October 8: The Pope on isolation in the city

“Cities create a sort of permanent ambivalence because, while they offer their residents countless possibilities, they also present many people with any number of obstacles to the full development of their lives. This contrast causes painful suffering.”

It is bracing to realize that Pope Francis—bishop of a large city for over 20 years—understands how dehumanizing city life can be. In Evangelii Gaudium, he devotes five paragraphs to the “challenges of urban cultures.”

One such challenge is isolation by design. “At the same time, what could be significant places of encounter and solidarity often become places of isolation and mutual distrust. Houses and neighbourhoods are more often built to isolate and protect than to connect and integrate.”

This passage recalls a moment in the series of interviews the journalists Sergio Rubin and Francesca Ambrogetti conducted with him, when he was still Archbishop of Buenos Aires.

It was in the 1970s, he had said then, that he started travelling outside Argentina. “In Mexico I came across a gated community for the first time, something that didn’t exist in Argentina back then. I was astonished to see how a group of people could cut themselves off from society.”

Some four decades later, in his even papal voice, we can still hear echoes of that original shock of discovery.