Francis
How do you
see the laity in Argentina?
As I have
said before, there is a problem: the temptation to clericalism. We priests tend
to clericalize the laity. We do not realize it, but it is as if we infect them
with our own thing. And the laity – not all but many – ask us on their knees to
clericalize them, because it is more comfortable to be an altar boy than the
protagonist of a lay path. We must not enter into that trap, it is a sinful
complicity. Neither clericalize nor ask to be clericalized. The layman is a
layman and has to live as a layman with the strength of his baptism, which
enable shim to be a leaven of the love of God in society itself, to create and
sow hope, to proclaim the faith, not from a pulpit but from his everyday life.
And by carrying his daily cross as all of us do. And this is the cross of the
layman, not that of the priest. Let the priest carry the cross of the priest,
since God gave him a broad enough shoulder for this.”
“What I Would Have Said At
The Consistory” (Interview: 30 Days)
This is valid also for lay people…
BERGOGLIO: Their clericalization is a problem. The priests
clericalize
the laity and the laity beg us to be clericalized… It really is
sinful abetment.
And to think that baptism alone could suffice. I’m thinking of
those
Christian communities in Japan that remained without priests for
more than
two hundred years. When the missionaries returned they found them
all
baptized, all validly married for the Church and all their dead
had had a
Catholic funeral. The faith had remained intact through the gifts
of grace
that had gladdened the life of a laity who had received only
baptism and had
also lived their apostolic mission in virtue of baptism alone. One
must not be
afraid of depending only on His tenderness… Do you know the
biblical
episode of the prophet Jonah?
I don’t remember it. Tell us.
BERGOGLIO: Jonah had everything clear. He had clear ideas about
God, very clear ideas about good and evil. On what God does and on
what
He wants, on who was faithful to the Covenant and who instead was
outside
the Covenant. He had the recipe for being a good prophet. God
broke into
his life like a torrent. He sent him to Nineveh. Nineveh was the
symbol of all
the separated, the lost, of all the peripheries of humanity. Of
all those who
are outside, forlorn. Jonah saw that the task set on him was only
to tell all
those people that the arms of God were still open, that the
patience of God
was there and waiting, to heal them with His forgiveness and
nourish them
with His tenderness. Only for that had God sent him. He sent him
to
Nineveh, but he instead ran off in the opposite direction, toward
Tarsis.
Running away from a difficult mission…
BERGOGLIO: No. What he was fleeing was not so much Nineveh as he boundless love of God for those people. It was that that
didn’t come into his plans. God had come once… “and I’ll see to the rest”: that’s
what Jonah told himself. He wanted to do things his way, he wanted to steer
it all. His
stubbornness shut him in his own structures of evaluation, in his
preordained methods, in his righteous opinions. He had fenced his soul off with
the barbed wire of those certainties that instead of giving freedom with God and
opening horizons of greater service to others had finished by deafening his
heart. How the isolated conscience hardens the heart! Jonah no longer knew that
God leads His people with the heart of a Father.
A great many of us can identify with Jonah.
BERGOGLIO: Our certainties can become a wall, a jail that
imprisons the Holy Spirit. Those who isolate their conscience from the path
of the people of God don’t know the joy of the Holy Spirit that sustains
hope. That is the risk run by the isolated conscience. Of those who from the
closed
world of their Tarsis complain about everything or, feeling their
identity
threatened, launch themselves into battles only in the end to be
still more
self-concerned and self-referential.
What should one do?
BERGOGLIO: Look at our people not for what it should be but for
what it is and see what is necessary. Without preconceptions and
recipes but
with generous openness. For the wounds and the frailty God spoke. Allowing
the Lord to speak… In a world that we can’t manage to interest
with the
words we say, only His presence that loves us, saves us, can be of
interest.
The apostolic fervor renews itself in order to testify to Him who
has loved us
from the beginning.
For you, then, what is the worst thing that can
happen in the
Church?
BERGOGLIO: It is what De Lubac calls “spiritual worldliness”. It
is the
greatest danger for the Church, for us, who are in the Church. “It
is worse”,
says De Lubac, “more disastrous than the infamous leprosy that
disfigured
the dearly beloved Bride at the time of the libertine popes”.
Spiritual
worldliness is putting oneself at the center. It is what Jesus saw
going on
among the Pharisees: “… You who glorify yourselves. Who give glory
to
yourselves, the ones to the others”.
* * * * * * * * * *
Benedict XVI: Assisi (October
2011)
(…)
“The absence of God
leads to the decline of man and of humanity. But where is God? Do we know him,
and can we show him anew to humanity, in order to build true peace? Let us
first briefly summarize our considerations thus far. I said that there is a way
of understanding and using religion so that it becomes a source of violence,
while the rightly lived relationship of man to God is a force for peace. In this
context I referred to the need for dialogue and I spoke of the constant need
for purification of lived religion. On the other hand I said that the denial of
God corrupts man, robs him of his criteria and leads him to violence.
In addition to the two phenomena
of religion and anti-religion, a further basic orientation is found in the
growing world of agnosticism: people to whom the gift of faith has not been
given, but who are nevertheless on the lookout for truth, searching for God.
Such people do not simply assert: “There is no God”. They suffer from his
absence and yet are inwardly making their way towards him, inasmuch as they
seek truth and goodness. They are “pilgrims of truth, pilgrims of peace”. They
ask questions of both sides. They take away from militant atheists the false
certainty by which these claim to know that there is no God and they invite
them to leave polemics aside and to become seekers who do not give up hope in
the existence of truth and in the possibility and necessity of living by it.
But they also challenge the followers of religions not to consider God as their
own property, as if he belonged to them, in such a way that they feel
vindicated in using force against others. These people are seeking the truth,
they are seeking the true God, whose image is frequently concealed in the
religions because of the ways in which they are often practised. Their
inability to find God is partly the responsibility of believers with a limited
or even falsified image of God. So all their struggling and questioning is in
part an appeal to believers to purify their faith, so that God, the true God,
becomes accessible. Therefore I have consciously invited delegates of this
third group to our meeting in Assisi
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