In 2021, during a visit to the Greek island of Mytilene, Pope Francis delivered one of the finest speeches I've ever read:
> This great basin of water, the cradle of so many civilizations, now looks like a mirror of death. Let us not let our sea (mare nostrum) be transformed into a desolate sea of death (mare mortuum). Let us not allow this place of encounter to become a theatre of conflict. Let us not permit this “sea of memories” to be transformed into a “sea of forgetfulness”. Please brothers and sisters, let us stop this shipwreck of civilization!
> We are in the age of walls and barbed wire. To be sure, we can appreciate people’s fears and insecurities, the difficulties and dangers involved, and the general sense of fatigue and frustration, exacerbated by the economic and pandemic crises. Yet problems are not resolved and coexistence improved by building walls higher, but by joining forces to care for others according to the concrete possibilities of each and in respect for the law, always giving primacy to the inalienable value of the life of every human being
I had no idea anyone still used the term “mare nostrum”. I believe it began to be used during the Roman Empire when the Romans had conquered all lands surrounding the Mediterranean. Back then, the term meant the sea belonged to them and no one else. That meaning no longer applies in the modern day, so using it today would mean “we all share this” rather than the original meaning. His use of the term was a clever way to invoke shared history.
It's not that weird a term: I was taught this as the Roman name for the Mediterranean in middle school history class in Spain, without having to take Latin. There's a boardgame and a video game with Mare Nostrum as the title. I's expect relatively well educated people in countries bordering the Mediterranean to understand what he meant with little trouble, especially if they are also speak a latin-derived language. For instance in Spanish, mare is just mar, nostrum would be nuestro, and mortuum is muerto. It'd all be trivial first guesses.
You are correct that most people do not use the term any more. But the Pope isn't like most people. It's an informal requirement that the Pope be able to speak Latin and Italian is commonly used in the Vatican (being surrounded by Italy probably has something to do with that). Even though Francis was not as fluent as his predecessors in Latin and Italian, he certainly understood it better than most and his speechwriters probably were probably proficient in Latin.
As the child of Italian immigrants to Argentina, Francis was quite fluent in Italian. He’s old enough that his formation would have included significant Latin instruction as well. I would guess that Benedict’s Latin skills were superior, but Francis was reasonably conversant in the language from what I understand.
The thing that I found interesting was during trump’s visit to the Vatican, he asked trump’s Slovenian wife if she was feeding him potica which indicated a surprising level of knowledge of the cuisine of a country which is largely insignificant on the world stage (as someone who’s half Slovene and has a loaf of potica on his kitchen counter, I think I can safely make that declaration).
As an American, it’s always a bit startling to realize that “German,” “French,” “Italian,” etc. are in many ways hugely diverse language families with dialects that are often not intelligible by all speakers (as opposed to English where, with a few extreme exceptions, there’s not really a problem with mutual intelligibility and the written language elides most of those distinctions).
I don’t have enough broad knowledge of Spanish (Castellano) to comment on its intelligibility across dialects (although Argentine/Uruguayan Spanish is more of a challenge to my Mexican-Spanish trained brain than European Spanish).
I come from Croatia and have lived in Italy for a long time and it's very rare to find anybody who can barely place our countries on a map until fairly recently and let alone heard about foods or drinks. Not zero people of course, but very few
just to be clear, mine was not a jab against the georgaphy or culture knowledge of the average Italian. They are likely to know more details about German, French or Spanish geographical or culinary features than something from the balkans despite sharing a border.
Indeed. I grew up in a cultural milieu that was overwhelmingly Slavic (Chicago suburbs, mostly Czech and Polish but smaller numbers of Slovaks, Slovenes, Croats and Serbs) and even within that, the lack of understanding of distinctions was surprising (so many people thought Slovak and Slovene were the same thing, which isn’t helped by the fact that the countries have very similar flags since independence and near-identical demonyms in their own languages) although I would note that the Slovenes, Croats and Serbs were all highly aware of the distinctions between themselves and even as cultural self-identification as specific Slavs in Chicago has faded, there’s still a low-level hostility between Slovenes/Croats and Serbs.
I don't know how large the Lithuanian community in Chicago is, but when I lived on the South Side in the late 90s there was an amazing Lithuanian restaurant called just "Healthy Food", a weird amalgam of traditional Lithuanian cuisine and hippie wheat germ and molasses-based fare. They also sold amber jewelry, as well as their own swag like "I ♥ Kugelis" T-shirts. Anyone remember that place?
I’d never been there, but there seem to at least be multiple Lithuanian restaurants in the Chicago area. Sadly, while there were literally dozens of Czech restaurants when I was a kid, now there are three.
Chicago has been shrinking for decades and it's tragic. Even in the 90s there were whole blocks on the South Side (I lived in Back of the Yards) that were just abandoned.
Even so, Francis lived most of his life in Argentina and could be excused for not knowing about the cuisine of a neighboring country. Certainly most of the press was ignorant, with many reporters thinking Francis said “pizza” and not “potica.”
He certainly spoke Italian and Latin, but he did not prefer it. It was kind of a sticking point early on when he would slip into Spanish when talking. It irritated some of the old guard who thought that he should stop speaking Spanish because he became Pope.
It was also the name of a major Italian naval operation to rescue migrants crossing the Mediterranean in 2013–2014, launched after a particularly tragic shipwreck near Lampedusa. The operation was shut down after just one year due to high costs and limited support from the EU, which left Italy largely on its own.
Definitely not surprising hearing a pope using it in a speech.
Technically yes, but they're used interchangeably nowdays. Plus, the official transcript mentions "Mytilene" so I wanted to follow that. Although I use Lesvos myself.
I am really sorry for pope francis's death. I truly am.
But to me, this was the first time that I ever saw that vatican has its .va and vatican.va ....
Sorry for late response but damn.. I didn't expect this name to be such crazy good.
I am still enchanted by this name. Dicastery for Communication, sounds like some committee within Game of throne whom Viseris or Littlefinger (most likely Viseris) would have been the head of.
With no opinion one way or another on the pope.. In the modern world this is a weird criteria to judge people on. I assume like every modern politician, he doesn't write his own speeches. A quite google search seems to confirm it
Who cares? He said it. The words are his responsibility. If his speech had advocated for grinding orphans into a nutritious paste, we wouldn’t be defending him on the basis that he didn’t write those words. He chose to read them and give them his official backing.
Because the book is plastered with the author's as well as the publisher's name. Their separation is easily comprehensible. Whereas when an orator delivers, the separation of the writer is not so apparent. It is automatically assumed the orator is the writer.
This is a perfect example of a motte and bailey. The "motte" is that people should be judged badly for parroting horrible ideas they heard (which makes sense) and the "bailey" is that people should be praised just for parroting nice things they heard (which doesn't make sense).
> My suspicion is that Pope Francis may have more to do with crafting his own speeches than did previous pontiffs, because Pope Francis’ talks strike me as more spontaneous, conversational, and unfiltered.
Anyway, a public figure is still giving the direction and “plot points” to their speech writer.
That pope was part of the Jesuits. If you don't know who the Jesuits are, let's just say they are amongst the most academically trained, most intellectual catholic religious orders there is.
Even if Pope Francis gave the charge of writing his speeches to someone else, that would be an heavy responsability for that person.
A friend of mine was one of his speech writers. JFK would change words and construction depending on how he liked it. The speech writers learned and he made less and less changes.
What you don't know is he would try things out on the golf course with his friend Buddy Hackett.
> This great basin of water, the cradle of so many civilizations, now looks like a mirror of death. Let us not let our sea (mare nostrum) be transformed into a desolate sea of death (mare mortuum). Let us not allow this place of encounter to become a theatre of conflict. Let us not permit this “sea of memories” to be transformed into a “sea of forgetfulness”. Please brothers and sisters, let us stop this shipwreck of civilization!
> We are in the age of walls and barbed wire. To be sure, we can appreciate people’s fears and insecurities, the difficulties and dangers involved, and the general sense of fatigue and frustration, exacerbated by the economic and pandemic crises. Yet problems are not resolved and coexistence improved by building walls higher, but by joining forces to care for others according to the concrete possibilities of each and in respect for the law, always giving primacy to the inalienable value of the life of every human being
Worth reading in full https://www.vatican.va/content/francesco/en/speeches/2021/de...