The Heart of Pope Francis: How a New Culture of Encounter Is Changing the Church and the World
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The Heart of Pope Francis: How a New Culture of Encounter Is Changing the Church and the World
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Overview
A presentation of what lies at the heart of Pope Francis' pontificate, written by his friend and fellow Jesuit
At the heart of Pope Francis' vision lies a keen interest in people, and a passion for understanding the life experience of others. This book by a longtime friend of the Pope clarifies the underlying thoughts and choices Jorge Bergoglio has made throughout his life in developing a culture of encounter that he now proposes as the basis for the rebirth of the whole church, and the world. This little book is essential reading for anyone wanting to contribute to renewal in the Catholic Church.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780824520984 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | PublishDrive |
| Publication date: | 09/15/2015 |
| Series: | The Pope Francis Resource Library |
| Sold by: | PUBLISHDRIVE KFT |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 112 |
| File size: | 804 KB |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
The Heart of Pope Francis
How a New Culture of Encounter is Changing the Church and the World
By Diego Fares, Robert H. Hopcke
The Crossroad Publishing Company
Copyright © 2014 Àncora S.r.l.All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8245-2098-4
CHAPTER 1
"We must go out of ourselves"
Our beloved Francis, by the grace received in virtue of his ministry, has awakened in the Lord's faithful people hope in the God of mercy and in the father of our Lord Jesus Christ. This grace is an "active" grace that spurs us all to move, to go forward toward encountering God himself and our fellow human beings, beginning with those most in need, the marginalized.
This action of the Spirit, which in everything seeks the common good, inspires us to listen to Francis, who exhorts us to keep our eyes wide open so that we might witness the miracles God has brought about among his people. He inspires us all further to help one another discover that which God — through Francis — has to say to each one of us personally, both as Church and as a people.
To speak personally, authentically, and directly is one of Francis's most striking characteristics. Every day, in his homilies, in his Wednesday audiences, in the Angelus, in the Mass, and even by way of Twitter, he speaks directly to us, because to meet us where we are is something truly and deeply dear to his heart. So open has he been about himself, particularly in the course of his present ministry, that whether with a journalist who was writing a biography of the Pope or with a doctoral student writing his dissertation about him, I myself have often had to apologize for not being able to be especially useful in providing any more information or stories or items of interests about Francis that he himself has not, in one place or another, already disclosed.
Hans Urs von Balthasar, one of Francis's favorite authors, places the study of aesthetics and theodramatics before the study of logic. In the same spirit, therefore, exploring the Pope's thinking ought not to be undertaken in order to classify or systematize his thought but rather is best used as a way to "wonder about" him, to awaken our spiritual sense about the meaning of what he says and does. Further, we would do well to loyally and unconditionally accept his invitation to experience for ourselves what he calls the two "transcendences," two ways we "go beyond ourselves": the first, in our encounter with the Father, through adoration; the second, through the encounter with our neighbor, starting first with the neediest around us, in service to them with the help of the crucified Christ.
But ask yourselves this question: how often is Jesus inside and knocking at the door to be let out, to come out? And we do not let him out because of our own need for security, because so often we are locked into ephemeral structures that serve solely to make us slaves and not free children of God. In this "stepping out" it is important to be ready for encounter. For me this word is very important. Encounter with others. Why? Because faith is an encounter with Jesus, and we must do what Jesus does: encounter others. We live in a culture of conflict, a culture of fragmentation, a culture in which I throw away what is of no use to me, a culture of waste. Yet on this point, I ask you to think — and it is part of the crisis — of the elderly, who are the wisdom of a people, think of the children ... the culture of waste! However, we must go out to meet them, and with our faith we must create a "culture of encounter," a culture of friendship, a culture in which we find brothers and sisters, in which we can also speak with those who think differently, as well as those who hold other beliefs, who do not have the same faith. They all have something in common with us: they are images of God; they are children of God. Going out to meet everyone, without losing sight of our own position. There is another important point: encountering the poor. If we step outside ourselves we find poverty. Today — it sickens the heart to say so — the discovery of a tramp who has died of the cold is not news. Today what counts as news is, maybe, a scandal. A scandal: ah, that is news!
In these words just quoted, we hear ringing in unison the principal themes of a Bergoglian culture of encounter, put into everyday language: we must go out of ourselves, because Jesus seeks to go out from the Church into the world; a culture created through faith; dialogue and diversity; the poorest among us; a society in which the death of someone living at the Hogar de San José makes the news rather than celebrity scandals in the tabloids. These are, of course, perennial themes, but they sound new to our ears because of the spontaneous way Francis lives them and speaks about them.
López Quintás, in his introduction to "Popular Opposition," tells how in one of his little-known works, in a passage about youth, Guardini talks about the way in which certain phenomena are made banal. He used the example of a church bell.
Thus, for example, we might say that the sound of a church bell is something pure and simple, and yet at the same time rich, and that it is in both these things that its power to instill peace resides. Nothing could be more true. But is the sound of a church bell actually something simple? Those with refined hearing tell us that the most impressive bells are precisely those that display a range of complementary tones. Their sound, therefore, is not at all simple: in reality, it is, instead, a chord. A truly simple ringing would actually sound strident and hollow to our hearing. Which brings us to something important, namely: the things of the real world are always — to continue with the musical analogy — polyphonic. Only artificial things, made by man, are "simple." Living things are always born from the collaboration of various forces. They are polyphonic, complex. Which is why they have power and reality. In each of them, in some way, rings the sound of all things.
The voice of Pope Francis rings with the sound of a great church bell. At the beatification of Brochero in September 2013, he gave us a bell that "he made ring" in blessing it. Let us allow him to gather us up to himself, recognizing in his voice that of the Good Shepherd, who like us (and as was inscribed in the bell) "smells of his sheep."
CHAPTER 2Encountering the Other
I am very familiar with the admiration Pope Francis has for Romano Guardini, and the notion of "encounter" this theologian put forward is well suited to what Francis wishes to get across to us when he uses this category of experience. For an interpersonal encounter to be authentic, freedom, respect, a proper perspective, esteem for the other, and dialogue must all come into play. One of Guardini's definitions summarizes all these aspects together and has a touching effect: we truly encounter another when "I am wounded by the brilliance of his being, when I am touched by his action."
This is what Pope Francis is encouraging when, for example, he speaks of charitable giving, a gesture that is an authentic encounter only when we look into the eyes of the person we are helping, touching his hands, exchanging words. "If I simply toss him some coins ... if I have not actually touched him, I have not encountered him."
All of Francis's mysticism, from this perspective, can be found perhaps best expressed in his course on the Exercises, "Our Flesh in Prayer," preached at La Plata in January 1990. At that time, he said, "To draw very close to all suffering flesh is to open one's heart, to 'feel it in the gut,' to touch the wound, to carry the wounded on our backs. It is to pay the innkeeper two denarii and to guarantee even more, if it is needed. On this we will be judged." This is the reason that "the Word made flesh redeems our sinfulness, by way of suffering the passion, that is, by taking on the pain of all flesh. Jesus draws very close to all who suffer; he pays the price with his own body. Jesus does not 'pass by.' We will be judged by how closely we draw near to all who suffer, on how we treat others as our 'neighbor.'"
Francis's very conception of prayer contains this notion of "touch." "Prayer touches our flesh in its very nucleus; it touches our heart." And from prayer thus described, he draws the meaning of a true "encounter," which holds those dimensions of transcendence mentioned earlier: going out of oneself to encounter God in prayer and to encounter our neighbor in service.
From an anthropological point of view, encounter is primary because it is our most human characteristic. "We are beings of encounter," beings who live out our lives in a way that cannot be denied or ignored. "Relationship is fulfilled when the other person 'encounters' (who?) the real me."
Expressed affirmatively, we encounter one another through our "capacity to resonate with" others and with all things, which is why an encounter unleashes creative realities. In an encounter, there is synergy, as we say nowadays. And when an authentic encounter does not take place, our soul and our bodies are weakened and may even grow ill.
In this light, Guardini speaks of illnesses of the soul. The soul stands in relationship to the absolute values of truth, goodness, and justice, values that transcend the world of utility. If our soul loses touch with these values, in the end it grows ill.
Our soul's most basic relationship is with the truth. If we lose touch with the truth, our mind loses openness to reflect on itself, which then in turn damages our capacity to love what is good and what is right. "This does not happen when the soul merely stumbles and makes a mistake, because if it did, we would all be sick people, since we all make mistakes. Nor does it happen when we lie, even when we lie frequently. Illness of the soul only happens when it loses its basic relationship to the truth itself. When our soul loses its will to seek the truth and the responsibilities that the truth imposes and renounces any distinction between truth and falsehood, that is when our soul grows ill." For this reason, the Pope exhorts us to "go out of ourselves to encounter the other." Indeed, he admits that whoever goes out and opens himself up to the world may well have an unpleasant collision, but Francis insists that he would rather have a Church that collides with the world than an ailing Church that remains shut up in its sacristy. From here, too, comes his oft-repeated, indefatigable assurance to us that God never tires of forgiving; thus his recommendation that in the sacrament of reconciliation we be as clear as possible as we confess our sins: "I did this, and this, and this."
Clearly, we see that his counsel on these points does not come from a purely moral set of values but arises from an existential discernment in which what is at stake is our spiritual (and physical) health. In going outside ourselves toward what can be discovered in a genuine encounter with an other (if with God, a confession of the truth of sinful nature; if neighbor, beginning with the neediest), what is at stake is our relationship to Truth, Love, and Justice. Without authentic encounter, we limit ourselves to merely self-referential, utilitarian, or purely functional relationships, or worse still, relationships of exclusion or domination, in which we not only hurt others but we make ourselves sick as well, as when we say someone is "insane with power" or "drunk with pride." These are not mere figures of speech but literal, spiritual truths.
By contrast, let us consider how Guardini describes a "man of encounter." He says, "When a man is at his most vital, when his relationship to the world is at its most fresh, he then lives his life through encounter and retains his capacity to encounter the other even through old age." "The reverse of this capacity," Guardini adds, "is habit, indifference, snobbishness." These last qualities could not be further from the personality of Pope Francis, who, by letting himself be touched by God's newness, gives everyone a personal embrace and shows a simplicity and humility about him that is the very antithesis of snobbishness.
The Pope has said that it is a grace, in his current ministry, to be able to "draw near to people first, and then only later on worry about the problems of the Vatican." In writing to Eugenio Scalfari, he himself defines his faith:
Faith, for me, is born of an encounter with Jesus. A personal encounter that has touched my heart, given me a direction and a new sense of my existence. But at the same time an encounter that was made possible by the faith community in which I have lived and thanks to whom I have had access to the wisdom of Holy Scripture, to the new life that like sparkling water flows from Jesus through the sacraments, to fellowship with all people and to service to the poor, the true images of the Lord. Without the Church, I believe, I would not have been able to encounter Jesus, aware as I am of how that enormous gift that is our faith must be carried in the fragile clay vessels of our humanity. So, it is precisely from my personal experience of a faith lived in the Church that I find myself able to listen to what it asks of me and to seek, with the whole Church, the roads on which we all might begin to walk down together.
This brief introduction to Romano Guardini and the passages quoted here from his writings on the Gospel should be enough to show how it has been a touchstone for the Pope's words and deeds throughout his ministry. Inspired by them, his life shows him successful at finding that source of living water beneath the desert of modern life. His direct and authentic encounters with all people are such that they "have life and have it abundantly." This, in Guardini's words, is love.
In his relationship to the truth of his faith, Francis is not a man who "for fear of making a mistake says nothing at all," but on the contrary, is someone who never renounces the truth of God's love for every person. He does not refrain from speaking, even if what he says at times is taken out of context or viewed abstractly such that he ends up being misinterpreted by the scribes and Pharisees of our day. With Francis, though, one can be certain that the conversation, whatever the topic, will be authentic, sincere, and fruitful.
CHAPTER 3"God's faithful people are infallible"
Francis's preaching aims to create a "culture of encounter," a long-standing notion of his that is united to his idea of a "faithful people." To be clear, when he uses the word "culture," he is not talking about "refined" or "polite" people, "cultured" in the intellectual sense. Such connotations come from our own ideas of the way in which culture is conflated with sophistication, or intellectualism, or a refinement of taste.
The Religious Resource That People of Faith Possess
As early as 1974, the then-quite-young Provincial Jorge Bergoglio, at the opening of the Provincial Conference of Argentinian Jesuits, pointed out the need to recognize "the religious resource that people of faith possess," and he went on to say that "for me, they are the most important part, the most real: people of faith."
To begin with, the first thing he did was to "enlarge the category." "When I say, 'people of faith,' I am speaking indeed simply about faithful people," adding, "those with whom we have most contact in our own priestly ministries and in our religious witness." The images in Bergoglio's mind here are those humble people of faith making a pilgrimage to the Shrine of Luján, where, each year as archbishop, he spent the night taking the confessions of those on the road; people of faith expressing their love at the Shrine of Our Lord of the Miracle at Salta; and finally those people of faith from the barrio of Los Polvorines, where, as a student, Francis was a missionary, or at the parish of Patriarca San Giuseppe, where he served as the first pastor.
Second, Bergoglio leaves behind any "ideological presuppositions." "Obviously, the term 'people' is, for us, a vague term depending upon which ideological presuppositions one uses to define the reality of a 'people.'" So he emphasizes, "I mean quite simply faithful people."
Third, he defines the term "narratively":
When I studied theology, when, like you all, I was combing through Denzinger's Sources of Catholic Dogma and various other treatises in order to defend my thesis, one traditional Christian formulation struck me: the faithful people of God are infallible in credendo, in their belief. It is from this insight that I drew my own personal formulation, which is less precise but which I have found helpful nevertheless: when you wish to know what our Holy Mother Church believes, turn to the Magisterium, for it has the charge of teaching what we believe without error; but if you wish to know what the Church believes, turn to the faithful people of God.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from The Heart of Pope Francis by Diego Fares, Robert H. Hopcke. Copyright © 2014 Àncora S.r.l.. Excerpted by permission of The Crossroad Publishing Company.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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Table of Contents
Contents
Preface by Antonio Spadaro, S.J.,1. "We must go out of ourselves",
2. Encountering the Other,
3. "God's faithful people are infallible",
4. Encountering Jorge Bergoglio,
5. The God of Pope Francis,
6. The New Ministry of Relationship,
7. A New Culture in the Church,
Study Guide Questions for Reflection and Sharing, Prayer and Practice,
Notes,
Photo Credits,