Dear Friends,
I am taking a quick vacation to visit friends who live in Alaska. I will be gone for one week and will keep you in my prayers. In the mean time, I will allow Pope Francis to use my Pastor’s letter space to teach you. The following comments and those for next week come from his recent trip to Poland. They were a part of a question and answer time he had with the bishops of Poland.
The question: “Holy Father, it seems that the faithful of the Catholic Church, and more generally all Christians in Western Europe, increasingly find themselves a minority in the midst of a modern, godless, liberal culture. In Poland, we are witnessing a profound clash, an enormous struggle, between faith in God on the one hand, and on the other a way of thinking and acting as if God did not exist. According to you, Holy Father, what kind of pastoral activity should the Catholic Church in our country undertake, so that the Polish people can remain faithful to its more than 1000-year-old Christian tradition? Thank you.”
Pope Francis:
True, the dechristianization, the secularization of the modern world is powerful, very powerful…I believe that in this highly secularized world we have also the other danger, that of a gnostic spiritualization. Secularization makes it possible for us to indulge in a spiritual life which is a little gnostic…it consists in a subjective spirituality, without Christ. For me the bigger problem with secularization is dechristianization: removing Christ, removing the Son.
This is gnosticism…To find God without Christ. God but not Christ, people but not Church. Why? Because the Church is a Mother, who gives you life, and Christ is our older brother, the Son of the Father, completely oriented to the Father, who reveals the Father’s name. A Church of orphans: today’s gnosticism, inasmuch as it is a dechristianization, lacking Christ, leads to a Church, or better, to Christians, becoming a people of orphans. We have to make our people see this.
What would I advise? Today we, the Lord’s servants – bishops, priests, consecrated persons and committed laypeople – need to be close to God’s people. Without closeness, there are only disembodied words. Let us think – I like to reflect on this – of the two pillars of the Gospel. What are the two pillars of the Gospel? The Beatitudes and Matthew 25, the “criteria” on which all of us will be judged. Concreteness, closeness, touching, the corporal and spiritual works of mercy…there is Jesus, who was always with people, with the disciples, or alone with the Father in prayer. Closeness. Touching. This is Jesus’ life…when he was moved, at the gates of the city of Nain, he went over to touch the bier saying: “Do not weep…” Closeness. It is closeness to touch the suffering flesh of Christ. The Church, the glory of the Church, is of course the martyrs, but also all those men and women who left everything to spend their lives in hospitals and schools, with children and with the sick…
I remember in Central Africa, an elderly Sister with a little girl came to greet me. “I’m not from here, but from the other part of the river, from Congo, but once a week I come here to shop because it is easier”. She told me that she was 83 or 84 years old. “I’ve been here for 23 years, I’m an obstetric nurse and I have delivered two or three thousand babies…” “And you come here alone?” “Yes, we take the canoe…” At 83 years of age! With the canoe, it took her about an hour to get there. This woman – and many others like her – left home (she was an Italian, from Brescia) to touch the flesh of Christ. The works of mercy: to touch, to teach, to console, to “waste time”…
There is one last thing I would emphasize, because I believe that the Lord asks it of me: grandparents, the elderly…The elderly possess the memory of a people; they preserve the memory of the faith, the memory of the Church. Don’t waste the elderly! In this throwaway culture, dechristianized as it is, we discard whatever is not useful or helpful. No! The elderly are the memory of a people; they are the memory of the faith. To connect young people with the elderly: this too is closeness. To be close and to build closeness.
That is how I would respond to the question. There are no easy answers, but we have to get our hands dirty. If we wait for the doorbell to ring, or for people to knock on the door… No, we have to go out and seek, like the shepherd who goes out to seek the lost sheep. Anyway, that’s what I think…”
Peace,
Fr. Damian