Sing a new Song: The one Pope Francis is teaching us to sing.
Pope Francis is important.
Pope Francis has the world’s attention. He has 40 million twitter followers and gained 1 million Instagram followers in the first 12 hours of having an account. He has been on the front covers of magazines; The Italian version of Vanity Fair was first to name him Man of the Year and did it on the basis of what he did in his first 100 days. The world is responding to something in Pope Francis.
Pope Francis is enormously significant not just because he is Pope but also because he brings hope and gives direction. He has transformed the mood inside the Catholic Church. He has brought hope to those inside the Church and helped those outside to see that the Church is about compassion rather than judgement.
A change of era, not an era of change
The amount of change and rate of change threatens to be overwhelming. Religion and culture have been moving further apart for perhaps 200 years. Faith used to be a part of a bundle, Charles Taylor points out, but now the bundle is separating. It used to be, for example, if you were Italian you were Catholic. This is no longer true.
Pope Francis has named this as a change of era rather than an era of change and pointed out that we are privileged to live in this changing time.
As a way of giving perspective and hope, the last change of era was in the 1500’s. October 31 next year is the 500th anniversary of Martin Luther nailing the theses to the Church door at Wittenberg. The Catholic Church in Europe lost perhaps 1/3 of its members in the 50 years after 1517. (2/3 of Germany, ½ Holland, all of Scandinavia, England, Scotland and large sections of Switzerland). This change of era also involved an unravelling over several centuries. It had its roots back in the black death and the Western Schism when there were two popes and rather than secularism, it was exacerbated by the rise of nationalism. And yet there were more Catholics in 1600 than there were in 1500 due to the appearance of Our lady of Guadalupe and the conversion of central and southern America.
In his homily on the occasion of his installation in Parramatta, Bishop Long quoted the proverb: ‘One sits on an old mat to weave a new one.’ We are in a period of change but we build on what we had. This talk then asks what is the way in which Pope Francis is weaving together the old elements in a new way?
Pope’s message to newly appointed bishops in September last year was that they, like the apostles, had to be witnesses to the resurrection and that their core actions were to pray and teach. I wonder if we could hold this as a central message for the teachers in our Catholic schools?
The medium is the message.
The church is not built on the rock of Peter’s faith, but on Peter himself, despite his faults and failings. (George Pell)
At the beginning of this pontificate, I was waiting to see if the media was putting Pope Francis on a pedestal just so that they could push him off it. The media seem love to building people up and then cutting them down. For example, President Obama had such high expectations placed on him that he couldn’t but be a failure measured by them, even though he was good. Same was true to a lesser extent of Kevin Rudd and perhaps Malcolm Turnbull. The attraction and hope which Pope Francis has awakened in Catholics and others are tied to the integrity of his life, his actions, his words and his gestures.
Francis has given an insight into the type of reformed, renewed and outward-looking Church about which he dreams. His response to corruption in governance, clericalism, strictness with laws and self-preoccupation in the Catholic Church is to lead the Church to be closer to people and to accompany them in their daily lives, to be a poor church for the poor and to be more accessible, and to focus on communicating God’s mercy and love.
Getting to the heart of Francis and his message leads us away from the hype of him being a media hero and trying to get to his substance. Let us be looking for what God is saying to us through Pope Francis.
Goal of this talk: Change the culture of the Church
The cultural revolution in the Church that Pope Francis envisaged in Evangelii Gaudium in 2013, is still being enacted. We might reasonably think that he is half-way through his pontificate. What can we do to promote these changes?
My goal in this talk is that we co-operate with Pope Francis in changing the culture of the Church. We know how hard it can be to change culture in our schools and how one has to persevere to be successful. How many times have we begun a new year with the sincere intention of taking the school forward and improving what we do as a community and, at the end of the year, have found ourselves again solidly embedded in our old culture, our old habits and ruts? Culture is hard to change.
If we want this change in the church, we need to get on board. We need to open ourselves and our communities to and engage with God’s mercy, with its integration of forgiveness, sin, confession and joy.
I again challenge you to undertake two actions as a result of having been at this conference that take your community forward in this area.
Symbolic Gestures
Pope Francis has got the world’s attention with his powerful symbolic actions. These have interrupted the old discourse and opened the world to a new message. Which gestures do you recall?
· Washing the feet of women and non-Christians on Holy Thursday,
· Doing baptism of the child of a single mother
· Paying his own hotel bill in Rome,
· Reusing his old glasses frame (and paying for the lenses himself)
· Opting to reside, not in the apparently opulent Apostolic Palace but the far more modest Casa Santa Marta,
· Providing showers in the Vatican and barbers for the homeless
· The Vatican museum is open to prisoners and the poor on Sundays.
· His first trip after he became pontiff in 2013 was to the Sicilian island of Lampedusa to bring the estimated 20,000 who have drowned to mind.
· Visiting the island of Lesbos and bringing 12 refugees home.
· Driving in a tiny white car while at World Youth Day in Rio
· The Pope sat down for lunch with 60 of the Rome’s poorest citizens, and again in Washington DC (instead of with the Senators and Congressmen) emphasising his teaching that the Church must be with and accompany the marginalised and those on the peripheries of society.
One thing that such actions do is redefine what is public and what is private. Previously the Church used to speak the truth from the pulpit and then to work through the details in people’s lives with compassion and mercy in the confessional. Today, people see this as merciless and harsh (because they don’t see the mercy) or as hypocrisy because we say one one thing and do another. ‘Condemn the sin but love the sinner’ doesn’t work any more. My homosexual friends tell me that they feel the condemnation, not the love. Pope Francis is enacting his message of mercy publically.
These sorts of symbolic actions have been a powerful way of cutting through.
What symbolic actions can we enact in our communities? We need to look for gestures that talk of the dignity of people, of the Church’s openness and of our outreach to those marginalised, of God’s love, of our closeness to our families.
Structure of the talk
In the time that remains, I want to look at:
One Key attitude
1. Joy.
3 keys to understanding Pope Francis (according to John Allen)
1. Be missionary
2. Go to the peripheries (where he has travelled).
3. Not condemnation but accompaniment.
Four principles of Pope Francis
1. Time is greater than space
2. unity prevails over conflict
3. realities are more important than ideas
4. the whole is greater than the part
Joy is such a powerful and positive emotion.
The pope refers to joy very often. For him, it is the motivation puts everything in its right place. His first encyclical is (in English) The Joy of the Gospel and his recent apostolic exhortation, Amoris Laetitia, is The joy of love.
When visiting Kenya, Pope Francis held a special meeting with clergy, religious men and women, and seminarians. Putting aside his prepared text, he spoke of the joy of a life of radical service to the Gospel and of the radical faithfulness to Christ that is the guarantee of happiness and success in discipleship.
We can’t lead with its doctrines or we will seem remote. If we try to start with our moral teaching, we will come across as harsh and out of touch. The Pope wants the Church to lead today, as it led two thousand years ago, with the stunning news that Jesus Christ is risen from the dead and that God loves us.
In The Joy in the Gospels, the Pope at one stage lists many references to joy. I take some of the passages he mentions: "'Rejoice!' is the angel's greeting to Mary;" in her Magnificat, the Mother of God exults, "My spirit rejoices in God my saviour;" as a summation of his message and ministry, Jesus declares to his disciples, "I have said these things to you so that my joy may be in you and your joy may be complete;" in the Acts of the Apostles, we are told that "wherever the disciples went there was great joy."
The Holy Father concludes with a wonderfully understated rhetorical question: "Why should we not also enter into this great stream of joy?" And why shouldn’t we? Let us do this and help our communities to do so as well.
The opposite, according to Pope Francis is a ‘Sourpuss’ (literally a Vinegar face) whose life can "seem like Lent without Easter."
3 keys to understanding Pope Francis (with acknowledgement to John Allen)
1 Missionary Church
The list of demands on a pope are crushing. They have to be Intellectual giants, media rock stars and wonderful at communication, great at governing and managing a world wide organisation and living saints. No person can do all these things. Pope Francis choses to be a missionary. He wanted to be a missionary to China. His dream when he joined the Jesuits was to be the next Matteo Ricci.
When the Pope talks to priests he urges them to get out of the sacristy and into the street. He wants them to be out in the street meeting people where they live. He is daring and wants them to be daring. The Holy Father insists, "we cannot passively and calmly wait in our church buildings; we need to move from a pastoral ministry of mere conservation to a decidedly missionary pastoral ministry."
One implication for us is that for our schools to be genuinely catholic they must also be missionary, daring, going out to others and offering a experience of living with Jesus.
At schools conference last November in Rome, Pope Francis talked of Three levels of transcendence. He called on educators to take young people beyond themselves; it is not enough to do no harm. The first level he stressed was for us to develop the whole person mind, heart and hand. “Our role is nothing less than to help children grow in their humanity.” Secondly, our task involves taking them beyond themselves to God and the last dimension involves us taking them beyond themselves to the other. In this area, there was discussion centered on “integral education”, concerned with a focus not just on the head but on the heart and on service to others. I think that this refers to service learning.
Perhaps our schools are most challenged by the second of these levels. How do we give our students, teachers, board members and parents opportunities to meet Jesus. The third paragraph of Amoris Laetitia commences with this remarkable and challenging sentence: "I invite all Christians, everywhere, at this very moment, to a renewed personal encounter with Jesus Christ, or at least an openness to letting him encounter them; I ask all of you to do this unfailingly each day."
In paragraph seven of Evangelii Gaudium, Francis says, "I never tire of repeating those words of Benedict XVI which take us to the very heart of the Gospel: 'Being a Christian is not the result of an ethical choice or a lofty idea, but the encounter with an event, a person, which gives life a new horizon and a decisive direction.' ‘Christianity is not a philosophy or a set of ideas, but rather a friendship with Jesus of Nazareth’.
The reason for evangelisation used to be that without baptism people could not go to heaven. The Church does not believe this now but we have not yet found a new, effective and attractive way of expressing why we should be missionary. Pope Francis points to a new formulation in Evangelii Gaudium 266: "It is impossible to persevere in a fervent evangelization unless we are convinced from personal experience that it is not the same thing to have known Jesus as not to have known him."
How do we help our students to be brave adventurers, to discover the rich teachings of the Church on love, to discover that Christianity is a project for life capable of captivating our hearts?
The Latin-American bishops gathered in Aparecida in 2007 (at which Pope Francis was an active participant) laid out a clear four-point plan for the pastoral conversion of parishes:
· To offer a personal experience of Jesus Christ through personal testimony.
· To create warm and welcoming communities.
· To offer solid ongoing formation in Scripture and doctrine as a tools for spiritual growth.
· To seek out those alienated from the Church.
I offer this as a framework against which to measure our communities as missionary. To what extent is that a description of your school that your community would recognize?