’s signature issue in the elections and given disproportionately high poverty rates in the south, it’s understandable why that position played well.

To the extent a “Pope Francis vote” was revealed in these elections, one can assemble a strong case that the Five Stars are its logical carriers.

To begin with, Pope Francis is a pope of the peripheries, and in Italy, that’s the south. He’s also a strong supporter of progressive popular movements, which is how the Five Stars were born. He supports precisely the sort of state intervention in the economy on behalf of the poor that the reditto di cittadinanza represents.

For bonus points, Conte himself is a practicing Catholic and a devotee of Padre Pio, whose uncle was a Capuchin friar and a former aide to the famed mystic and healer at his shrine in San Giovanni Rotondo — which, perhaps not entirely coincidentally, is located in the Apulia region in southern Italy.

For still additional reinforcement, consider that the Five Star Movement was formally launched by ex-comic Beppe Grillo on Oct. 4, 2009, on the Feast of St. Francis. Grillo himself, seizing upon a standard reference to Francis of Assisi as the “madman of God,” famously declared in 2016 that “Pope Francis is one of us.”

In fact, polls show that practicing Catholics, meaning those who go to Mass at least once a week, constitute somewhere between 16% and 20% of the Five Star Movement, which is fairly high by the standards of Italian political parties.

To be sure, not all is sweetness and light in terms of the relationship between the Five Stars and the Italian Church.

Like any predominantly leftist party, there are stiffly secularist and even anti-clerical elements within the Five Stars. There are also few ethical themes in Italian politics, from euthanasia to same-sex marriage, where the official positions of the party and those of the leadership of the Church aren’t in strong contrast.

Yet one of the major themes of last Sunday’s vote, noted by commentators of all political stripes, was the relative absence of avowedly Catholic voices in the debate; one noted pundit actually referred to the “disappearance” of the Church from political life.

Only time will tell if that obituary was premature or if what the elections actually did was to identify, and actually to reward, the lone plausible repository of something akin to a Pope Francis agenda.

Should the Five Stars take a few steps in that direction, Italy could become a very interesting laboratory experiment indeed.

VATICAN CITY (CNS) — One cannot love and worship the Eucharist without compassion for the poor and marginalized, Pope Francis said at a Mass concluding Italy’s eucharistic congress.

“Let us recognize that the Eucharist is the prophecy of a new world, it is the presence of Jesus who asks us to dedicate ourselves to an effective conversion,” which includes the conversion from indifference to compassion, from waste to sharing, from selfishness to love and from individualism to fraternity, he said in his homily Sept. 25.

The pope concelebrated the Mass at an outdoor stadium in the southern Italian city of Matera, which was host to Italy’s 27th National Eucharistic Congress Sept. 22-25.

Rain, thunder and lightning storms forced the pope to travel by airplane and car rather than by helicopter from the Vatican.

In his homily, the pope reflected on the day’s Gospel reading (Lk 16:19-31), in which Jesus tells the parable about the nameless rich man who “dined sumptuously each day” and ignored the poor man, Lazarus, “who would gladly have eaten his fill of the scraps.”

When Lazarus died, “he was carried away by angels to the bosom of Abraham,” however, when the rich man died, he was sent to “the netherworld, where he was in torment,” according to the Gospel reading.

Pope Francis said, “It is painful to see that this parable” is still alive today with so many “injustices, inequalities, the unequal distribution of the earth’s resources, the abuse of the powerful against the weak, the indifference to the cry of the poor, the abyss we dig every day creating marginalization.”

All of this, he said, “cannot leave us indifferent.”

The parable talks about the abyss or great chasm that the rich man dug between him and Lazarus when they were alive, so now, “in eternal life, that gulf remains,” the pope said.

One’s eternal destination is determined by one’s earthly life, he said. “If we dig a chasm now,” separating oneself from others, then “we dig our own grave for later; if we raise walls against our brothers and sisters now, we remain imprisoned in loneliness and death later.”

The Eucharist offers a “permanent challenge” to adore and worship God, not oneself, the pope said, and “to put him at the heart” of everything.

“Only the Lord is God, and everything else is a gift of his love,” he said.

“If we worship ourselves, we die, asphyxiated inside our tiny ego; if we worship the riches of this world, they take possession of us and enslave us; if we worship the god of appearance and are inebriated in wastefulness, sooner or later life is going to ask us (to pay) the bill,” Pope Francis said.

“Instead,” he said, “when we adore the Lord Jesus present in the Eucharist, we receive a new way of looking at our lives as well: I am not the things I possess and the successes I am able to achieve; the value of my life does not depend on how much I can show off nor does it diminish when I go through failures and setbacks.”

“Every one of us is a child who is loved” and blessed by God, “who wanted to clothe me with beauty and wants me free from all enslavement,” he said. Those who worship God are free and are slaves to no one, he added.

The pope asked people to rediscover the prayer of adoration and to pray for a church that is “eucharistic, made up of women and men who break themselves like bread for all those who gnaw on loneliness and poverty, for those who are hungry for tenderness and compassion, for those whose lives are crumbling because the good leaven of hope has been lacking.”

The ideal, he said, is “a church that kneels before the Eucharist and worships with awe the Lord present in the bread, but which also knows how to bend down with compassion and tenderness before the wounds of those who suffer” and to become the “bread of hope and joy for all.”

“For there is no true eucharistic worship without compassion for the many ‘Lazaruses’ who walk beside us even today,” he said.

“While we are hungry for love and hope or are broken by the trials and sufferings of life, Jesus becomes food that feeds us and heals us,” he said, and while injustice and discrimination against the poor continue, “Jesus gives us the bread of sharing and sends us out every day as apostles of fraternity, justice and peace.”

After the Mass, Pope Francis went to the Archdiocese of Matera’s new Mensa della Fraternità, a soup kitchen and social center for the poor and the elderly. The pope greeted the staff and blessed the new structure, which was completed as a project in conjunction with the eucharistic congress.

By Cindy Wooden

ROME (CNS) — Acknowledging how young people have been given a world marked by inequality, injustice, war and environmental degradation, Pope Francis urged those looking for solutions to be concrete, to involve the poor, to care for the Earth and to create jobs.

“Our generation has left you with a rich heritage, but we have not known how to protect the planet and are not securing peace,” Pope Francis told some 1,000 young adult economists, entrepreneurs, financial advisers, students, scholars and scientists from 120 countries at the closing session of the Economy of Francesco event in Assisi.

The gathering Sept. 22-24 originally was planned for March 2020 but was postponed because of the COVID-19 pandemic. Instead, the young people spent more than two years working online with older experts, studying agriculture and employment, peace and ecology and finance and development in the search for ways to make the economy better for more people and for the environment.

The project is named in honor of St. Francis of Assisi, known for his love of the poor and of creation, and has been supported by the Dicastery for Promoting Integral Human Development.

At the end of the meeting, participants gave Pope Francis a pact, promising to work for “an economy of peace and not of war; an economy that counteracts the proliferation of weapons, especially the most destructive ones; an economy that cares for creation and does not plunder it; an economy at the service of the person, the family and life, respectful of every woman, man, child, the elderly and especially the frail and vulnerable.”

The pope encouraged the young people also to dedicate themselves to preserving and increasing their “spiritual capital,” the faith and values that will give meaning to their studies, their work and, especially, to their lives.

After all, he said, “human beings, created in the image and likeness of God, are seekers of meaning before being seekers of material goods,” but the modern world is losing sight of “this essential kind of capital, accumulated over centuries by religions, wise traditions and popular piety.”

Inspired by St. Francis of Assisi, he said, a new economic model must be “an economy of friendship with the earth and an economy of peace. It is a question of transforming an economy that kills into an economy of life, in all its aspects.”

Love for the poor and for the Earth must go hand in hand, he said. But it will require sacrifice and radical change.

“The earth is burning today,” he said. “If we speak of ecological transition but remain in the economic paradigm of the 20th century, which plundered the earth and its natural resources, then the strategies we adopt will always be insufficient.”

“We human beings, in these last two centuries, have grown at the expense of the earth. We have often plundered to increase our own well-being, and not even the well-being of all,” Pope Francis told the young people. “Now is the time for new courage in abandoning fossil fuels to accelerate the development of zero- or positive-impact sources of energy.”

When the pope arrived at the gathering, young adults from Italy, Benin, Argentina, Thailand, Kenya, Afghanistan and Poland shared their stories and projects — from creating farms and educating farmers in regenerative agriculture to creating small businesses or rallying other young people to convince companies to stop producing single-use plastic bottles and bags.

Andrea, a young Italian in jail for murder but given permission to attend the Assisi event, spoke about his digital marketing work through a prison-based cooperative, which provides remote workers for companies as well as a workshop for repairing espresso machines for coffee bars.

“I am not an economist, but it seems quite logical to me to think that prison, in order to be a good investment for society, must achieve concrete results, and these are basically two: security and zero recidivism,” Andrea said. “People coming out of prison must be changed and transformed from a ‘cost item’ to a ‘resource’ for society.”

Concluding his speech with a prayer, Pope Francis asked God to forgive the older generation “for having damaged the earth, for not having respected Indigenous cultures, for not having valued and loved the poorest of the poor, for having created wealth without communion.”

He prayed that the Holy Spirit would continue to inspire the young people and that God would “bless them in their undertakings, studies and dreams.”

“Support their longing for the good and for life, lift them up when facing disappointments due to bad examples, do not let them become discouraged but instead may they continue on their path,” the pope prayed. “You, whose only begotten Son became a carpenter, grant them the joy of transforming the world with love, ingenuity and hands.”