UNDERSTANDING POPE FRANCIS 

 by Cardinal Vincent Nichols 

Two words are at the heart of the Pope’s drive to reform the Church: accompaniment and discernment. And they are key to understanding the document at the centre of increasingly heated debate, Amoris Laetitia

Pope Francis has made it clear what he wants to achieve in and for the Church. In his apostolic letter, Misericordia et Misera, issued at the end of the Year of Mercy last November, he speaks of “a perennial activity of pastoral conversion and witness to mercy”. He speaks of generating a “culture of mercy” in the Church. This, it seems to me, is Francis’ real programme.

As I was reading this letter for the first time, I was also listening to a young man who was talking with a group of bishops as we were engaged in preparations for next year’s Synod of Bishops, which will be on “Youth, Faith and Vocational Discernment”. When he was asked what young people feared most today, he replied with one word, “failure”. Reflecting on the Church’s teaching, especially on sexuality, he said: “It has no room for failure. It is impossible for us to work with.”

This phrase, “the culture of mercy”, and the words of this young man hold the key to understanding the entire reform that Pope Francis is trying to bring about. It is important to understand this, as it is related directly to Amoris Laetitia (“The Joy of Love”), the apostolic exhortation from the Synod of Bishops on the Family.

Two words are at the heart of Pope Francis’ drive to see the Church become a place of mercy and salvation: accompaniment and discernment. These words were central to the Year of Mercy and they will be central to the next Synod of Bishops. And they are central to understanding Amoris Laetitia.

This passionate drive of Pope Francis arises from the conviction that the whole point of the Church founded by Christ is to bring us to the Father, to God, through the transformation of grace. This, he insists, is God’s entire project, working through creation and redemption, and through every moment in the life of every human being. In a wonderful phrase, Pope Francis describes the world as “God’s construction site”.

Francis is calling for a radical reform of the Church, of you and me, asking us to go back to these very basic truths and learn again how to live by them and be shaped by them. I say “go back”, because I see in these truths the very best of much traditional teaching, pastoral wisdom and practice.

For Francis, reform or renewal is not an idea, or a theory, imposing itself on history or on the Church. Reform is an accompaniment of each other – bishops with the Pope in the Synod, priests in a council, pastoral reflection in a deanery or in a parish, the confessor in the confessional box – as we try to discern the working of God in each concrete circumstance. To be part of this process, we may have to allow some models we had formed in our heads to be broken down.

Two axioms lie at the heart of the Pope’s vision. The first is this: time is greater than space (explored in his encyclical letter, Evangelii Gaudium, 222-225). We should not be trying to fill, or dominate, space and shape it as we believe it ought to be shaped. Rather, we must respect the speed, the timing – slow or fast – of processes of growth and change.

This runs contrary to much that we are accustomed to in our hurried, busy culture. Yes, as we face a new problem or challenge, we bring our ideas to it. But we must always give time to respect and grow close to the reality, to attend carefully to its complexity and allow its own dynamic to become clear. This means exercising some self-restraint in expressing our opinions – and certainly never shouting them. It means not rushing to separate the wheat from the tares. It means thinking twice – at least – before we tweet.

There is an interesting application, or reflection, on this first axiom. It has been pointed out to me that, for many, the first step on the road to a return to the full practice of the faith is one of being embraced by the Church, of experiencing a sense of belonging. Often we might be tempted to think that true belonging only comes after the necessary changes or reform of life. On the contrary, if a concrete sense of belonging is created and experienced, then the pathway of conversion can open up, with all the time that it might need. Pope Francis is a genius at creating this sense of belonging for those who feel they are excluded.

A second axiom that lies at the heart of the Pope’s vision is this: reality is more important than ideas (Evangelii Gaudium, 231-233). For Francis, reform is always a matter of spiritual discernment, whether in the life of the Church or of the individual. Such discernment attends first of all to the realities, to the limited degrees of goodness and failure that are to be found there. We accompany one another in our slow progress towards the revealed fullness of life to which we are called. What we are looking for, in this discernment, are the shades of progress, not the black and white of a final judgement.

The reform of the Church, and the pastoral care of individuals, should not be seen as a battle of ideas. A battle of ideas, so beloved of the media, tends to take us away from the very place that should fill our hearts and minds: the respectful, even reverential, regard for the reality of a person’s life and how God is at work in it at any moment. We are often tempted to retreat into ideological clashes between so-called “liberals” and “conservatives”. This ends up taking us away, often for our comfort, from the reality before our eyes. Yet that is precisely where God is to be found and where he wants us to be.

“I know that you face many challenges,” Pope Francis said to the bishops of the United States in September 2015, “and that the field in which you sow is unyielding, and that there is always the temptation to give in to fear, to lick one’s wounds, to think back on bygone times and to devise harsh responses to fierce opposition. And yet we are promoters of the culture of encounter. 

“We are living sacraments of the embrace between God’s riches and our poverty. We are witnesses of the abasement and the condescension of God who anticipates in love our every response. For this, harsh and divisive language does not befit the tongue of a pastor, it has no place in his heart; although it may momentarily seem to win the day, only the enduring allure of goodness and love remains truly convincing.”

In understanding that reality is more important than ideas, we have to take limitations – not least our own – seriously and learn how to work within them. This is the antidote to what the Pope calls, in his blunt way, the “aggression of idealism” or “pastoral autocracy”. This does not mean we have to simply surrender to our limitations, and sink deeper into the sofa. We should be clear where the signposts are, pointing to the path we are to try to follow, discerning the next steps and walking, as best we can, together with others who are making the journey.

A third key perspective of Francis is that before the mystery of God nothing is too big and nothing is too small. We should not turn away from the radical demands of the Gospel – and its unfolding in practice – which always seem unrealistic. But nor should we disdain  the simplest of gestures, which often give expression to the greatest of truths.

The art of accompaniment and discernment is the art of learning to recognise our limits and to embrace our desires. It takes humility to recognise our limitations, to let go of the last vestiges of seeing myself as a hero and to acknowledge that I stand in need, constantly, of forgiveness, especially from those who love me most. And we also have to embrace our deepest desires: that pervading longing to be better, the lingering hope of holiness; the marvellous moments when we catch a glimpse, through the clouds of our everyday lives, of the bright horizon of our hopes and dreams, and everything again seems possible.

This takes us right through to the moment of death, for which life is a trial run. Cardinal Basil Hume expressed this lasting power of faith and hope beautifully. As he was facing death, he said he felt a little like he was sitting in the front row of the stalls, waiting for the curtain to go up.

Francis seems to be inviting us to learn to give deep respect to the reality of life, to recognise the limits of the possibilities open to us at each point. Day by day, we are to seek to deepen our desire for goodness, for conversion, for closeness to the Lord. Gradually we learn how to discern the next step in response to God’s mercy, and how to see the longer and challenging pathway we are to take. This can only be done if we give it time, if we are in tune with the Spirit through prayer.

This is the wisdom of the reform that Pope Francis is laying before us, with persistence and patience. He is remarkable. He is our shepherd and he is to be lovingly followed.

GNOSTIC GOD

                                          The Gnostic God

There is an old saying: “God is forgiving; Nature, not so much.” Nature can, indeed, be very unforgiving.

This is likely why Gnostics, ancient and modern, have always opposed the God of the Old Testament. The God of the Old Testament created Nature and promulgated the Law. He doesn’t let me do what I want without consequences. He’s the God who created human beings male and female and told them to be fruitful and multiply; the God who warned human beings that, although their freedom was wide-ranging, this freedom had to stop short of trying to take control over good and evil. Humans should not seek to “become like God” and try to create “good” and “evil.” Their calling is, rather, to discover the goodness inherent in the world God created and act accordingly; not presuming to try “make” something good “because I say so.”

The problem with “values clarification” is that it suggests things in the world have the value I give them. But if that’s true, then the reverse must also be true. If I don’t “value” something, it has no value. This mistake is just as easily made, depending on the ideology of the individual, about old-growth forests as it is about unborn children. If I choose to “value” it, it can continue to exist. If I don’t, then it’s acceptable to clear-cut the one or terminate the other. People increasingly feel convinced that governments exist precisely to “free” us in this way to set aside the constraints of Nature, so my act of personal will can take its place.

For similar reasons, many people prefer the Gnostic god of “spirituality” to the bothersome Old Testament Creator-God of Nature and the Moral Law. And yet is the rule of this “god” better, especially for the poor, the weak, the widow, and orphan? How well are these cared for by the engines of laissez-faire capitalism or the modern bureaucratic state? How well are they faring under the regime of lifestyle liberalism?

I suggest that we can learn a great deal about contemporary Gnostics by examining their earlier forebears. Ancient Gnostics, thinking the body unimportant and valuing only the “spirit,” often engaged in stringent punishment of their bodies. Their modern counterparts often engage in similarly stringent diets of a specificity and relentless rigor that makes the simple Catholic Lenten fast look like a banquet.

                                    Among ancient Gnostics, those who had attained higher levels of spiritual “knowing” (gnosis) and whose ascetic practices had honed their bodies into perfect temples of “the spirit,” were an “elite” who could look with a sad disdain at the great unwashed, those still tied to bodies and matter and Nature. There were among “the many,” those who also wished to be among, or at least be associated with, these elite “knowing” ones, so they devoted themselves to the study of their oftentimes bizarre, rarely reasonable ruminations and proclamations.

The similarities to certain parts of the Christian message was precisely what made ancient forms of Gnosticism so dangerous, and why the early Church Fathers spent so much of their energy arguing against them, carefully clarifying how orthodox Christianity differed from what these Gnostics were selling.

Of the many fronts in this battle, the first was to insist that Christ was both the Word made flesh and the Word through whom God created the world; that the God of the New Testament could not be separated from the God of the Old; and that the “spiritual” teaching of the Sermon on the Mount could not be separated from the moral law of Mount Sinai. All of these were expressions of one divine will.

Moreover, the way the Church Fathers chose to enter the struggle with the spiritual elite who claimed to be the bearers of a greater “knowing” was with solid arguments – with logic (from the Greek logos). As Pope Benedict XVI often emphasized, it was not without reason (literally) that God revealed Himself in the Gospel as the Logos, as the ultimate ground of reason.

The Fathers did not battle the Gnostics by trying to “one-up” their sentimental appeals; they formulated the best arguments they could muster, and in doing so became the true heirs of the best Greek and Roman philosophers. The patrimony of Aristotle, Plato, and Cicero lived on in Fathers like Basil of Caesarea, Gregory of Nazianzus, and Augustine of Hippo. And having preached the words, the Fathers showed their truth by acting in integrity with them – to the point of being willing to give their lives in witness to it.

What sort of formation do we owe our young people today to counter the many purveyors of modern Gnosticism? May I suggest it should be like the one offered by the Church Fathers. It should be devoted to explicating the goodness of creation, showing how the sacramental character of material things allows them to realize their true nature as instruments of God’s selfless love. So too it should renew our appreciation of the “natural law” as revealed in and through the Decalogue. And it should affirm, in union with the Fathers and Popes John Paul II and Benedict XVI, the importance of human reason and logic.

Can we not now see how defenseless we have left the young, having stripped from Catholic education regular courses in the Philosophy of Nature, the natural law, and logic, in favor of “soft” courses in “Religion and Spirituality”? It has left us a generation “lost in the cosmos,” as novelist Walker Percy called it, having no natural place, not even in our own bodies, no longer capable of discourse or dialectic: disembodied ghosts without a meaningful world or words.

In a virtual world dominated by Facebook fantasies and internet illusions, Christian parents and educators should promise young people nothing less than a true encounter with full-bodied reality. Anything less would be just another media gimmick, unworthy of the Word made flesh.

© 

MAN-WOMAN STATUS

Pope: "Man and woman are not equal, but neither is superior to the other"

In his homily at Casa Santa Marta, Pope Francis recalled the Book of Genesis, and emphasized that woman brings a new element to Creation: harmony. He explained that man and woman are not equal, but neither is superior to the other.

FRANCISCO

"A woman is harmony, is poetry, is beauty. Without her the world would not be so beautiful, it would not be harmonious. And I like to think – but this is a personal thing – that God created women so that we would all have a mother.”

The Pope also denounced that hurting a woman is not just a crime, but it also destroys the harmony of the world.

SUMMARY OF PAPAL HOMILY IN ENGLISH

(Source: Vatican Radio)

"When women are not there, harmony is missing. We might say: But this is a society with a strong masculine attitude, and this is the case, no? The woman is missing. ‘Yes, yes: the woman is there to wash the dishes, to do things…’ No, no, no! The woman is there to bring harmony. Without the woman there is no harmony. They are not equal; one is not superior to the other: no. It’s just that the man does not bring harmony. It’s her. It is she who brings that harmony that teaches us to caress, to love with tenderness; and who makes the world a beautiful place.” And they looked at me, they looked me in the eyes – I’ll never forget those eyes, eh? – then they turned and they told me, both together: ‘We are in love.’ After 60 years, this means ‘one flesh.’ And this is what the woman brings: the capacity to love one another. Harmony for the world. Often we hear: ‘No, it is necessary in this society, in this institution, that here there should be a woman because she does this, she does these things.’ No, no, no, no! Functionality is not the purpose of women. It is true that women should do things, to do things as we all do. The purpose of women is to make harmony, and without women there is no harmony in the world. Exploiting persons is a crime of ‘lèse-humanité’: it’s true. But exploiting a woman is even more serious: it is destroying the harmony that God has chosen to give to the world. It is to destroy.”        

This is the great gift of God: He has given us woman. And in the Gospel, we have heard what a woman is capable of, eh? She is courageous, that one, eh? She went forward with courage. But there is more, so much more. A woman is harmony, is poetry, is beauty. Without her the world would not be so beautiful, it would not be harmonious. And I like to think – but this is a personal thing – that God created women so that we would all have a mother. 

MARY AND OUR INNER SELVES

MARY AND OUR INNER SELVES

She is the Madonna of the Streets, the Madonna of the Refugees, the Madonna of the Ghetto. But she is also

Our Lady of Carmel, Knock and Walsingham, not to mention Guadalupe, Lourdes and Fatima. She is in

short our maternal guide from the trials of Earth to the everlasting happiness of Heaven

LADY of Lourdes is praying,

halfway up the stairs. At the end         

of my daughter’s bookshelf the

Immaculate Conception dispenses

benedictions. When my daughter gets bored

by Mass, she revives with talk of Mary. After

all, I say, Mary is only human; she is easy to

understand. She has become Our Lady of

Homework, Our Lady of Sleeping Alone in

the Dark.

In the past two millennia she has been taken

a long way from the woman of Nazareth. After

the birth, the death, the Resurrection, she

became a kind of triage nurse in the hinterland

between Heaven and Earth, speeding some

closer to God, dispensing mercy, appearing

and disappearing at critical moments in our

history. She first appeared before she was

even dead, to St James in Saragossa. Since

then it has been a centuries-long curtain call

as she does that thing we need so badly: she

finds us where we are at.

WHEREVER SHE appears – Guadalupe,

Lourdes, Fatima – she talks the talk of the

natives; she trades in their signs and symbols

(in Mexico, for example, she wore the Aztec

maternity belt to show she was pregnant).

Over the centuries, Mary of Nazareth has

gone native in countless countries. She is Our

Lady of Carmel, Knock and Walsingham. In

one early twentieth-century painting she is

even the Madonna of the Prairie, driving a

covered wagon, the shape of the tarpaulin

creating a halo around her head. Wherever

she is, she is the fearless missionary entering

dangerous territory, donning the clothes of

the country until she can say: “Do you know

who I am?”

Psychologists have noted that when empathetic

people converse they adopt, very subtly,     

the accent of the person they are talking to.

It is Mary’s ability to be like us that is the most

extreme empathy we can know here on Earth:

Madonna of the Streets, Madonna of the

Refugees, Madonna of the Ghetto.

But do we risk making a Barbie doll of the

woman of Nazareth, with an outfit for any

occasion? In southern Italy, during religious

processions, more than once giant statues of

Our Lady have paused outside the home of

a Mafia boss, and the Mother of God is made

to bow. The Mafia’s perversion of religion is

well known; at times like that the Madonna

becomes a puppet in their hands. Indeed, her

undiluted humanity and femininity leave her

vulnerable to all of us. It has become almost

the norm to paint her like a doll. But we risk

ignoring the real message that she bears.

When I taught catechism, the eight-year olds

in my class loved talk of Mary – she was

the mother who did not deal in rules and fear;

she was nothing to do with confession and

commandments. She is La

Madonnina (“the little

Madonna”) to children here

in Italy. When May came

around, I told them the tale

of Fatima and they were

enthralled. Until I got to the

bit where Mary showed the

children a vision of hell. Hell.                               

You would think the word had           

never been spoken aloud. They                                                        

actually jumped in their seats.

My co-teacher gave me a dark look and steered

the discussion away.

BUT WARNING, reparation and penance are

the fundamental messages contained in credible

Marian apparitions. And, at Fatima in

particular, the existence of hell. For Mary is

no puppet and no doll.

It is almost 100 years since those strange

happenings at Cova da Iria that we are not

required to believe. But it is hard not to believe

Sr Lucia’s testimony. The vision of hell was

so terrifying that the 10-year-old Lucia yelled

aloud; people in neighbouring fields reported

hearing that cry.

What the children saw were flames, people

burning and black demons. But even if we

don’t believe in this depiction of the Inferno

as literal, we must remember that God always

brings us truths in images that we, or a child

of 10, can understand.

It may be that fewer people in the Western

world believe in God these days than at any

point in history, and even fewer believe in

hell. Which is ironic, as glimpses of hell are

everywhere – in war, pornography and self harm,

to name just a few. And children are

far more likely to encounter images of these

hells than ever before. For even if they are

not seeing horror and pornography on their

smartphones, their friends are and it is becoming

playground banter. This may sound bleak,

but it gives Mary her greatest opportunity.

IT HAS OFTEN struck me as I recite the Rosary

how those repetitive words must shape our

psyche. These days, when we have ever greater

access to appalling and potentially desensitising

images of cruelty, these kinds of prayers

are even more essential. They form the brain

with truth and beauty; we can make those

images outnumber and neutralise the ugly.

After all, what we put into ourselves on a

regular basis becomes what

we are. This is not to reduce

the power of the supernatural

in prayer – it is about enabling

our brains to receive it and let

it grow.

We are familiar with John

the Evangelist taking Mary

into his home after the

Crucifixion. But Benedict XVI

has illuminated this English

translation with a truer sense

of the original Greek: John is described as

taking Mary into his inner life, his inner being.

This is far from simply giving her a bed in the

spare room. This is yielding to her and becoming

like her; she understands us but in turn

we are asked to absorb her utterly.

Within ourselves she might tread through

selfishness, unbelief or hopelessness – all

cracks into which darkness can pour. That is

why we should pause often in this tinselly

season to recognise her almost incredible feminine

power and to say, as often as we possibly

can, “Hail Mary …” If we do so, we will be

better able to try and achieve the courage of

her fiat and her unsurpassable strength and

patience in prayer, as the life of her child

unfolded, ended and began again.

 “It is Mary’s ability

to be like us that

is the most

extreme empathy

we can know

here on Earth”