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During his travels, Pope Francis likes to anchor his speeches in the local culture. He often cites specificities of the place to get his messages across, from local literature to geographical elements.
At the end of a Mass celebrated in East Timor, in front of 600,000 Catholics (almost half the country), he seized upon the region's most emblematic animal, the saltwater crocodile, to urge a defense of the country's culture and demographic vitality.
This enormous reptile, found all along Timor's coastline — but especially on the south coast — is a real killer. It measures between 4 and 6 yards long, lives in fresh, brackish, and sometimes salty waters, and has a habit of springing up with extreme velocity to take its prey — regularly humans in East Timor.
An effective metaphor
“But be careful! For I have been told that crocodiles come to some beaches,” warned the Pontiff in a spontaneous remark at the very end of the Mass celebrated on a huge esplanade in the capital Dili.
However, the pontiff's message didn’t refer to Timorese marine crocodiles, but to crocodiles from much further afield. “Be careful of those ‘crocodiles’ who want to change your culture, who want to change your history,” he went on to say.
The crowd loved the image, however obscure it may seem to non-locals. It is in fact a reference to the dangers of what the Pope is accustomed to call “ideological colonization.” This refers to the tendency of Western countries or institutions to press for the forced Westernization of the cultures of developing countries.
This colonization can, according to the Pope, affect family policies, with incentives to implement birth control or the acceptance of Western norms concerning gender issues.
The thousands of faithful cheered the Pope loudly afterwards. The crocodile, deeply rooted in their popular culture, is an animal as feared as it is loved by the Timorese.
"Colonizing" with ideologies
In 2015, in a meeting with families in the Philippines, he said:
Let us be on guard against colonization by new ideologies. There are forms of ideological colonization which are out to destroy the family. They are not born of dreams, of prayers, of closeness to God or the mission which God gave us; they come from without, and for that reason I am saying that they are forms of colonization. Let’s not lose the freedom of the mission which God has given us, the mission of the family. Just as our peoples, at a certain moment of their history, were mature enough to say “no” to all forms of political colonization, so too in our families we need to be very wise, very shrewd, very strong, in order to say “no” to all attempts at an ideological colonization of our families. We need to ask Saint Joseph, the friend of the angel, to send us the inspiration to know when we can say “yes” and when we have to say “no”. [...] While all too many people live in dire poverty, others are caught up in materialism and lifestyles which are destructive of family life and the most basic demands of Christian morality. These are forms of ideological colonization. The family is also threatened by growing efforts on the part of some to redefine the very institution of marriage, by relativism, by the culture of the ephemeral, by a lack of openness to life.
That same year, to the bishops of Central African Republic, he said, "I cannot but encourage you to give marriage all the pastoral care and attention it deserves, and not to be discouraged in face of resistance caused by cultural traditions, human weakness or the new ideological colonizationthat is spreading everywhere."
In 2016, meeting with bishops of Poland, he said:
In Europe, America, Latin America, Africa, and in some countries of Asia, there are genuine forms of ideological colonization taking place. And one of these - I will call it clearly by its name – is [the ideology of] “gender.” Today children – children! – are taught in school that everyone can choose his or her sex. Why are they teaching this? Because the books are provided by the persons and institutions that give you money. These forms of ideological colonization are also supported by influential countries. And this terrible!
In 2016, returning from Azerbaijan and Georgia, the pope was asked to speak about transgenderism. Giving the example of comments made by a 10-year-old boy, the Pope said, "It is one thing if a person has this tendency, this option; some people even change sex. But it is another thing to teach this in schools, in order to change people’s way of thinking. I call this 'ideological colonization.'"
In 2017, on the feast of Our Lady of Guadalupe, he invited, "let us see the richness and cultural diversity of our peoples of Latin America and the Caribbean; it is a sign of the great richness that we are invited not only to cultivate, but also, especially in our time, to courageously defend from every attempt at homogenization which ends by imposing — with attractive slogans — a single way of thinking, of being, of feeling, of living; that ends by rendering pointless and barren what we inherited from our forebears; that results in making people — especially our young people — feel inadequate because they belong to this or that other culture. Ultimately, our fruitfulness demands that we protect our peoples from an ideological colonization that erases what is richest in them, be they indigenous, Afro-American, of mixed race, farmers, or residents of the periphery.
Returning from Panama in 2019, he spoke of sex education being affected by this colonization: "Objective sex education should be offered [in schools], as is, without ideological colonization. Because if sex education steeped in ideological colonization is taught in schools, it destroys the person."
The legend of the boy and the crocodile
The Pope was no doubt aware that the island of Timor, according to a local legend known to all inhabitants, “comes from the body of an old crocodile that died and turned into rock at sea” and thus formed the island and its mountains, as historian and geographer Frédéric Durand reports in his book 42,000 ans d'histoire de Timor-Est. The crocodile is said to have sacrificed itself to enable a boy who had saved its life to found a homeland, which became Timor, sometimes nicknamed the “crocodile land.”
Young Arnaldo, a Timorese student, welcomed the Pope's reference. He was unable to attend the Mass but followed it passionately from the restaurant where he works to finance his university studies. “Crocodiles in our culture are linked to our ancestors; we have traditional ceremonies during which we feed the crocodiles before going fishing,” he explains.
But, he assures us, “the Pope talked about other types of crocodiles, the kind you can't negotiate with.”
