The Book of Job sees our origin in the one Creator as the basis of certain common rights: “Did not he who made me in the womb also make him? And did not the same one fashion us in the womb?” (Job 31:15).
This comes near the end of a long monologue by Job. It’s part of the long-standing concern about why the just suffer and the wicked seem to prosper. We might ask the same questions of the 1% and the needy in our own era. Often people of color are blamed for being more crime-inclined than whites. But in many cases, the opposite is actually true.
Nevertheless, Pope Francis is trying to make a point that people made separately are actually a harmony and not a dissonance.
Many centuries later, Saint Irenaeus would use the image of a melody to make the same point: “One who seeks the truth should not concentrate on the differences between one note and another, thinking as if each was created separately and apart from the others; instead, he should realize that one and the same person composed the entire melody”.[St Irenaeus of Lyons, Adversus Haereses, II, 25, 2: PG7/1, 798ff]
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