Pope improvises as tense visit to Asia winds down
DHAKA, Bangladesh — Pope Francis urged Bangladeshi priests and nuns to resist the “terrorism of gossip” that can tear religious communities apart, delivering one of his trademark, zinger-filled spontaneous speeches to the country’s Catholic leadership on Saturday at the close of an otherwise tense and diplomatically fraught Asian tour.
As he has done in similar encounters, Francis told the priests and nuns gathered in Dhaka’s Holy Rosary Church that he was ditching the eightpage speech that he had prepared and would instead speak to them from his heart.
“I don’t know if it will be better or worse, but I promise it will be less boring,” he quipped.
And then for the next 15 minutes, Francis had the crowd in stitches, mixing paternal advice on how to tend to religious vocations (“with tenderness”) with gentle warnings about the havoc that gossip “bombs” can wreak when lobbed in closed religious life.
“How many religious communities have been destroyed because of a spirit of gossip?” said Francis, adding that he was speaking from personal experience. “Please, bite your tongue.”
It was a humor-filled event to a tense diplomatic trip that saw Francis maintain public silence over the Rohingya refugee crisis while in Myanmar, only to address it head-on in Bangladesh on Friday with an emotional encounter with refugees themselves.
“The presence of God today is also called ‘Rohingya,’ ” he told a group of 16 refugees who traveled to Dhaka from Cox’s Bazar, the district bordering Myanmar where refugee camps are overflowing with more than 620,000 Rohingya who have fled what the U.N. says is a campaign of ethnic cleansing by Myanmar’s military.
Speaking to reporters aboard his flight back to Rome, Francis defended his silence in Myanmar over the plight of Rohingya refugees, saying a public denunciation would have “slammed the door in the face” of his hosts and prevented his message from being heard.
Francis said he chose instead to speak in general terms about human rights in public so that he could engage more frankly in private about the refugee crisis.
Francis said he was “very, very satisfied” that his message had been received in his private meetings with Aung San Suu Kyi and Myanmar’s powerful military chief, Gen. Min Aung Hlaing.
“It’s true I didn’t have the pleasure of slamming the door in their face publicly with a denunciation,” Francis said. “But I had the satisfaction of dialogue.”