What Pope Francis Really Said - Tom Hoopes

What Pope Francis Really Said (eBook)

Words of Comfort and Challenge

Tom Hoopes (Autor)

eBook Download: EPUB

2023 | 1. Auflage
160 Seiten
Servant (Verlag)
978-1-63582-307-3 (ISBN)

His likeable, spontaneous, unguarded manner has drawn both estranged Catholics and even non-Catholics to take a closer look at the Catholic Church. He has also puzzled and even outraged the faithful who listened uncritically to the media's interpretation of Pope Francis's off-the-cuff commentary on hot-button issues such as abortion, marriage, divorce, the environment, immigration, and a host of other issues. Meanwhile, younger Catholics aren't analyzing him. They are simply gazing with him at Jesus Christ. In What Pope Francis Really Said, nationally respected Catholic journalist Tom Hoopes explores how Pope Francis is bringing the Catholic Church to bear on a dramatically changing world, not by altering its teachings but by applying enduring truths to new realities in fresh ways. This book takes up the primary themes of the first three years of the pontificate and challenges American Catholics to see the pope and his teachings as a pathway to personal renewal.

Chapter One

The Francis Option

“Woman, you are set free of your infirmity.”

—Luke 13:12

Cardinal Jorge Bergoglio’s rise to the chair of Peter in March 2013 began with a four-minute speech in Rome.

In the days leading up to the conclave, the future Pope Francis addressed his brother cardinals, who were preparing to enter the conclave that would elect a new pope. His brief statement impressed them—with one impressed enough to ask the Argentinian cardinal for a copy of his remarks. What he got was a page of notes, little more than an outline, which is nonetheless a remarkable document: It carries in succinct, embryonic form the major themes that would shape the career of an enigmatic, surprising and tumultuous leadership style. In these brief remarks you see all the hallmarks of Francis: He is insistently centered on Jesus Christ, he quotes Pope Paul VI, and he calls the Church to go out to “the peripheries.” You could call it the first articulation of “the Francis option.”

“Put simply, there are two images of the Church,” the future pope told the cardinals. There is the “Church which evangelizes and comes out of herself…and the worldly Church, living within herself, of herself, for herself.”1

The speech fleshes out each image. The fruitful mother is a Marian image. Mary’s faith is contemplative and active, both at once. She is the Virgin Mother of Jesus who presents her son to the world and presents the world to her son. She is the woman sweeping Elizabeth’s kitchen, the guest noticing what is needed at the wedding at Cana, the central figure who sits among the apostles praying for the Holy Spirit after Jesus’s ascension. She is filled with youthful vigor regardless of her age because she is centered on others, and is filled with her son’s urgent purpose.

“Thinking of the next pope,” said Bergoglio, “he must be a man who, from the contemplation and adoration of Jesus Christ, helps the Church to go out to the existential peripheries, that helps her to be the fruitful mother, who gains life from ‘the sweet and comforting joy of evangelizing.’”2

“When the Church does not come out of herself to evangelize, she becomes self-referential and then gets sick,” he said. She becomes “the deformed woman of the Gospel.”

The story in the Gospel of Luke goes like this:

He was teaching in a synagogue on the sabbath. And a woman was there who for eighteen years had been crippled by a spirit; she was bent over, completely incapable of standing erect. When Jesus saw her, he called to her and said, “Woman, you are set free of your infirmity.” He laid his hands on her, and she at once stood up straight and glorified God. (Luke 13:10–13)

But as so often happens in Jesus’s life, that’s not the end of the story. The leader of the synagogue is indignant that Jesus had cured her on the sabbath and uses the opportunity to publicly chide him, loudly telling the crowd: “There are six days when work should be done. Come on those days to be cured, not on the sabbath day” (Luke 13:14)

Jesus pushes back: “This daughter of Abraham, whom Satan has bound for eighteen years now, ought she not to have been set free on the sabbath day from this bondage?” (Luke 13:16). The synagogue official is humiliated, and the crowd rejoices (see Luke 13:14–17).

The story hits some of Pope Francis’s favorite themes. It shows Jesus refusing to be stage-managed by what officialdom is asking him to do and instead turning his attention to those who are looking to have a real encounter with him. The villains in the story are the rules-bound religious men who have allowed a proscription of the law to take on a life of its own, away from its original purpose. It also sees the evil of a real, malignant, supernatural being as the heart of the problem. The Gospel tells us twice that her infirmity is more than physical: She is “crippled by a spirit,” says Luke; “bound by Satan,” says Jesus.

She is also the opposite of Mary, the vigorous woman at Christ’s service. This woman is stuck in a defensive posture, a continual bow of automatic acquiescence to the world around her. Or perhaps she is too focused on herself, another constant theme of Francis: After all, you have to stoop to gaze at your navel. In either case, she is a kind of crooked doppelganger of the Church, carrying a bad spirit instead of the spirit of her son.

The Cardinal from Buenos Aires continued: “When the Church is self-referential, inadvertently, she believes she has her own light; she ceases to be the mysterium lunae [Latin, ‘mystery of the moon,’ i.e., reflecting the light of Christ the way the moon reflects the light of the sun] and gives way to that very serious evil, spiritual worldliness.… It lives to give glory only to one another.”3

The cardinal was saying that the Church needed to contemplate Jesus Christ and model his eternal freshness to the world, not engage in endless self-analysis and stand before the world as a self-absorbed, neurotic relic of the past. The Church needed more than a rebranding, it needed a radical (“from the roots”) renewal based in a deep faith in Jesus Christ. This is what Pope Francis wanted from the Church. What did the Church want from Pope Francis?

Three Popes in Historical Context

After the papal conclave in 2005, Chicago Cardinal Francis George gave the Chicago Tribune an insider’s perspective, offering important context about what the cardinals were thinking when they elected previous popes. “Twenty-six years ago, when Karol Wojtyla was chosen to be the successor to Peter, some of the most difficult challenges to the Church’s mission came from the East,” Cardinal George said, referring to the Soviet Bloc that dominated world politics at the time. “Twenty-six years later, the most difficult challenges to the Church’s mission come from the West. There is a man now [Pope Benedict XVI] very well-prepared who understands Western society and the history of the world.”4

Popes tend to take after their namesakes. John Paul combined the mysticism of St. John the Evangelist, the beloved disciple who said, “God is love,” with the no-nonsense focus on truth in action of St. Paul. He was the pope of love and truth, two principles that stood in fundamental opposition to the tide of statism and secularism that was at a high-water mark in the Soviet Bloc in Eastern Europe and continues to rise in the West.

The “love and truth” pontificate of Pope John Paul II seemed to go from strength to strength. He helped topple communist tyranny in the 1980s. He presided over a flowering of Catholic doctrine in the 1990s with the publication of the Catechism, Ex Corde Ecclesiae (his apostolic constitution for higher education), and encyclicals whose very names sum up the key elements missing from the intellectual life of our times and our Church: The Gospel of Life, The Splendor of Truth, and Faith and Reason.

Pope Benedict XVI was like his namesake St. Benedict, the founder of monasticism. You could sum up St. Benedict’s contribution as “monks and manuscripts”; his Holy Rule translated the love of Christ into concrete practices of daily work and prayer that provided sisters and monks to the world, and his monasteries are famous for literally preserving the Church’s teaching through the study and reproduction of important texts. Pope Benedict did the same thing: He gave the Church leaders and liturgy. Vatican watchers say Benedict spent his time focused on bishop appointees and the proper celebration of the Church’s worship.

Winds of Change: The 2013 Conclave

The Chicago Tribune returned to Cardinal George in 2013 to ask about the election of Pope Francis. If Benedict had been elected to provide continuity with the “great papacy” of John Paul II, this time, the Church needed a new direction. At first, Cardinal George did not consider Cardinal Jorge Bergoglio a contender because the Argentinian prelate was seventy-six years old. But Bergoglio’s address about the two images of the Church changed that. “It wasn’t so much what he said as who said it and how he said it: very direct, very sincere,” said Cardinal George. “He talked about the Church being a mission and not being self-referential, which is a wonderful thing to say.”5

He said other cardinals had a similar message, but there was a difference about Cardinal Bergoglio. “It’s not who is the holiest cardinal or who is the smartest. The most basic question is: Is he free to govern?” Cardinal George said. “He’s free because he’s a man of prayer. He’s not attached to himself. He’s internally free and externally free as much as possible.”6 Many of the 115 cardinals gathered in Rome apparently agreed. They entered the conclave in the Vatican on March 12, and white smoke emanating from the Sistine Chapel chimney signaled the election of a new pope the next day.

And how did Jorge Bergoglio choose his name? When it was clear that he was chosen, Pope Francis said his Brazilian friend, Cardinal Cláudio Hummes, “hugged [him], kissed [him] and said, ‘Don’t forget...

Erscheint lt. Verlag	1.2.2023
Sprache	englisch
Themenwelt	Geisteswissenschaften ► Religion / Theologie ► Christentum
ISBN-10	1-63582-307-2 / 1635823072
ISBN-13	978-1-63582-307-3 / 9781635823073

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