Right
from the start of his Petrine Ministry, Pope Francis has been on a full spree
of new juxtaposition of linguistic expressions, which are very thought
provoking and which certainly needs our attention. Those expressions are
concise, simple, conversational oratory, tethered to words or images of
immediate communicative impact. When we listen to him, in most cases he either
improvises the text or completely goes off-the-cuff, but always driving home
the point in his unique style totally unprecedented in the history of Church’s Petrine
Ministry.
Let’s analyze a few of them here below:
·
On 24th April 2013, in his
homily during the Holy Mass at Domus Sanctae Marthae, he said, “When the Church
wants to throw its weight around and sets up organizations, and sets up offices
and becomes a bit bureaucratic, the Church loses its principal substance and
runs the risk of turning itself into an NGO. And the Church is not an NGO. It is a love story.”
·
On April 18th 2013, he used the
expressions such as ‘God spray’ and
the confessional as the ‘dry cleaner’
to warn against the idea of an impersonal God.
·
On April 17th 2013, he used the
expression of “babysitter Church,”
to stigmatize a Church that only “takes care of children to put them to sleep,”
instead of acting as a mother with her children…and engage in Evangelization,
which is the fundamental dimension of the Church.
·
On April 22nd he used the
formula “satellite Christians,” to
brand those Christians who allow their conduct to be dictated by “common sense”
and by “worldly prudence,” instead of the dictates of Jesus.
·
We are aware of his usage of the
expression in his audience with all the country diplomats soon after his
election to papacy, where he spoke of ‘spiritual
poverty besides the material poverty’ and referred to the ‘secular relativism’
which was spoken by his predecessor Benedict XVI.
·
We are also aware of his earlier
expression [the day after he was elected… speaking to the Cardinals] quoting
the French writer Leon Bloy, ‘whoever does not pray to God, prays to the
devil’, and asserted saying, “when one
does not profess Jesus Christ, he/she professes the worldliness of the devil”.
·
In the homily for the Chrism Mass of Holy
Thursday, in St. Peter's Basilica, he made a very striking exhortation to the
pastors of the Church, bishops and priests, to take on “the odor of the sheep.”
·
On April 19th, in his morning
homily, he lashed out against the “great ideologists” who want to interpret
Jesus in a purely human vein. He called them “intellectuals without talent, ethicists
without goodness. And of beauty we will not speak, because they do not
understand anything.”
·
On April 12th, speaking to the
pontifical biblical commission, Pope Francis reiterated that “the
interpretation of the Sacred Scriptures cannot be solely an individual
scholarly effort, but must always be compared with, inserted within, and
authenticated by the living tradition of
the Church.” And therefore “this entails the insufficiency of any
interpretation that is subjective or simply limited to an analysis incapable of
accommodating within itself that overarching sense which over the course of the
centuries has constituted the tradition of the whole people of God.”
·
On April 22nd, in another
morning homily, he said forcefully that Jesus
is “the only gate” for entering into the Kingdom of God and “all the other
paths are deceptive, they are not true, they are false.”
·
On April 23rd, the feast of St.
George, in the homily of the Mass with the cardinals in the Pauline Chapel, he
said that “the Christian identity is a
belonging to the Church, because to find Jesus outside of the Church is not
possible.” And how different it is from the famous quote, “extra Ecclesiam nulla salus,"?
·
And during the conclave to elect the
successor to Pope Benedict XVI, he spoke to the Cardinals using the expression ‘spiritual worldliness’ so as to
caution the Church from becoming self-referential. During the same talk, he
spoke of Christ as the sun and Church as the moon, and that the moon only
reflects the light that it receives from the sun. He went on to say that he
preferred a Church which is wounded but still in the battle rather a Church
which is self-referential and is ‘lost’.
·
On April 21st, 2013, during the
‘Regina Coeli’ of Sunday, there was yet another typical feature of his
preaching, viz. interacting with the crowd, getting it to respond in chorus. During
that prayer, he said: “Thank you very much for the greeting, but you should
also greet Jesus. Yell 'Jesus' loud!" And the cry of "Jesus" in
fact went up from St. Peter's Square.
The
popularity of Pope Francis is due to a large extent this style of preaching and
to the easy, widespread success of the concepts on which he insists the most -
mercy, forgiveness, the poor, the “peripheries”. They are seen reflected in his
actions and in his own person.
It is a popularity that acts as a screen for the other more inconvenient things that he does not neglect to say - for example, his frequent references to the devil - and that if said by others would unleash criticism, while for him they are forgiven.
In
effect, the media have so far covered up with indulgent silence not only the
references of the current pope to the devil, but also a whole series of other
pronouncements on points of doctrine as controversial as they are essential.
But
let us not be surprised, the media and the secularists are about to take on
him. Let us pray for the Holy Father Pope Francis.
Thank
you,
Papireddy . Gade
[May
4th 2013]
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