On 22nd January Pope Francis gave a wide ranging interview to the El País newspaper which, while it might have said nothing new was very interesting in the way it encapsulated many of the concerns of the Holy Father. While touching on many themes, he once again called on Catholics to be truly evangelical, indeed flagging the great importance of evangelical spirit among the faithful. When asked: “What are your main concerns with regard to the Church and the world in general?” he replied as follows:
With regard to the Church, I would say that I hope that it never stops being close. Close to the people. Proximity. A Church that is not close is not a Church. It’s a good NGO. Or a good and pious organization made up of good people that does good, meets for tea and work in charity…. The hallmark of the Church is its proximity, being close siblings. We all are the Church. Therefore, the problem we should avoid is breaking that closeness. Closeness among everyone. Being close is touching, touching Christ in flesh and blood through your neighbour. When Jesus tells us how are we going to be judged, in Matthew chapter 25, he always talks about reaching to your neighbour: I was hungry, I was in prison, I was sick…. Always being close to the needs of your neighbour. Which is not just charity. It is much more.
Of course Pope Francis has been repeating the same message ad nauseum, and dedicated a whole encyclical to this, and yet one might be forgiven for thinking that the message was not getting through to the faithful, or that this pressing calls to arms from the Vicar of Christ has become lost in the din around what the Pope has or has not said in Amoris Laetitia chapter 8, or what the Pope may or may not have said to journalists on plane journeys throughout the world (and in fact probably did NOT say given the media’s unerring gift for misquoting him (see www.christianpost.com/news/7-times-pope-francis-was-misquoted-132679/ for some telling examples).
While most Catholics must be very happy with the promptness with which President Trump has defunded Planned Parenthood, there is a danger in our putting too much store in the actions of a political leader. In the same interview, when asked about the inauguration of President Trump, the Pope pointed out that in times of crisis human beings are more liable to fall for charismatic leaders who promise much but then don’t deliver:
… the case of Germany in 1933 is typical, a people who were immersed in a crisis, who were searching for their identity until this charismatic leader came and promised to give their identity back, and he gave them a distorted identity, and we all know what happened. Where there is no conversation… Can borders be controlled? Yes, each country has the right to control its borders, who comes in and who goes out, and those countries at risk – from terrorism or such things – have even more of a right to control them, but no country has the right to deprive its citizens of the possibility to talk with their neighbours.
And no, Pope Francis did not draw a comparison between Trump and Hitler (despite what some silly headlines said). With an abundance of common sense he said that it would be premature to assail him either as a messiah or as a disaster:
I think that we must wait and see. I don’t like to get ahead of myself nor judge people prematurely. We will see how he acts, what he does, and then I will have an opinion. But being afraid or rejoicing beforehand because of something that might happen is, in my view, quite unwise. It would be like prophets predicting calamities or windfalls that will not happen.
Besides, the Pope pointed out, it is the saints who are the true saviours of history:
The history of the Church has not been driven by theologians, or
priests, or nuns, or bishops…. Maybe in part, but the true heroes of the Church are the saints. That is, those men and women that devoted their lives to make the Gospel a reality. Those are the ones that have saved us: the saints.
We should not be waiting for saviour presidents, saviour Popes, or saviour bishops to sort out the mess of our age. Each Christian, the Pope keeps reminding us, is to be a saviour. Each one of us is called to evangelise the flesh and blood persons we encounter each day, and this is what Pope Francis has been repeating since the outset of his papacy, and in a particular way in the encyclical Evangelii Gaudium:
“On the lips of the catechist the first proclamation must ring out over and over: “Jesus Christ loves you; he gave his life to save you; and now he is living at your side every day to enlighten, strengthen, and free you.” This first proclamation is called “first” not because it exists at the beginning and can then be forgotten or replaced by other more important things. It is first in a qualitative sense because it is the principal proclamation, the one which we must hear again and again in different ways, the one which we must announce one way or another throughout the process of catechesis, at every level and moment (Evangelii Gaudium 164).
In the El País interview Pope Francis points out that he takes this call to evangelisation largely from Pope Paul VI:
Evangelii Gaudium, which frames the pastoral principles that I want for the Church, is an update of Paul VI’s Evangelii Nuntiandi. He is a man who was ahead of history. And he suffered a lot. He was a martyr. There were many things that he wasn’t able to do, he was a realistic person and he knew that he wasn’t able and he suffered for it, but he offered his suffering. He did what he could. And the best thing that he did was planting the seeds. The seeds of things that history collected afterwards. Evangelii Gaudium is a mix of Evangelii Nuntiandi and the Aparecida document.
In the light of this call to evangelise (the call to kerygma we might say), it would be a terrible pity if the Amoris Laetitia controversy were to lead us to get distracted by a doctrinal matter which really must be left to ecclesiastical leaders and theologians to examine. This issue, and others like it, may be important in their own right but they cannot be an excuse for failing to heed the call, made so clearly and insistently by the Holy Father, to engage in a full-blooded work of evangelising the world in which we live.