Pope Francis: ‘If I Dishonor the Elderly, I Dishonor Myself’

ROME — Pope Francis urged greater care and respect toward the elderly Wednesday, since they are “the honor of our civilization.”

“How many times have we heard or thought: ‘Old people are a nuisance,’” the pontiff asked those gathered for his weekly general audience. “Don’t deny it, that’s the way it is… We’ve said it, we’ve thought it.”

The elderly are “somewhat removed from our experience: we want to keep them at a distance,” he declared.

The fragility of old age is “marked in a special way by the experiences of confusion and despondency, of loss and abandonment, of disillusionment and doubt,” he said.

And yet we are called not to disdain but to honor the elderly, Francis asserted, a call that is “sealed by God’s commandment” to honor father and mother.

“It is not just about one’s own father and mother,” he stated. “It is about their generation and the generations before” and “old age.”

“Honor is a good word to frame this aspect of returning love that concerns old age,” he said. “That is, we have received the love of parents, of grandparents, and now we return this love to them, to the elderly, to our grandparents.”

Some young people manifest “an attitude of condescension — and even contempt — for the elderly, for their weaknesses and their precariousness,” he said, an attitude that “produces horrible things” and “opens the way to unimaginable excesses.”

But contempt that dishonors the elderly “actually dishonors all of us,” Francis said. “If I dishonor the elderly, I dishonor myself.”

The pope went on to urge parents to bring their children, even young children, “closer to the elderly,” even when their mind begins to fail.

Let children know that “this is our flesh, that this is what has made it possible for us to be here,” he said, and never “push the elderly away.”

If there is no other option than to send them to a nursing home, “please visit them and bring the children to see them: they are the honor of our civilization, the old people who opened the doors,” he said.

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