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Pope Francis has died

(www.reuters.com)
916 points phillipharris | 17 comments | 21 Apr 25 08:00 UTC | HN request time: 2.618s | source | bottom
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fforflo ◴[21 Apr 25 10:02 UTC] No.43750147[source]▶
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

Worth reading in full https://www.vatican.va/content/francesco/en/speeches/2021/de...

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ryao ◴[21 Apr 25 13:43 UTC] No.43751938[source]▶
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.
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1. parsimo2010 ◴[21 Apr 25 14:43 UTC] No.43752571[source]▶
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.
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2. dhosek ◴[21 Apr 25 16:30 UTC] No.43753783[source]▶
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).

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3. senderista ◴[21 Apr 25 17:41 UTC] No.43754468[source]▶
Well of course Slovenia is Italy's neighbor, but I guess that's more surprising from a non-Italian.
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4. mariuolo ◴[21 Apr 25 18:23 UTC] No.43754892[source]▶
> As the child of Italian immigrants to Argentina, Francis was quite fluent in Italian.

Actually he was more fluent in the Piedmontese dialect. His Italian was somewhat wobbly at the time of his election.

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5. ithkuil ◴[21 Apr 25 20:10 UTC] No.43755922{3}[source]▶
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
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6. senderista ◴[21 Apr 25 20:14 UTC] No.43755969{4}[source]▶
I doubt many Americans can name a single Canadian province or Mexican state.
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7. parsimo2010 ◴[21 Apr 25 21:36 UTC] No.43756766[source]▶
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.
8. ithkuil ◴[22 Apr 25 08:10 UTC] No.43760052{5}[source]▶
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.
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9. dhosek ◴[22 Apr 25 13:46 UTC] No.43762128{6}[source]▶
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.
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10. dhosek ◴[22 Apr 25 13:47 UTC] No.43762147{5}[source]▶
I suspect many Americans would have trouble identifying all the American states. I wouldn’t use Americans as a model of geographic awareness.
11. dhosek ◴[22 Apr 25 13:53 UTC] No.43762197{3}[source]▶
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).

12. dhosek ◴[22 Apr 25 13:54 UTC] No.43762222{3}[source]▶
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.”
13. senderista ◴[22 Apr 25 14:51 UTC] No.43762912{7}[source]▶
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?
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14. tptacek ◴[22 Apr 25 15:23 UTC] No.43763281{8}[source]▶
It's the largest population of Lithuanians outside of Lithuania, for what it's worth.
15. dhosek ◴[22 Apr 25 17:41 UTC] No.43764551{8}[source]▶
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.
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16. senderista ◴[22 Apr 25 21:24 UTC] No.43766447{9}[source]▶
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.
17. pyuser583 ◴[26 Apr 25 04:10 UTC] No.43800875[source]▶
I don’t know about Pope Francis personally, but the quality of “Vatican Latin” has gone down significantly during his reign.

Part of it is the death and retirement of the last generation to be taught Latin from nursery to ordination.

But given the prominence and resources of the Vatican, they could find a few Latinists.