Pope Francis — "We have forgotten to weep. We have forgotten to weep for the victims of war, for…"
We have forgotten to weep. We have forgotten to weep for the victims of war, for the poor, for the discarded.
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More from Pope Francis
"The Lord asks us to be shepherds, not to be sheep dogs, but shepherds."
"The death penalty is an inhumane measure that humiliates human dignity. There is no justification for it, and it is unacceptable."
"Do not be afraid of joy."
"We are not living in an era of change, but a change of era."
"I prefer a Church which is bruised, hurting and dirty because it has been out on the streets, rather than a Church which is unhealthy from being confined and from clinging to its own security."
About Pope Francis (born 1936)
First Latin American and Jesuit pope (2013-), who has steered the Catholic Church toward pastoral inclusion on LGBTQ pastoral care, divorced Catholics, and climate. Closely associated with Pope John XXIII (the Vatican II reformer pope) and Cardinal Walter Kasper (his theological ally on pastoral reform). For an intellectual contrast, see Cardinal Raymond Burke, American traditionalist cardinal, former head of the Vatican Apostolic Signatura — Burke is the public face of Catholic traditionalism that views Francis's pastoral approach as doctrinally dangerous — he has formally challenged Amoris Laetitia and other Francis reforms.
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Understanding this quote
What it means
Collective moral numbness has replaced genuine empathy. Society scrolls past images of bombed cities, ignores homeless people on sidewalks, and forgets those pushed to the margins — refugees, the chronically poor, the elderly abandoned by families. Weeping here isn't sentimentality; it's the basic human response that signals you still register another person's suffering as real. The loss of that response is the diagnosis. The call to remember it is the demand for moral revival.
Relevance to Pope Francis
Born in Buenos Aires during Argentina's era of political violence and economic crisis, Jorge Mario Bergoglio chose the name Francis after the patron saint of the poor. As a Jesuit archbishop, he lived simply among slum communities rather than in clerical comfort. He coined the phrase 'throwaway culture' to describe capitalism's discarding of the unproductive. He washed the feet of migrants, prisoners, and the disabled — embodied acts of solidarity that mirror his insistence that empathy must be practiced, not merely professed.
The era
Francis became Pope in 2013 during a decade shaped by the Syrian civil war displacing 13 million people, a European refugee crisis met with razor-wire fences, and the widest global wealth gap in recorded history. Social media compressed tragedies into fleeting viral moments, accelerating compassion fatigue at industrial scale. Nationalist movements across Europe and the Americas framed the poor and displaced as threats rather than human beings deserving grief — the precise cultural hardening this statement directly confronted.
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