I have begun a series of
posts digging into an amazing interview that Bergoglio gave in 2007 to the
international magazine 30 Days. In my first post I drew on an excerpt that spoke to his understanding of change in
order to suggest that there are substantive reasons to believe that he will
indeed be a pope who brings not only reform of the Curial bureaucracy but
reform doctrinally as well. This is not to say that he will be some sort of
anti-Benedict, but that he will be dramatically different.
In this respect I would
point to another section of the 30 Days
interview where Bergoglio draws on two stories, one from the biblical Jonah and
another from the experience of the church in Japan, to pointedly question the
clericalist direction of both the laity and the hierarchy. His reasoning
suggests a missional pope completely willing to upend the status quo if it is
coming between the mercy of God and the needs of the world. (The words in bold
are the interviewers)
I have told my
priests…:«If you can, rent a garage and, if you find some willing layman, let
him go there! Let him be with those people a bit, do a little catechesis and
even give communion if they ask him». A parish priest said to me: «But Father,
if we do this the people then won’t come to church». «But why?» I asked him: «Do
they come to mass now?» «No», he answered. And so! Coming out of oneself is
also coming out from the fenced garden of one’s own convictions, considered
irremovable, if they risk becoming an obstacle, if they close the horizon that
is also of God.
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.
BERGOGLIO: No.
What he was fleeing was not so much Nineveh as the 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 pre-ordained 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.
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