Twelve years completed. Yes, the papacy of Francis. We were on a complicated four-way street. If we had not taken every step carefully well, the dream tower of humanity that it has built over the centuries would have collapsed like a house of cards! Perhaps, we are going through the days when the people of the world are experiencing the Divine presence in a very powerful way. If God were not in control of it all, things would not have fallen into place like this to become history.

Social media, the Covid pandemic, artificial intelligence, and right-wing populism had come together into our historical moment from four directions. All four had raised four types of challenges before us. We survived the global pandemic. We will also survive the global right-wing populism. There are signs of it already that it will not go beyond another ten years. Social media and artificial intelligence will travel with us further.

The idolatry of wealth that marginalizes the world's poor, the arms trade in the pretext of building peace, the closing of borders in the name of immigration, and the international debt trap that keeps poor countries ever slavish have all merged into the same juncture from all four directions. He has been constantly calling on the world to confront these four socio-economic problems.

To aggravate things, a thirst for ecological balance, a passion for gender justice, an aversion towards centralized forms of power, and a certain religious xenophobia also merged to the same juncture with their own strong currents.

It's true that in such junctures, we may not have the necessary hardware systems useful for survival. In fact, the software is more important than the hardware. The software that the world needs at this moment is a long-term vision based on spiritual footing. Especially so in a world that has been polluted by barbarity. In a time of total confusion where the blind lead the blind, what is needed is clarity of vision, deep grounding, and courage of stance. God prepared him specifically for this era and gifted him to the Church and the World. Without this Divine gift, I think perhaps we ourselves, our times, and our world would have been left poor and empty.