Pope Francis has warned leaders of the Roman Curia against the “heresy” of becoming a Church that is only for “the pure” and which refuses to translate the Christian message into contemporary language and thinking.
Delivering his annual end-of-year Christmas speech on 22 December, the 86-year-old pontiff said the “form” of Jesus’ message can constantly change even as the “substance” remains the same.
“True heresy consists not only in preaching another gospel, as Saint Paul told us, but also in ceasing to translate its message into today’s languages and way of thinking,” the Pope told the gathering of cardinals, bishops and senior officials in the Vatican’s Apostolic Palace.
He pointed out that the Second Vatican Council, whose sixtieth anniversary was marked in October, had sparked an “effort to understand the Gospel more fully and to make it relevant, living and effective in our time” which the Church’s synodal process is continuing.
The global synod, the Pope explained, comes out of a “conviction that the process of understanding Christ’s message never ends, but constantly challenges us”.
Francis’ Christmas speech to the Roman Curia is traditionally a mix of reflection on the past year and spiritual direction. In the past, he has delivered blistering critiques of the Church’s central government, which he diagnosed in 2014 as suffering from “spiritual Alzheimer’s”.
In this year’s speech, he warned Church leaders against feeling a sense of superiority precisely because they were working for the Holy See.
“We are in greater danger than all others,” Francis stressed, “we could easily fall into the temptation of thinking that we are safe, better than others, no longer in need of conversion.”
Those working at the most senior levels of the Church, he said, should be on their guard against the “elegant demons” which can enter “smoothly and without our even being conscious of them”.
The Pope gave the example of a seventeenth-century French abbess, Mother Angelica, who was in charge of the Cistercian Abbey of Port-Royal in Paris from 1602 to 1661.
She became the centre of the Jansenist movement, which, through its repeated emphasis on sin, was characterised by a harsh moral rigourism. It was later declared a heresy by the Church.
Francis said that Mother Angelica (Marie-Angélique Arnauld) was a “very gifted woman” who had “charismatically” reformed herself and her order.
Yet, he added, she became the “soul of the Jansenist resistance”, which was “intransigent and unbending even in the face of ecclesiastical authority”.
He added that the nuns were known as “pure as angels and proud as demons”.
During his speech, Francis emphasised the need for the Church to adopt “kindliness, mercy and forgiveness”, to recognise that the path to holiness is something that comes in “fits and starts”, and to give people second chances.
“A Church that is pure and for the pure is only a return to the heresy of Catharism,” he stressed.
The Cathars, derived from the Greek word “pure”, were a sect that in western Europe in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries and professed a dualistic faith which said the material world is evil and that human beings should free their spirit to be in communion with God.
In his speech, the Pope talked about the war in Ukraine and other conflicts worldwide and reiterated that “religion must not lend itself to fuelling conflict”.
Along with putting down arms, building peace also involved rejecting “verbal violence, psychological violence, the violence of the abuse of power and the hidden violence of gossip, all of which are so deeply harmful and destructive”.
Francis also apologised if he had directed harsh language to those working for the Church.
“Pardon me, brothers and sisters, if at times I say things that may sound harsh and pointed,” he said.
“It is not because I don’t believe in the value of kindness and persuasion. Rather, it is because it is good to keep our caresses for the weary and the oppressed, and to have the courage to ‘afflict the comfortable’.”
At the end of the speech, senior curia members came to greet the Pope individually, who remained seated due to his mobility problems.
Francis gave each of them two books as a Christmas present: Vita di Gesù (Life of Jesus), by Andrea Tornielli, the editorial director of Vatican News, and Passiamo All’Altra Riva (Let’s go to the other shore), a book-length interview by Fr Benito Giorgetti with a former member of the Calabrian mafia, Luigi Bonaventura.