It is quite exciting to consider
Pope Francis’ centering on the family now as the mainspring for a global
revolution when you put it together with St. Josemaria Escriva’s central
observation that there is a quid divinum
to be found in the most ordinary circumstances and it is up to us to find it.
That is, it is not a case of looking for a center of power to occupy in order to do great
things for God and man, but rather to begin to make the gift of oneself in the
daily grind in the unspectacular and humdrum of secular life.
Notice how this plays out in the thought of
Pope Francis. On the occasion of the Jubilee of the year 2,000, he issued (as
archbishop) “a rallying cry for Argentina “to recover ‘the adventure of anew
nation’ and to be reborn in the promise of the pioneers who began our fatherland.’
That meant, he said, restoring social bonds and solidarity, and reaching out to
the young, the jobless, the migrants and the elderly. He again pointed to the
growth in community organizations as a sign of hope, and called on the
politicians to ‘make the community the protagonist.’ But he presented the grim
image – the prophetic, as it turned out - of a people profoundly disillusioned
with their self-referential politicians, incapable of generating the solidarity
needed for a functioning democracy.
In the
interview with Anthony Spadaro S.J., Pope Francis offered the following
profundity: “God manifests himself in
historical revelation, in history. Time initiates processes, and space
crystallizes them. God is in history, in the processes.
“We
must not focus on occupying the spaces where power is exercised, but rather on
starting long-run historical processes. We must initiate processes rather than
occupy spaces. God manifests himself in time and is present in the processes of
history. This gives priority to actions that give birth to new historical
dynamics. And it requires patience, waiting.
“Finding God
in all things is not an ‘empirical eureka.’ When we desire to encounter God, we would like
to verify him immediately by an empirical method. But you cannot meet God this
way. God is found in the gentle breeze perceived by Elijah. The senses that
find God are the ones St. Ignatius called spiritual senses. Ignatius asks us to
open our spiritual sensitivity to encounter God beyond a purely empirical
approach. A contemplative attitude is necessary: it is the feeling that you are
moving along the good path of understanding and affection toward things and
situations. Profound peace, spiritual consolation, love of God and love of all
things in God—this is the sign that you are on this right path.”[1]
The point being that the quid
divinum is the family as the incubator and communion where human
persons are generated, nourished and formed. When speaking of Argentina as
country in the year 2000, he said that “We need to recognize, with humility, that
the system has fallen into a borad umbral cone, into the shadow lands of
distrust, in which many of the promises and statements sound like a funeral
cortege. Everyone consoles the bereaved, but nobody resurrects the corpse. Get
up! This is the call of Jesus in the Jubilee. Arise, Argentina! As the Holy
Father (John Paul II) said to us on his last visit, and as our pioneers and
foundrs dreamed. But until we face up to the duplibity of our motives there
will be neither trust nor peace. Until we are converted, we will not know
happiness and joy. Because unchecked ambiton, whether for power, money, or
popularity, expresses only a great interior emptiness. And those who are empty
do not generate peace, joy, and hope, only suspicion. They do not create bonds.”[2]
Hence, just before the opening of the Synod, he referred to the family as “a new alliance of man and woman [that]
becomes not only necessary but also strategic for the emancipation of people
from the colonization of money. This alliance must return to orientate
politics, the economy and civil coexistence! It decides the habitability of the
earth, the transmission of the meaning of life, the bonds of memory and of hope.
Of this alliance, the conjugal-family community of man and woman is the generative
grammar, the “golden bond….” – the transformative power of the
new civilization of love.
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