It is no mystery why Pope Francis’ interview sparked such rapid and widespread commentary. For in one fell swoop, he took direct aim at all three flawed tendencies of the last generation of Catholic officialdom: Fetishism, Puritanism, and Proof-testing of Vatican II. The result was a “triple play” against any distortion of Catholic tradition or the legacy of Vatican II.
Against Puritanism: Ecclesiastical fetishism not only reduced the faith to a small set of obsessions, it also justified attacks on Catholics who did not share those obsessions.
Francis openly disagrees with anyone who thinks that church reform means reducing the flock to a smaller, more faithful few. Asked about his view of the Church, Francis begins with the image of the people:
The image of the church I like is that of the holy, faithful people of God. This is the definition I often use, and then there is that image from the Second Vatican Council’s ‘Dogmatic Constitution on the Church’ (No. 12). Belonging to a people has a strong theological value. In the history of salvation, God has saved a people. There is no full identity without belonging to a people. No one is saved alone, as an isolated individual, but God attracts us looking at the complex web of relationships that take place in the human community. God enters into this dynamic, this participation in the web of human relationships….The people itself constitutes a subject. And the church is the people of God on the journey through history, with joys and sorrows.
Expanding on that, he makes a clear that this people constitutes an expansive, open community:
This church with which we should be thinking is the home of all, not a small chapel that can hold only a small group of selected people. We must not reduce the bosom of the universal church to a nest protecting our mediocrity. And the church is Mother; the church is fruitful. It must be. You see, when I perceive negative behavior in ministers of the church or in consecrated men or women, the first thing that comes to mind is: ‘Here’s an unfruitful bachelor’ or ‘Here’s a spinster.’ They are neither fathers nor mothers, in the sense that they have not been able to give spiritual life.
And this means we need church leaders who draw others in with a patience that ensures that “no one is left behind”:
“How are we treating the people of God? I dream of a church that is a mother and shepherdess. The church’s ministers must be merciful, take responsibility for the people and accompany them like the Good Samaritan, who washes, cleans and raises up his neighbor. This is pure Gospel. God is greater than sin. The structural and organizational reforms are secondary—that is, they come afterward. The first reform must be the attitude.
It also means we need leaders ready and able to go after every “lost sheep”:
The people of God want pastors, not clergy acting like bureaucrats or government officials. The bishops, particularly, must be able to support the movements of God among their people with patience, so that no one is left behind. But they must also be able to accompany the flock that has a flair for finding new paths.
“Instead of being just a church that welcomes and receives by keeping the doors open, let us try also to be a church that finds new roads, that is able to step outside itself and go to those who do not attend Mass, to those who have quit or are indifferent.
This new pope seeks, not a purer, smaller, more dogmatically correct Church, but a bigger, more open, more merciful Church.
Shades of John XXIII!
Against Proof-texting of Vatican II. Asked about the legacy of Vatican II, Francis offers a “big picture” view of the Council as a historical event bigger than its texts:
Vatican II was a re-reading of the Gospel in light of contemporary culture. Vatican II produced a renewal movement that simply comes from the same Gospel. Its fruits are enormous. Just recall the liturgy. The work of liturgical reform has been a service to the people as a re-reading of the Gospel from a concrete historical situation.
He acknowledges that, even 50 years after the council, people still argue about “hermeneutics” (that is, how to interpret its decisions)--but he insists that its “irreversible” impact is above such disputes:
Yes, there are hermeneutics of continuity and discontinuity, but one thing is clear: the dynamic of reading the Gospel, actualizing its message for today—which was typical of Vatican II—is absolutely irreversible.
He even doubts that such disputes can be perfectly settled, since certainty is beyond us:
In this quest to seek and find God in all things there is still an area of uncertainty. There must be. If a person says that he met God with total certainty and is not touched by a margin of uncertainty, then this is not good. For me, this is an important key. If one has the answers to all the questions—that is the proof that God is not with him. It means that he is a false prophet using religion for himself.
He then takes aim at those who insist that our task now is to restore a perfect, secure form of Catholicism:
If the Christian is a restorationist, a legalist, if he wants everything clear and safe, then he will find nothing. Tradition and memory of the past must help us to have the courage to open up new areas to God. 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. I have a dogmatic certainty: God is in every person’s life. God is in everyone’s life. Even if the life of a person has been a disaster, even if it is destroyed by vices, drugs or anything else—God is in this person’s life. You can, you must try to seek God in every human life. Although the life of a person is a land full of thorns and weeds, there is always a space in which the good seed can grow. You have to trust God.
Finally, Francis rejects the view that we promote the Council’s legacy (or the mission of the Church) by lamenting the state of the world around us:
There is a temptation to seek God in the past or in a possible future. God is certainly in the past because we can see the footprints. And God is also in the future as a promise. But the ‘concrete’ God, so to speak, is today. For this reason, complaining never helps us find God. The complaints of today about how ‘barbaric’ the world is—these complaints sometimes end up giving birth within the church to desires to establish order in the sense of pure conservation, as a defense. No: God is to be encountered in the world of today…God manifests himself in historical revelation, in history. Time initiates processes, and space crystallizes them. God is in history, in the processes.
Clearly, the new pope prefers the hopeful tone that Vatican II gave to Catholicism’s dialogue with contemporary world:
Christian hope is not a ghost and it does not deceive. It is a theological virtue and therefore, ultimately, a gift from God that cannot be reduced to optimism, which is only human. God does not mislead hope; God cannot deny himself. God is all promise.
This new pope is proving once again that Catholicism can advance in history even when its teachings do not change. He is showing us that a new attitude, a new style, a new emphasis on the real priorities can renew the core of our tradition and free us from the traps of a fetish-faith, a puritanical Catholicism, and a literalist and legalist reading of Vatican II’s renewal of the Church..
Is Pope Francis resetting the Church’s course? Yes—he is setting us back to the future of Vatican II’s true legacy. If he succeeds, the wisdom of Catholic tradition will be more available—and more accessible—to the people of our world and our time.
© Bernard F. Swain PhD 2013
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