As if to deflect from countless headlines about his views on homosexuality and abortion, Pope Francis
chose a far more personal theme for his daily tweet last Friday: “Christ
is always faithful. Let us pray to be always faithful to him.”
The
same certainty – what he calls his “dogmatic certainty” that “God is in
every person’s life” – resonates through his interview with a Jesuit
theologian, published this last week.
As well as discussing hot political topics such as Vatican
censorship, the role of women in the church and the Catholic stance on
reproductive rights, the pope articulates a clear and somewhat
challenging vision for Christians.
“If the Christian is a
restorationist, a legalist, if he wants everything clear and safe, then
he will find nothing,” he says.
“Those who today always look for
disciplinarian solutions, those who long for an exaggerated doctrinal
‘security’, those who stubbornly try to recover a past that no longer
exists – they have a static and inward-directed view of things. In this
way, faith becomes an ideology among other ideologies.”
Drawing
on his background as a Jesuit, he extols the virtues of living “on the
margins, on the frontier”, saying: “There is always the lurking danger
of living in a laboratory. Ours is not a ‘lab faith’ but a ‘journey
faith’, a historical faith. God has revealed himself as history, not as a
compendium of abstract truths.”
Citing the
example of nuns working in hospitals, he adds: “They live on the
frontier . . . Laboratories are useful, but reflection for us must
always start from experience.”
‘Warm the hearts of the faithful’
Asked what sort of reforms are needed in the Catholic Church, he replies: “The thing the church needs most today is the ability to heal wounds and to warm the hearts of the faithful; it needs nearness, proximity. I see the church as a field hospital after battle. It is useless to ask a seriously injured person if he has high cholesterol and about the level of his blood sugars! You have to heal his wounds. Then we can talk about everything else. Heal the wounds, heal the wounds . . . And you have to start from the ground up.
“The church sometimes has locked itself up in small things, in small-minded rules.”
As for role models, he cites the founder of the Jesuits, Ignatius Loyola, along with his lesser known companion Peter Faber
(1506-46) who is praised for his “dialogue with all . . . even the most
remote and even with his opponents; his simple piety, a certain naiveté
perhaps . .”
The pope adds: “I am rather close to the mystical
movement. . . And Faber was a mystic.”
Elsewhere, the pope describes himself as a Roman
outsider, “a sinner” and “a really, really undisciplined person”.
He
emphasises the role of consultation in decision-making, calling for a
“less rigid form” of discussion at the highest level of the church.
“I
do not want token consultations, but real consultations,” he says. “The
people of God want pastors, not clergy acting like bureaucrats or
government officials.”
Untapped resources
Suggesting untapped resources in the laity, he says: “If you want to know who [Mary] is, you ask theologians; if you want to know how to love her, you have to ask the people . . . We should not even think, therefore, that ‘thinking with the church’ means only thinking with the hierarchy of the church.”
This focus on the church as it is experienced in ordinary life is a recurrent theme, and informs his comments on homosexuality.
“We need to proclaim the Gospel on every street corner,” he says, “In Buenos Aires,
I used to receive letters from homosexual persons who are ‘socially
wounded’ because they tell me that they feel like the church has always
condemned them. But the church does not want to do this.
“During
the return flight from Rio de Janeiro I said that if a homosexual
person is of good will and is in search of God, I am no one to judge.
“By
saying this, I said what the catechism says. Religion has the right to
express its opinion in the service of the people, but God in creation
has set us free: it is not possible to interfere spiritually in the life
of a person.”
He continues: “The church’s
pastoral ministry cannot be obsessed with the transmission of a
disjointed multitude of doctrines to be imposed insistently.
Proclamation in a missionary style focuses on the essentials, on the
necessary things: this is also what fascinates and attracts more, what
makes the heart burn, as it did for the disciples at Emmaus.
“We
have to find a new balance; otherwise even the moral edifice of the
church is likely to fall like a house of cards, losing the freshness and
fragrance of the Gospel.
“The proposal of the
Gospel must be more simple, profound, radiant. It is from this
proposition that the moral consequences then flow.”