Pope Francis – and Roger Casement?

You probably know a lot about how two of Pope Francis’ deepest concerns are peace and mercy. Maybe if you’re Irish, you might know Roger Casement, at least as the nationalist who went to Germany during World War I to get military aid for the Easter Uprising. There’s a lot more to Roger Casement.

Our Irish book club just finished reading Mario Vargas Llosa’s The Dream of the Celt, a fictionalized biography of Casement. Why should this Peruvian who won the Nobel Prize for Literature – just before this book came out in 2012 – want to write about an Irish patriot? And why do I link Casement with Francis?

The book is not an easy read; even the four positive reviews I read struggle to identify the problem with the writing – until the last section, on Ireland, which soars. It’s as if Vargas Llosa could not control how much material he found about the rest of Casement’s life. That part of his life is what I am relating to Francis.

Casement was a British diplomat in the Congo Free State in 1904 who was moved to investigate abuses in the rubber industry, which was controlled by the Belgians under King Leopold II. To say the African workers were exploited minimizes the maiming and murder that Casement documented. His journeys were dreadful; the horrors of traveling in the African jungle just added to the cruelty of the Belgian masters. The widely-publicized report Casement prepared when he returned to London resulted in enough uproar in England to press the Belgians to change. Casement became a hero and a celebrity. I was reading this book in the last days of the January 6 commission; I related to the feelings of admiration for someone who tells unpopular truths at great personal cost.

The Democratic Republic of the Congo is one of the countries Pope Francis is visiting this week. The European heritage of exploitation lingers along with an ever-growing Catholic population. Now the natural resources being extracted are the minerals necessary to transition to clean energy in the developed world. Now the conflicts are among ethnic groups, who have been warring in shifting political alliances since independence in the 1960s. In some areas the fighting is too dangerous for a papal visit.

Pope Francis’ other African destination is South Sudan, a country created in 2011. He already has a history with its political leaders. In 2019 he hosted them at the Vatican and knelt at their feet to plead for peace. Like then, on this trip he will be joined by Church of England Archbishop of Canterbury, Justin Welby, and the Moderator of the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland, now Dr. Iain Greenshields. They will present a united Christian front to encourage their fragile coalition and discourage the endemic violence. This is as concrete an action as one could desire to mark the recent observance of the Week of Prayer for Christian Unity: an ecumenical witness for peace. Roger Casement would have loved that kind of support.

Casement’s diplomatic career continued in Latin America after his recovery from Africa. The rubber operation in Peru in 1911 was controlled by a company chartered in Britain but run by local people. It was as brutal as anything he had seen in the Congo. Casement put his investigative skills to work, again enduring difficult journeys. There was more infrastructure here; British and Peruvian and some church officials tried to discourage Casement’s outreach to the grassroots; some missionaries helped him. When he left Peru, intensely frustrated, he wrote another damning report that ultimately destroyed the company. He was recognized by a British knighthood for his humanitarian efforts. My surmise is that this book was written because Vargas Llosa knew something about this sequence of events and was intrigued enough to learn more about this courageous hero who told the truth about abuses in his own
country.

I am writing this in the week after the murder of Tyre Nichols. I am able to avert my eyes from the webcam videos of police brutality. I did not skip the sections of this book that repeatedly described similar actions against members of both populations by the colonial and elite forces controlling each society.

Casement channeled his diplomatic experiences into an understanding of the economics of colonialism and the specific Irish experience of British domination, despite the irony of his knighthood. He had long been fascinated by Irish history and mythology and had tried to learn the Irish language. Like some of the others in the Irish cultural revival around the turn of the twentieth century, he identified as Protestant but supported Irish independence. Pope Francis has consistently critiqued exploitation of the global South by economically powerful colonizers, and he’s doing that again on this African trip. But when it came to Irish independence, Casement landed on a solution that could never have been imagined by this pope.

As World War I began, many ideas were in play about what form Irish independence might take and how it might be achieved. Casement became convinced that Ireland should use the enemy, Germany, against its colonial oppressor, England. He attempted to recruit Irish prisoners of war held in Germany to fight with the rebels; few volunteered. He attempted to get Germany to send weapons to those in Dublin preparing for the Easter Rising; even he realized that they did not send enough to be successful. The Germans were done with Casement; they sent him on a submarine back to Ireland, where he was soon captured.

Vargas Llosa begins the book with Casement in prison awaiting a decision on his petition to avoid execution. He alternates prison chapters with the biographical narrative, so I will leave you wondering about his fate as Casement does until the very end.

Vargas Llosa introduces something else into that first chapter: the diaries. Casement was gay, and he recorded graphic descriptions of sexual relationships with the boys and young men, often native, to whom he was attracted. The diaries were found and published after his trial, and today scholars suggest a lot of the activity he described was fantasy. None the less, homosexuality was illegal at the time in England, and the reaction to the diaries was highly critical among his friends and foes alike.

Vargas Llosa includes Casement’s descriptions in the chapters on his diplomatic postings. I would have to reread the book to be clear exactly how much Casement shared with the Catholic priests he encountered abroad. What I remember is the mercy showed him by those who ministered to him in prison. In addition to peace, that’s the message the Pope is preaching in Africa in his attempt to create reconciliation among the factions warring with each other, much as Casement was warring with himself about his sexuality. I was wishing as I read the book that Casement could have heard the message that Pope Francis repeats so often: that we are all flawed human beings, worthy of God’s love. Casement did so much good for people who were so tortured. I wish he had lived in a time that would not have made him a pariah for who he was as much as for what he did.