ROME — Pope Francis condemned the modern “cult of speed” Wednesday, urging his hearers to learn how to “waste time.”
“I ask each one of you, ‘Do you know how to waste time, or are you always in a hurry?’” the pontiff queried of the pilgrims gathered for his weekly general audience.
“Do you know how to waste time with grandparents, with the elderly?” he asked. “Do you know how to spend time playing with your children, with children? This is the touchstone.”
The pope went on to denounce a modern “obsession with speed,” which is born of people’s understanding that “speed is money.”
“The excess of speed puts us in a centrifuge that sweeps us away like confetti. One completely loses sight of the bigger picture,” he said.
“The excess of speed pulverizes life: it does not make it more intense,” he continued, whereas wisdom requires learning to “waste time.”
“When you return home and see your son, your daughter, and you ‘waste time,’ but in this conversation that is fundamental for society, you ‘waste time’ with children,” he said, adding that wasting time with children and the elderly “strengthens the human family.”
“It is necessary to spend time, time that is not lucrative, with children and with the elderly, because they give us another ability to see life,” he declared.
The pope went on to say that the coronavirus pandemic has imposed “a halt to the obtuse cult of speed.”
“And in this period,” he continued, “grandparents have acted as a barrier to the affective ‘dehydration’ of the youngest” and the alliance of the generations blocks “the obsession with speed, which simply consumes [life].”