Among the commentaries that have come out on the occasion of the second anniversary of the Bergoglio Pontificate, this one took a rather different tack, even if his conclusions about this Pope and his Pontificate mirror those of most orthodox Catholics. I would have added a parenthetical to his title '(scolding them yet again'), since in his March 13, 2015, homily announcing the Holy Year of Mercy, JMB saw fit to intone "No one can be excluded from the Church" fallaciously and needlessly (because it is in no one's capacity to do so).
But the statement appeared to be pointedly directed at those whom he wrongly accuses of wishing to exclude others from the Church (not that they can do so), just because they believe the Church should not lift the communion ban on persons living in a chronic state of sin or actively encouraging mortal sin like abortion. A none-too-subtle bit of stagecraft by JMB with a view to the family synod in October, at which he still hopes to get synodal consensus behind his 'communion for everyone' bedrock conviction.
To equate the orthodox insistence on sacramental discipline to excluding anyone from the Church is sheer, perverse and uncharitable bias unworthy of the pope. But why should I be surprised when his Casa Santa Marta homilettes are often verbal illustrations of lack of charity, compassion, and yes, mercy, for those Catholics he dislikes or disapproves of? (He never targets non-Catholics, of course.)
Pope Francis enters his third year
of scolding introverts...
BY NICHOLAS FRANKOVICH
Deputy Managing Editor
March 13, 2015
He preaches mercy for everyone except them, when the Church needs them more than ever.
‘I want the Church to go out into the streets,” Pope Francis told a cheering crowd gathered for World Youth Day in Rio de Janeiro in July 2013, four months after he was elected pope. “
¡Hagan lío!” he exhorted them, in the spirit of creative destruction: Make a mess! Take care, he added, not to become “closed in on” yourselves. On other occasions, he has urged priests to leave “the stale air of closed rooms” and has characterized traditional Catholics as “self-absorbed.”
An extrovert, Francis attaches a positive moral value to extroversion — and, as if it followed, by some logical necessity, a negative moral value to extroversion’s complement, introversion. “Pope Francis has said that he does not want a church that is introverted,” Monsignor M. Francis Mannion, describing the pope’s “achievements,” explained bluntly last July in an article for the Catholic News Agency.
[I have remarked more than once on the contradictions inherent in JMB/PF's facile carrying on about the Church being 'closed in on herself' (The Church has never been so - otherwise, she would never have spread worldwide)and 'self-referential' (he means this as the Church being too obsessed about her affairs - but she ought to be, because the Church ought to be run well, as JMB/PF himself is seeking to achieve through his structural reforms - and she ought to look after her own members, making sure they know the doctrinal essentials and orthodox practice of the faith, re-evangelizing nominal and lapsed Catholics even as she seeks to evangelize non-Catholics); and his indiscriminate obsession with 'going out to the peripheries' (he means this primarily for bishops and priests, but if everyone went to the peripheries - and he primarily means the geographical peripheries of a parish, a diocese, or the attention map of the media and the world - what happens to those left behind? It's not as if, in today's context, the faithful at 'the center' did not need as much spiritual care as those at the peripheries. That is the fundamental fallacy of the 'peripheries' fixation: it divides the faithful into favored and less favored classes - just like the fallacy of the Bergoglian 'gospel of poverty' in which he makes it appear that Jesus came to earth only for the materially poor, and therefore his present vicar on earth would consign all the non-poor (like all those who are not at the peripheries or margins of society) to an ecclesial limbo in which neither their Pope nor his bishops and priests ought to spare them any attention other than to use them as scapegoats for all the miseries of 'the poor'.]
Two weeks later in the
Los Angeles Times, an admiring Amy Hubbard included in her list of lessons that we should take from Francis: “Do not be an introvert. That’s just putrid.”
[Whoever Ms. Hubbard is, is she saying that most of the great saints, the mystics and contemplatives are 'putrid'? And BTW, Jorge Mario Bergoglio did not exactly have a reputation for being the extrovert he now is when he was Archbishop of Buenos Aires. Was he putrid then? Or, if she is quoting from JMB himself, well, was the pot calling himself black?...]
“This is no century for introverts,” Kathleen Parker remarked on the occasion of Francis’s elevation to the papacy two years ago today. In our age, yes, “introversion — along with its cousins sensitivity, seriousness, and shyness — is now a second-class personality trait, somewhere between a disappointment and a pathology,” as Susan Cain writes in "Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can’t Stop Talking".
To “disappointment” and “pathology” we should add - if we follow Pope Francis on this question - “character flaw” and “moral failing.” More grandly than any other figure on the world stage today, Francis, entering the third year of his pontificate, exemplifies what Cain calls “the Extrovert Ideal”:
We like to believe that we value individuality, but all too often we admire one type of individual — the kind who’s comfortable “putting himself out there.” . . . Talkative people, for example, are rated as smarter, better-looking, more interesting, and more desirable as friends.
Velocity of speech counts as well as volume: we rank fast talkers as more competent and likable than slow ones. The same dynamics apply in groups, where research shows that the voluble are considered smarter than the reticent — even though there’s zero correlation between the gift of gab and good ideas.
In fairness to Pope Francis, we should remember that, though he is quick to chastise introverts, they have been quick to reciprocate. The primary reason that he disappoints many Catholics who delight in cultivating their interior life is
not that he leans left in his politics and theology but that he’s shallow or at least presents himself as such. He has little apparent interest in the life of the mind. He lacks the patience to think slowly. [That's one way to look at it. Personally, I think that he speaks out his mind so readily, volubly and seemingly recklessly, because his mind has been made up for quite some time about the things he says. His certitudes have all been locked into those grooves of his brain that his mind taps reflexively when the appropriate topic comes up, and the readymade thoughts gush forth as his now-all-too-familiar platitudes. He is simply articulating those certitudes as he has convinced himself about them over the years - incoherent, half-baked and/or fallacious as some of them may be (the ones that orthodox Catholics find issue with). He has said more than once since he became Pope that "I am too old to change, and I am not going to change now". We should take him at his word. That is the frightening aspect that no one must under-estimate about JMB and his Pontificate.]
Cain quotes a venture capitalist telling her, “I worry that there are people who are put in positions of authority because they’re good talkers, but they don’t have good ideas.” Bingo. Francis tends to speak in platitudes, sometimes strung together rhetorically when they don’t cohere logically.
Consider more closely his “Make a mess” speech at World Youth Day in 2013:
I want the Church to go out into the streets. I want us to defend ourselves against all worldliness, opposition to progress, from what is comfortable, from what is clericalism, from all that means being closed in on ourselves. Parishes, schools, institutions are made in order to go out. . . . If they do not do this, they become a non-governmental organization, and the Church must not be an NGO.
What a brain-bruising knot of contradictions: Go out into the streets — that is, the world — to defend yourself against worldliness. Church institutions must go out into the world! Many already do, such as Catholic Relief Services, arguably the Church’s premier NGO. If other Church institutions don’t do likewise, they’ll become NGOs. They must not become NGOs!
In the original Spanish, the key word in Francis’s phrase “what is comfortable” is
instalación, derived from medieval Latin. A “stall” was a fixed place, and “installation” was, and remains, an ecclesiastical term for the assignment of a prelate to his place — of a bishop, for example, to his
cathedra, or “chair.”
A bishop should be stable, like a tree, rooted in the soil of his diocese. Episcopal “absenteeism” (a bishop’s failure to reside in the diocese where he has his chair) was once common, but the Church has condemned it since the Council of Trent in the 16th century.
Francis himself has disparaged “airport bishops,” although in doing so he seems to contradict his message that the Church’s missionary (Latin: “sent out”) or apostolic (Greek: “sent out”) character is preeminent. The word “missionary,” of course, is now associated with colonialism and has fallen out of fashion. And “apostolic” sounds churchy and formal.
In contemporary Catholicism, the new word for the Extrovert Ideal is “evangelical,” as in “the New Evangelization.” You know the drill: Leave the fortress and sally forth into town. Drop that sourpuss, Counter-Reformation stance
contra mundum. Engage the world with a smile. Let’s dialogue. That’s the music, from circa 1965, to which the lyrics of the New Evangelization have been set.
The term originated during the pontificate of John Paul II, and Benedict XVI formally recognized the concept in 2010, when he created the Pontifical Council for the Promotion of the New Evangelization.
[Not that either Pope followed the 'lyrics' described in the previous paragraph!]
Benedict charged it with
“the specific task of promoting a renewed evangelization in countries where the first proclamation of the faith already resounded, and where Churches are present of ancient foundation, but which are going through a progressive secularization of society and a sort of ‘eclipse of the sense of God.’” It was a serious objective nobly articulated.
In the Francis era, sadly, the New Evangelization is sometimes made to sound like a program for shaming introverted Catholics into leaving their conversation with the Lord so they can go help in the kitchen. Concern with liturgy, for example, the public prayer of the Church, is dismissed as “the Church . . . being obsessed with itself.” Martha, Martha! Remember, Mary chose “the better part” and “the one thing necessary.”
Jesus’s teaching in Bethany stands in obvious creative tension, however, with his instruction to his disciples to go forth, teach all nations, and baptize them. All Christians are called to contribute to the Great Commission, but the nature of the contribution will vary from individual to individual, as the body of Christ has many members, each with a different function.
[In fact, one must ask where and how the New Evangelization is manifest at all in this Pontificate. For all the supposed evangelii gaudium preached by this Pope, has he made any special effort at all to re-evangelize the European countries that have been most de-Christianized, or for that matter, what has he done to further the 'continental mission' whose proclamation he was so proud to have drafted in Aparecida in 2007, when Catholics continue to leave the Church in Latin America by the millions? And what has he done to strengthen the Church's missionary efforts when he openly preaches that he does not want to convert anyone to Catholicism, and that all non-Catholic Christian denominations are just as valid as the 'one true Church' that Christ established? What we are getting instead is a New Secularization, in which the priorities of the Successor of Peter are secular utopian concerns like eliminating poverty, hunger and war, and dabbling in dubious climate-change ideology. And yes, in case anyone is interested about the 'church' he leads, rest assured he will make it all nice and easy for you, paint you a rose-colored, rose-scented world in which you literally never have to do anything but ask God's 'mercy' and you will have it. The devil exists, but there is no Last Judgment because God's infinite mercy means everyone will go to heaven and not have to do anything to earn it.]
“Are all apostles?” Saint Paul asks rhetorically
(1 Cor 12:29). Saint Thérèse of Lisieux wanted to “go forth” in the obvious way, by traveling to far-off lands where she could bring the good news to people who had never heard it. Her health prevented her, as did her religious superiors, but no problem: From her convent, she joined the work of the missionaries by praying for them. She did so at first as a Carmelite nun and does so now in her capacity as their patroness.
To the naïve observer, intercessory prayer appears to be a form of talking to oneself. Those who know better recognize that no act is more profoundly social, or other-directed. And no act requires more concentration, which usually benefits from apparent solitude — I say “apparent” because communion with God or the saints, whether still on earth or already in heaven, is the most extreme form of relatedness and intimacy.
[Exactly what Benedict XVI is doing - much more so now than before he retired because he no longer has to attend to the burdens of office.]
Concentration requires stillness as well, and hence the monastic virtue of
stabilitas, or stability not only in one’s moral and spiritual affairs but in the literal sense of standing still in one place. “Monastics have to become ‘lovers of the place,’” Sister Mary Catharine Perry, O.P., a cloistered nun, explained in her interview with Kathryn Jean Lopez earlier this week.
The Dominican sister belongs to a long line of holy and intentionally obscure individuals who have dedicated their lives to contemplative prayer, which supports the Church. To support them in return, the Church since at least the fourth century has set aside cloisters — from the Latin
claustra, meaning exactly “closed spaces.”
From the gospels, we know that Jesus in his own life integrated solitary prayer with the busyness of his public ministry. The pattern was for the former to precede the latter. He fasted in solitude for 40 days in the desert before beginning to preach. Before he gathered his disciples to choose from their number the Twelve, his inner circle, he spent the night in prayer on a mountain. Before the ordeal of his blood sacrifice of himself — his trial, torture, and crucifixion under Pontius Pilate — he spent the night in prayer in the Garden of Gethsemane.
Private prayer was never an add-on for Jesus; it was the foundation on which he built his most momentous undertakings. Prayer of that depth is the breath and the blood, the very life of the Church, which in the West, at least (Africa is a different story), is clearly winded and anemic.
I will go out on a limb and say that it’s not as palpably holy as it was for our grandparents. We may not be able to define holiness, but if you have ever felt its presence, you would know when it’s absent from places where and from occasions on which you had come to expect it.
The body of Christ needs among its members some reservoir of introversion if it is to create a culture — sacred architecture, sacred music, lectio divina — capable of expressing holiness, and if it is to sustain a congregation capable of slowing down long enough to discern it. Michelangelo, Gregory the Great, John of the Cross — these were not exactly party animals.
In our drive to conform to the Extrovert Ideal, the spiritual fruits of their labor have become invisible to us, inaudible, unintelligible.
Godspeed to Pope Francis in his mission to draw people to the Church — but not in his attempt to discourage those who are only laboring to keep the oil burning in the sanctuary lamp. The flame is guttering.
[And in churches where the tabernacle has been literally sidelined, probably they don't even bother to light the lamp! It just occurred to me - can the Pope not issue a universal directive that the tabernacle ought to be in the center of the main altar of any church or chapel and that the sanctuary lamp should always be lit? And compel all those who have sidelined the tabernacle as nothing more than an altar accessory to treat it as the repository of the Eucharist that should be there for anyone who wishes to pray, venerate and adore?]
[Modificato da TERESA BENEDETTA 19/03/2015 01:39]