Blogger’s Preface:
Such a fine article by
Weigel could be the occasion for him to rewrite his previous criticisms of John
Paul II’s “Of Social Concern” [Witness to Hope pp. 559-560] and Benedict’s
“Charitas in Veritate” [National Review, July 7, 2009]. They maintained the
very point that Weigel is extolling in Francis: the centeredness of Christ in
all affairs human including economics.
Perhaps
the most revealing detail in Pope Francis’s lengthy interview, conducted by the
Italian Jesuit Antonio Spadaro and published yesterday in English translation
in the Jesuit journal America, is the pontiff’s reflection on one of his
favorite Roman walks, prior to his election:
When
I had to come to to Rome, I always stayed in [the neighborhood of the] Via
della Scrofa. From there I often visited the Church of St. Louis of France, and
I went there to contemplate the painting of “The Calling of St. Matthew” by
Caravaggio. That finger of Jesus, pointing at Matthew. That’s me. I feel like
him. Like Matthew. . . . This is me, a sinner on whom the
Lord has turned his gaze.
The Calling of St.
Matthew is an
extraordinary painting in many ways, including Caravaggio’s signature use of
light and darkness to heighten the spiritual tension of a scene. In this case,
though, the chiaroscuro setting is further intensified by a profoundly
theological artistic device: The finger of Jesus, pointing at Matthew, seems
deliberately to invoke the finger of God as rendered by Michelangelo on the
Sistine Chapel ceiling. Thus Caravaggio, in depicting the summons of the tax collector,
unites creation and redemption, God the Father and the incarnate Son, personal
call and apostolic mission.
That is who Jorge
Mario Bergoglio is: a radically converted Christian disciple who has felt the
mercy of God in his own life and who describes himself, without intending any
dramatic effect, as “a sinner whom the Lord has looked upon.” Having heard the
call to conversion and responded to it, Bergoglio wants to facilitate others’
hearing of that call, which never ceases to come from God through Christ and
the Church.
And
that, Bergoglio insists, is what the Church is for: The Church is for
evangelization and conversion. Those who have found the new pope’s criticism of
a “self-referential Church” puzzling, and those who will find something shockingly
new in his critical comments, in his recent interview, about a Church reduced
“to a nest protecting our mediocrity,” haven’t been paying sufficient
attention. Six years ago, when the Catholic bishops of Latin America and the
Caribbean met at the Brazilian shrine of Aparecida to consider the future, the
archbishop of Buenos Aires, Bergoglio, was one of the principal intellectual
architects of the bishops’ call to put evangelization at the center of Catholic
life, and to put Jesus Christ at the center of evangelization. The Latin
American Church, long used to being “kept,” once by legal establishment and
then by cultural tradition, had to rediscover missionary zeal by rediscovering
the Lord Jesus Christ. And so the Latin American bishops, led by Bergoglio,
made in their final report a dramatic proposal that amounted to a stinging
challenge to decades, if not centuries, of ecclesiastical complacency:
The
Church is called to a deep and profound rethinking of its
mission. . . . It cannot retreat in response to those who
see only confusion, dangers, and threats. . . . What is
required is confirming, renewing, and revitalizing the newness of the
Gospel . . . out of a personal and community encounter with
Jesus Christ that raises up disciples and missionaries. . . .
A
Catholic faith reduced to mere baggage, to a collection of rules and
prohibitions, to fragmented devotional practices, to selective and partial
adherence to the truths of faith, to occasional participation in some
sacraments, to the repetition of doctrinal principles, to bland or nervous
moralizing, that does not convert the life of the baptized would not withstand
the trials of time. . . . We
must all start again from Christ, recognizing [with Pope Benedict XVI] that
“being Christian is . . . the encounter with an event, a
person, which gives life a new horizon and a decisive direction.”
The
21st-century proclamation of Christ must take place in a deeply wounded and not
infrequently hostile world. In another revealing personal note, Francis spoke
of his fondness for Marc Chagall’s White Crucifixion, one of the most striking religious paintings
of the 20th century. Chagall’s Jesus is unmistakably Jewish, the traditional
blue and white tallis or prayer-shawl replacing the loincloth
on the Crucified One. But Chagall’s Christ is also a very contemporary figure,
for around the Cross swirl the death-dealing political madnesses and hatreds of
the 20th century. And so the pope’s regard for Chagall’s work is of a piece
with his description of the Catholic Church of the 21st century as a kind of
field hospital on a battlefield strewn with the human wreckage caused by false
ideas of the human person and false claims of what makes for happiness. Thus
Francis in his interview on the nature of the Church:
I
see clearly that 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
how are the wounds of late-modern and postmodern humanity to be healed? Through
an encounter with Jesus Christ, the Son of the living God. “The most important
thing, “ Francis insisted in his interview, “is the first proclamation: Jesus
Christ has saved you.” The Church of the 21st century must offer Jesus Christ
as the answer to the question that is every human life (as John Paul II liked
to put it). The moral law is important, and there should be no doubt that
Francis believes and professes all that the Catholic Church believes and
professes to be true about the moral life, the life that leads to happiness and
beatitude. But he also understands that men and women are far more likely to
embrace those moral truths — about the inalienable right to life from
conception until natural death; about human sexuality and how it should be
lived — when they have first embraced Jesus Christ as Lord. That, it seems to
me, is what the pope was saying when he told Antonio Spadaro that “proclamation
in a missionary style focuses on the essentials, on the necessary things.”
These are what make “the heart burn: as it did for the disciples at
Emmaus. . . . The proposal of the Gospel must be more
simple, profound, radiant. It is from this proposition that the moral consequences
then flow.”
Francis
underscores that “the teaching of the Church is clear” on issues like abortion,
euthanasia, the nature of marriage, and chastity and that he is “a son of the
Church” who accepts those teachings as true. But he also knows that “when we
speak about these issues, we have to talk about them in a context.” That
“context” is Jesus Christ and his revelation of the truth about the human
person. For as the Second Vatican Council taught in Gaudium et Spes,
its Pastoral Constitution on the Church in the Modern World, “It is only in the
mystery of the Word made flesh that the mystery of man truly comes clear. For
Adam, the first man, was the type of him who was to come. Christ the Lord,
Christ the new Adam, in the very revelation of the mystery of the Father and of
his love, fully reveals man to himself and brings to light his most high
calling.”
Thus Pope Francis, the
pastor who is urging a new pastoral style on his fellow bishops and fellow
priests, insists that every time the
Church says “no,” it does so on the basis of a higher and more compelling
“yes”: yes to the dignity and value of every human life, which the Church
affirms because it has embraced Jesus as Lord and proclaims him to a world
increasingly tempted to measure human beings by their utility rather than their
dignity.
Francis’s
radical Christocentricity — his insistence that everything in the Church begins
with Jesus Christ and must lead men and women to Jesus Christ — also sheds
light on his statement that there is a hierarchy of truths in Catholicism or,
as he put it, that “the dogmatic and moral teachings of the Church are not all
equivalent.” That does not mean, of course, that some of those those teachings
are not really, well, true; but it does mean that some truths help us make
sense of other truths. The Second Vatican Council reclaimed this notion of a
“hierarchy of truths” in Unitatis Redintegratio, its Decree on
Ecumenism, and it’s an important idea, the pope understands, for the Church’s
evangelical mission.
If
you don’t believe in Jesus Christ as Lord — if you’ve never heard the Gospel —
then you aren’t going to be very interested in what the Catholic Church has to
say in Jesus’s name about what makes for human happiness and what makes for
decadence and unhappiness; indeed, you’re quite likely to be hostile to what
the Church says about how we ought to live. By redirecting the Church’s
attention and pastoral action to the Church’s most basic responsibility — the
proclamation of the Gospel and the invitation to friendship with Jesus Christ —
Pope Francis is underscoring that a very badly disoriented 21st century will be
more likely to pay attention to evangelists than to scolds: “We need to
proclaim the Gospel on every street corner, preaching the good news of the
kingdom and healing, even with our preaching, every kind of disease and
wound. . . . The proclamation of the saving love of God
comes before moral and religious imperatives.” The Church says “yes” before the
Church says “no,” and there isn’t any “no” the Church pronounces that isn’t
ultimately a reflection of the Church’s “yes” to Jesus Christ, to the Gospel,
and to what Christ and the Gospel affirm about human dignity.
It’s
going to take some time for both the Church and the world to grow accustomed to
an evangelical papacy with distinctive priorities. Those who imagine the
Catholic Church as an essentially political agency in which “policy” can change
the way it changes when a new governor moves into an American statehouse will
continue — as they did within minutes of the release of the America interview
— to misrepresent Pope Francis as an advocate of doctrinal and moral change, of
the sort that would be approved by the editorial board of the New York
Times. This is nonsense. Perhaps more urgently, it is a distraction.
Jorge
Mario Bergoglio is determined to redirect the Church’s attention, and the
world’s attention, to Jesus Christ. In this, his papacy will be in continuity
with those of John Paul II and Benedict XVI. Pope Francis is going to be
radically Christ-centered in his own way, though, and some may find that way
jarring. Those willing to take him in full, however, rather than excising 17
words from a 12,000-word interview, will find the context in which those 17
words make classic Catholic sense. “We cannot insist only on issues related to
abortion, gay marriage, and the use of contraceptive methods,” the pope told
his interviewer. Why? Because it is by insisting on conversion to Jesus Christ,
on lifelong deepening of the believer’s friendship with him, and on the
Church’s ministry as an instrument of the divine mercy that the Church will
help others make sense of its teaching on those matters — with which the New
York Times, not the Catholic Church, is obsessed — and will begin to
transform a deeply wounded culture.
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