Religion and dealing with poverty: Crazy Franz

Love is not loved.” That's a sentence that can stay with you for decades. What does it mean? And why does he speak to you directly emotionally, exude sadness and almost wild longing, even though you don't understand him?

The fact that love itself is not loved goes far beyond interpersonal disagreements. As the saying goes, anyone who chooses love chooses it without the prospect of love in return.

Love does not connect you, it separates you from other people. Love is radical. As radical as breaking away from possessions and embracing the poor, the lepers, seeking their physical closeness, beyond all limits of disgust, ambition and vanity.

On October 3rd, Francis of Assisi, to whom the phrase is attributed and who did all this, died, 800 years ago. That was an incredibly long time ago. My little son is currently learning numbers and regularly mistakes my fifty-eight years for eighty-five: The question “Dad, are you really 85 already?” is the question of whether we even live in the same world.

On our way through the city we meet the modern poor and lepers every day, and I teach my little son to avoid them. Once, on the hottest day of the summer, a person slapped his face right in front of us and stayed there. My son looks out of the car seat, people stroll past. I pull out my cell phone and call the ambulance. Nobody answers. My son is afraid the man smells of urine. Then he stands up suddenly and staggers away. The emergency doctor calls back, telling us to wait, we wait, the man can no longer be found. Was he not interested in what we had to offer him?

The taz is an independent, left-wing and opinionated daily newspaper. We have been arguing in our comments, essays and debate texts since the taz was founded in 1979. We often cannot and do not want to agree on an opinion. That's why you'll find some completely opposing positions here - all part of the very broad left-wing spectrum of opinions.

Love, it is not loved. What are 800 years compared to this sentence? At the beginning of modern times, the Italian philosopher Niccolò Machiavelli wrote that “the Christian religion” would have “completely died out” without Saint Francis. Because he brought this poverty back into people's consciousness in the first place through his example of poverty.

To the extent that there is still such a message from Francis that has reached us over the centuries, it is not a Christian or religious one at all. But it didn't allow itself to be turned into a purely political matter: Although people in the poorest neighborhoods in Berlin voted for the left far above average, voter turnout remained comparatively low. There was a voter turnout of 74 percent across Berlin. In the 3G constituency in Neukölln it was only 50.

The poorest people may not be primarily interested in solutions. They want to live and be accepted in their way of life. If we wanted to follow Francis' example, we would first have to recognize "precarity as a form of evangelical life," as the left-wing Catholic Italian newspaper Avvenire puts it in an article marking the anniversary. We should stop looking down on the poor and, on the contrary, look up to them and open up to them. So practically speaking, don't socialize the junk property, but live with them in the junk property.

With this kind of radical devotion - Machiavelli said it - Francis saved an institution, the church. He forced them to position themselves according to his extreme example. And this was successful because Franz did not attack the institution itself head-on, so that his previous life could be integrated.

Which institution would we want to save by our example? Civil democracy? Or would we rather wait for the savior again, the poor madman who sacrifices himself so that everyone else can live?

What we shouldn't do to ourselves or to Franz is to bring him closer to us, to make him more unmystical, more unmedieval, less fanatically religious and crazy than he was. Francis, it says in Avvenir, loved poverty more than the poor: "He did not go to the lepers to help them or to set up a leper hospital. No: he went to them to become like them. We, on the other hand, if we think of it at all, imagine poverty as an evil that needs to be eliminated, because loving the poor means hating poverty. And we are right to do that."

We can therefore also understand that love is not loved as a challenge in the banal political struggles. Andrea Nahles did not experience any love in her fight for the minimum wage that is now taken for granted a good 10 years ago, but was instead exposed to a nasty campaign by the Union and employers. And if we work today to ensure that property is obligatory and that its use also serves the common good, as stated in the Basic Law, then we must not allow ourselves to be deterred by the fact that we are met with rejection and even hatred.

In other words: If we want to make life easy for ourselves, we would rather look for a saint other than Francis.