ROME — Pope Francis warned Wednesday of a worrisome tendency to glorify youth and to despise old age, which reminds us of our mortality.
Our modern culture cultivates “the myth of eternal youth as the desperate obsession with an incorruptible body,” the pontiff told pilgrims gathered in Saint Peter’s Square for his weekly general audience.
This is why our society fails to appreciate old age, he proposed, because “it bears the undeniable evidence of the end of this myth, that makes us want to return to our mother’s womb always to return with a young body.”
“Technology is fascinated by this myth in every way,” Francis continued. “While awaiting the defeat of death, we can keep the body alive with medicine and cosmetics which slow down, hide, erase old age.”
The pope drew a distinction between a healthy concern for one’s well-being and the myth of eternal youth.
“Everything is done to always have this youth – so much make-up, so many surgical interventions to appear young,” he lamented.
Wrinkles, in fact, are “a sign of experience, a sign of life, a sign of maturity, a sign of having made a journey,” he proposed. “Do not touch them to become young, that your face might look young.”
Moreover, he said, the heart is what matters, “and the heart remains with the youth of good wine – the more it ages, the better it is.”
Francis went on to suggest that what the modern age lacks is a living faith in eternity.
Life “down here” is an initiation, not the fulfillment, which comes later, he declared, and “life in our mortal flesh is too small a space and time” to bring to fulfillment the most precious part of our existence.
Faith enables us to see the kingdom of God and the many signs of the approximation of our hope of the fulfillment, which is the “sign of being destined for eternity in God,” he said.
Old age “does not communicate a nostalgia for a birth in time, but of a love for our final destination,” he asserted. “In this perspective, old age has a unique beauty – we are journeying toward the Eternal.”
“No one can re-enter their mother’s womb, not even using its technological and consumeristic substitute,” he said, and even if it were possible, it is artificial, sad, and “not wisdom.”
The elderly person “journeys toward the final destination, towards God’s heaven,” and old age “is a special time of disassociating the future from the technocratic illusion of a biological and robotic survival.”
The pope concluded with a rhetorical question: “why has this throw-away culture decided to throw out the elderly, considering them useless?”
In point of fact, he answered, the elderly are “the messengers of the future, the elderly are the messengers of tenderness, the elderly are the messengers of the wisdom of lived experience.”