Pope Francis' message in Africa echoes papal concerns since 1960s

Before Francis, Pope Paul VI issued his 1966 Populorum Progressio on the challenge of poverty and inequality at the individual and even country levels. The three encyclicals showed papal concern for integral threats to human development.

The encyclicals comprise integral responses to threats to humanity. Each arose out of a particular context in time and attitude and each called for a change in attitude toward poverty, environment, and sense of exclusivity. For Pope Paul VI, the 1960s were times of hope and despair. There was hope because it was the period of decolonisation but there also was global despair because of upheavals and wars, the growing poverty gap, and perceived neglect of the weak.

There was a need to address poverty and therefore for everyone to get involved in uplifting the weak, closing the individual and collective poverty gap, encouraging participatory everything including democracy, and showing serious concern for humanity.

It was in the 1960s that the notion of 'liberation theology' took root stressing the fact that the poor need more than good preaching. People needed liberation from socio-religious as well as economic and political oppressive conditions. Paul was calling for a change of attitude on the issue of individual and collective poverty within countries and internationally.

If poverty was a pressing global issue in the 1960s, environmental degradation loomed large in 2015 when Francis issued Laudato Si to warn about the global threat to humanity arising from Climate Change partly due to human recklessness that was destroying the environment. Environmental preservation is the responsibility of every person and country and cannot be left to one individual or country.

People needed to change their attitude from the negative implied in the 'tragedy of the commons' to the positive inherent in collective cooperation in confronting the then clear danger to the earth. Those who had denied the reality of environmental threats witness unprecedentedly destructive floods, droughts, and fires that are worse than when a country invades another.

Since no country, however rich it is or how vast its military hardware and technology are, can escape the wrath of the environment, there now is a lot of talk and conferencing about climate change by many who had ignored danger signs. They have been hit, and hit hard.

The environment has turned against humans partly because humans have forgotten how to be human as they have neglected the rule of both natural and man-made laws.

Since people engage in destructive nationalism and refuse to treat each other as brothers and sisters, Francis issued his 2020 Fratelli Tuti encyclical to tackle the tendency to increase suffering through a sense of exclusivity which protects the notion of 'garden' in Europe and North America from immigrants and refugees escaping political and economic misery in the purported African and the Middle East 'jungle'.

To deal with this devastating anti-brotherly Euro 'garden-jungle' mentality, Francis was at pains to advance brotherly inclusion as a way of lessening human suffering. His recent visit to war-torn Congo and South Sudan to call for predator accountability was in line with the integral spirit of the three papal encyclicals.