Living on the Spanish island of Mallorca in 1936, the French writer Georges Bernanos found himself engulfed by the civil war then raging across Spain. A Catholic, Bernanos was predisposed to favor Francisco Franco; Pope Pius XI, a fervent anticommunist, was sympathetic to the despotic military commander, who was also a staunch Catholic. But Bernanos was finally revolted by Spanish clergy blessing the cold-blooded executions of hundreds of suspected Republicans. In A Diary of My Times, a book comparable to George Orwell’s Homage to Catalonia, he denounced Franco and predicted accurately that the Spanish Civil War had made the world “ripe for every kind of cruelty” and that soon Stalin and Hitler would inflict on their enemies the barbarities he had witnessed in Spain.

Bernanos’s independence of mind and spirit and heightened political consciousness were characteristic of many Catholic writers and thinkers during the interwar years, even as many Church conservatives favored disastrous alliances with fascist demagogues. Their reflexive embrace of human fraternity—the solidarity of the hopeful in bleak times—attested to the spiritual strength of Christianity, manifested not so much in ecclesial institutions as in the Gospel message of compassion for the weak and opposition to every form of hatred and cruelty.

Bernanos went into exile. He and other expatriate writers would help prepare the ground for a profound postwar transformation—not only of the Church but also of the wider culture of the West. Jacques Maritain, a leading Catholic intellectual of the era, drafted an antifascist manifesto, criticized “individualist liberalism,” denounced antisemitism, racism, and colonialism, and, in 1948, helped shape the formulation of the United Nations’s Universal Declaration of Human Rights. His work spread widely, influencing writers and artists—from Marc Chagall, Gabriela Mistral, and Jean Cocteau to Czesław Miłosz and Shūsaku Endō—as well as political and business leaders. The ideals of universal human dignity and fraternity, prominent in the founding documents of the United Nations, would soon resonate in the declarations of the Second Vatican Council, the Church’s decisive opening to the modern world in the 1960s.

In our own era of convulsive breakdowns, the Catholic Church is one of the few global institutions with moral and intellectual authority. The warm reception for Pope Leo XIV across the world is testament to the successful pontificate of Pope Francis (2013–2025), the only major world leader to offer a sustained critique of the final, explosive phase of neoliberal globalization—what he referred to as “a third world war fought piecemeal.”

In his discourse and diplomacy, Francis diagnosed our interconnected global crises—economic instability, social inequality, climate catastrophe, authoritarianism, and war—as failures of moral imagination and practice. He saw nothing inevitable about the worship of wealth and power, the obsession with technology, disrespect for human dignity, and the destruction of the planet. These were human choices, not fate. Francis sought to sanctify the natural impulses of decency and solidarity that spring in all human hearts and to bridge the widening gap between those impulses and our political and economic realities. His 2020 encyclical Fratelli tutti—“brothers and sisters all”—insisted on the moral imperative and practical possibility of advancing our shared human future through fraternity, social friendship, and a “culture of encounter.”

Francis’s ecumenical worldview and his respect for diverse human experiences and convictions enabled him, like Bernanos and Maritain before him, to engage with a broad range of figures and movements. Over the course of his pontificate he interacted not only with religious and political leaders but also with creative writers and other artists. A former teacher of literature, he saw writers—with their power to evoke alternative worlds—as allies in the struggle against free-floating cynicism, organized hatred, and what he denounced as the “globalization of indifference.”

Today art and literature have been absorbed even more deeply into a commercial civilization than when Bernanos proclaimed his furious rejection of the atrocities in Spain. Our perilous world-historical moment challenges writers and artists to unsparingly reconsider beliefs and allegiances formed during a morally complacent era. As in the 1930s and 1940s, this juncture calls for a fresh solidarity of the hopeful—those who neither accept the world as it is nor turn away from it but see it as something to be engaged with and ultimately transformed. It is in this spirit that, since last year, the two of us have been co-convening the Georgetown Global Dialogues, an ongoing event series that gathers writers and intellectuals, many of them from the Global South, to discuss ways forward in a divided world. What follows are brief texts adapted from remarks delivered in Rome this past July at the second installment of the dialogues, which brought together leading writers to engage with the legacy of Pope Francis and was cosponsored by the Vatican Dicastery for Culture and Education. —Thomas Banchoff and Pankaj Mishra

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**‘What Am I Doing Here?’

** Zadie Smith

Since I was a child I’ve always wanted to say “thank you” to someone who is not around. I have always done that. I’ve always felt ridiculous: “Oh, thank you” if the child comes home safely, “Oh, thank you.” Who am I talking to here?

When I was a baby writer, even before I wrote White Teeth, I read some lines by David Foster Wallace. There was nothing deep about them. In fact, you could put them on a tote bag. Something like: If you worship money, you will always feel poor, and if you worship beauty, you will feel ugly, and if you worship power, you will feel weak. And I remember reading it and thinking: If you worship God, what will you always feel? I realized I didn’t really have an answer to that.

I grew up in what you could call radical atheism. To the point that once, when I was about nine, a sweet English boy—I think he had a crush on me—bought me a Bible for my birthday, and my mother took it and threw it out of the window in front of his face. She grew up in an extremely oppressive church—the Jehovah’s Witnesses— and my mother ran from it in order to survive. I have so many friends who were profoundly damaged by churches. I’m well aware of this bloody legacy—but then, all human legacies are bloody.

And yet from the beginning I was interested in religions as philosophical systems. I grew up among Hindus and Muslims and two different kinds of Christians and the kind of syncretic worship that many Jamaicans have left over from their West African experience. I was always envious and fascinated, going around my friends’ houses and watching people break fasts, seeing people sit seders.

When I was writing White Teeth, the comedy of the novel in my mind was that it was about some very religious people: Muslims, Jehovah’s Witnesses, and another, third type of very religious person—rationalist liberals. That was the comedy of it: the third party didn’t think they had a faith, they felt that they were being extremely rational about life, but of course rationalist-liberalism was a philosophical system that dominated their lives and structured their reality as surely as any faith. The thing about rational liberals is they do not know what they do not know. Their map of the world is complete, defended, and impenetrable, and applied to every situation, in every country, and to all peoples. This way of thinking was one of the animating spirits of colonialism, and as comic as it is in White Teeth, in the world its consequences have often been tragic.

So, there’s White Teeth, with its interest in Islam, evangelical Christianity, and rational liberalism. And then The Autograph Man is obviously about Judaism and Buddhism, two philosophical systems I was very interested in at that time. On Beauty is about the secular worship of art and culture. NW for me is an Anglican novel, with its sense of tragic fatalism. Swing Time is about a kind of syncretic African spirituality. And *The Fraud *is a Catholic novel, in which evil is taken seriously as a force in the world.

I’m now back living in Willesden, north London, in the parish I was born in and the street I was raised on, though in the nice house instead of the estate across the road, and I am once again surrounded by Jews and Hindus, Muslims and Christians. When I moved back to London, I thought: well, like the Jews I don’t have any interest in heaven or hell—I have no metaphysical concerns—and like the Muslims I believe in the concept of human limits, in the act of submission or surrender, particularly to contingency. And like the Anglicans and Catholics I find the story of Christ as a form of socialist gospel endlessly interesting and inspiring, and like the Hindus I seem to have many gods—so what am I doing here?

The local Anglican church is where I used to dance back when I was a kid, and it appears in Swing Time: the two girls who are the main characters in the novel first meet there. It’s a big nineteenth-century church, half of which was sold off and converted into flats in 1987 at the height of Thatcherism. What is left is, I guess, just a tiny corner.

One day I found myself going. I walked in nervous. The congregation is, on a good day, about twelve people. Some of them are unhoused, some are addicts, some are recent immigrants, some are locals of long standing. At least one person is usually there solely so they can put the fact of their attendance on a school application form in a few years. Anyway, that day the vicar hadn’t come—sometimes she doesn’t. Since the vicar wasn’t there, a man stood up and gave a eulogy to his dog. There was a big picture of the dog, and we sat and celebrated his dog and I thought, “What am I doing here? This is crazy.”

I think I had an alibi in my mind. I subscribe to Iris Murdoch’s idea that the good exists as a concept universally and in every culture, no matter what the particularity of that good, or God, is. But it was still an alibi, and I was still in an Anglican church worshiping an Alsatian that recently died.

The extension of this church’s worship is that every Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday we have a larder, or “food pantry” as you say in America. We show up and feed people in the community, as well as handing out advice on visas, housing, unemployment benefits and gas bills. Since I started showing up, one thing I’ve noticed is the way in which this simple act re-enchants the neighborhood. North West London has gentrified very quickly, and I think when some of my neighbors walk through the neighborhood it is to them a place of fear. But when I walk through the neighborhood, I’m like, That’s not a “meth head,” that’s Dave. Because I know Dave, because he comes and eats at the larder. It is still my neighborhood, but I see it differently than a lot of people do, especially outsiders. To me our neighborhood is not just the middle-class moms with their expensive pushchairs or my writer friend across the park, but instead a place of many layers, where people are going through all kinds of struggle, many of whom I now know personally. The larder makes me ask myself: How do you want to be connected in the world, and how do you want to be in communion with people?

Anglicanism is meaningful to me in that way. I’m not in any way an effective, good, or faithful Anglican. I am at the larder far less frequently than I should be. But I’m interested in the idea that this particular space in Willesden provides something which, at least in contemporary capitalism, seems very hard to find elsewhere. (I cannot speak for Anglican churches elsewhere.) It’s meaningful to me, in the radically local sense Philip Larkin got at in “Church Going,” as a specific place where for hundreds—or maybe thousands—of years, people have gathered for this purpose: to be quiet, to be in communion, to be with one another. These human souls can be abject, they can be lost, they can be rich or poor, hold a great variety of political views or none at all. The door is open.

These reflections are adapted from Zadie Smith’s remarks in a conversation with Paul Elie and Javier Cercas on “The Diminished Dialogue Between Faith and Culture.”

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**‘The First Thing That Needs to Be Transformed Is Literature Itself’

** Tash Aw

One of Pope Francis’s last major statements dealt with “the role of literature in formation.” In it, he set out to defend the value of reading novels and poems for one’s spiritual development. “Literature is often considered merely a form of entertainment, a ‘minor art’ that need not belong to the education of future priests and their preparation for pastoral ministry,” he wrote. “I consider it important to insist that such an approach is unhealthy.” Literature, he argued, offers a particular kind of access “to the very heart of human culture and, more specifically, to the heart of every individual,” a view onto “our concrete existence.”

The Yorck Project/Wikimedia Commons

Simone Martini: detail from the Miraculous Mass of Saint Martin, circa 1317–1319

I was moved by Pope Francis’s vision for literature. It was precisely fiction’s power to capture “our concrete existence” that I felt when I was growing up as a teenager reading Rabindranath Tagore, Yasunari Kawabata, and Pramoedya Ananta Toer. It also seems to me that this power is something that we, as writers, have lost. I think that, as we discuss how to transform societies, the first thing that needs to be transformed is literature itself.

How can we reestablish the conditions for literature to offer the possibility of awakening, of transcendence, or however you want to put it? One starting point might be to finally do away with the old, stubborn distinction between Western and non-Western writing. Too often one still encounters the presumption that Western literature is linked to the intellect, to rationality, a product of the Age of Reason and the Age of Enlightenment—and that non-Western literature, by contrast, is somehow inherently “spiritual.”

In my experience, this couldn’t be more wrong. I grew up in a Chinese Buddhist Taoist family and went to a Catholic mission school in Malaysia, a heavily Muslim country, and much of the literature that I encountered growing up had exactly the same aims as its Western counterpart. Many of these aims are not particularly admirable. The literature I read as a child was again and again focused on capturing a sort of nationalism, on defining a national identity, which is then used to define a particular group of people against others. Not only was it not used to offer transcendental experience, it was used to exclude the possibility of transcendence—to exclude the possibility of awakening, the realization of a better way of living, even for the self. It was aimed, ultimately, at reinforcing the nation-state’s authority over the individual. And, again as in the West, by and large it was produced by a small, elite, bourgeois intelligentsia, with their own narrow political interests.

The challenge for us in Asia is to change this state of affairs. What would it take for us to again create something in the spirit of a Tagore or a Kawabata—a literature that restores the connection between the personal and the political and reestablishes a sense of “our concrete existence”? That is my provocation for today.

These reflections are adapted from Tash Aw’s remarks in a conversation with Mohsin Hamid and Ranjit Hoskote on “Literature and the Transcendent in a Global Frame.”

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‘A Historian of Emotions’

** Juan Gabriel Vásquez**

Mario Vargas Llosa, writing about the heroes of the chivalric novels before Cervantes, said somewhere that their psychology was as complex as that of their horses. Literature, in other words, didn’t always concern itself with emotional reality. But at a certain point that started to change. Novels started to discover the possibility of revealing the hidden lives of women and men, their contradictions, their ambiguities, their secrets and their secret desires, their demons and their ghosts; novelists started to learn how to fix and study and understand a certain space that is not easily measurable, that is not quantifiable, that has no real existence in the world and cannot be accounted for on a factual level but nonetheless has life-changing importance.

This made novels dangerous. They are accused of immorality, of damaging readers, for which political authorities censor and ban them. I recall a wonderful moment in a book by Madame de Staël, the French novelist who was expelled from France by Napoleon, in part because of his suspicions of novelists—especially hugely successful and influential novelists. I believe she was writing from exile, and she says that she can’t deny the fact that novels cause harm because they reveal too much about what we are. They reveal too much about human beings. She says, and this I find beautiful and problematic: You cannot have a new feeling anymore without realizing immediately that you have just read about it in a novel.

I would like to posit that the novelist is a historian of emotions. We go to Dostoevsky, to Stendhal, to Virginia Woolf, to Austen, to George Eliot and Gabriel García Márquez and Mario Vargas Llosa and Toni Morrison because they opened this place where our emotional world leaves a trace.

I’m not talking only about our intimate lives. There is, I think, a sense in which the modern novel’s success at explaining our emotional world helped lay the foundation for other, more directly political achievements. In his extended essay Testaments Betrayed, Milan Kundera writes that Western democracies are used to thinking about themselves as the inventors of human rights. But before human rights, he seems to argue, first we had to invent the notion of the individual, and to recognize ourselves and others alike as individual human beings.

This would not have happened, says Kundera, without the art of fiction, which teaches us to be curious about the lives of others and to accept truths that differ from our own. Pope Francis comes to a strangely similar conclusion when he writes that literature gives us a language for “the marvelous diversity of humanity,” a language that makes that diversity “not foreign but shared.” To invite us to recognize the full range of people’s visible and invisible lives: that is precisely what novels do.

These reflections are adapted from Juan Gabriel Vásquez’s remarks in a conversation with Nesrine Malik and Kamila Shamsie on “Emotions in Literature and Politics.”