Entry 19: Pastoral living.

                        Pope Francis showing his pastoral side, once again!

                  ( Source:http://www.hurriyetdailynews.com/pope-francis-calls-for-prayers-for-syria-nuns.aspx? 
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The deeper I go into this document, the more I struggle with how to write about what the Pope is addressing. This is why it gets harder for me to write a blog more regularly. On the other hand, I do end up praying with the entries a lot, so I am actually living out the purpose of this blog even more!!

One theme that seems to come back a few times in this exhortation is this idea that the Christian faithful should allow the heart of the Gospel shape who we are, and how we live not just our faith, but our entire lives. We may be tempted to believe that, because of the name of this document, Francis believes that Joy is what is at the heart of the Gospel. In truth, as he's stated may times during his papacy, what he sees as the heart of the Gospel, is love. More specifically, being loving, or being pastoral.   

   He returns to the word pastoral ( a word he uses approximately 40 times in this document) just after having spoken about dogma ( a word he uses maybe twice) in the previous paragraph, not to illustrate a contrast between them, but perhaps to emphasize that a well-developed faith will in fact integrate both. This may be –and I emphasize may be because I’m fishing a little bit with what he’s saying in this section- why he introduces the notion that a sense of proportion is so important in our efforts to preach the Gospel (EG 38). He introduces as an example, priests that focus their preaching more on themes like temperance than on justice related themes like charity, or when they focus more on law than on grace (EG 38). I don’t think the pope is saying ‘stop preaching about temperance and other morally challenging themes’, but he is saying “don’t focus the tone of all your homilies on the same subject. Make sure you engage with the text, and that you preach, not about what you value as important, but what you feel God is calling us to with those words in that moment.”

 We all know this is not a problem that is specific to priests. In my own life, the reverse problem exists: I all too often shirk from thinking or praying, or preaching about moral themes, and focus all my energy of prayers and reflections on justice, and on themes that explore our Christian identity. Perhaps I’d like to justify myself in saying ‘there’s enough people out there who focus only on the moral themes, I need to counterbalance that with my own focus’. That’s a fair statement, but what happens when ‘our focus’ becomes more important than Christ himself, or even when we speak more about the Pope or The Church, than about Christ?

 That question is a troubling one that I usually expect my Protestant friends to ask. However, it is Francis who is asking it this time, because he knows that Christians –it’s not just Catholics who do this!!- have this danger of falling into legalism, or an obsession with Church History or anything else that detracts from the core message of our faith, from the truth that Christ offers us. Whatever focus we have, we can never forget that our faith is driven by an organic unity that dictates “not one (of the virtues we’re taught) can be excluded from the Christian ideal”, (EG 39)  a sentiment that seems inspired by Matthew 5:18 ( “ Not even the smallest letter, or part of letter will pass until all things have been accomplished”).

 Rather than allowing us to be intimidated by the daunting task of trying to integrate the whole of the Christian message a little more in our lives, the pope encourages us to see how integrated the various parts are to the whole, how  all the truths illumine one another.(EG 39) Each one of them is important. How we relate to them is important too. If we limit Christian morality to self-denial, or a list of sins and faults, can we say that this is an appropriate response to the love that God gives us every day? Not only is this attitude not an appropriate response  to God’s love, it obscures God’s invitation to love and be loved (paraphrasing EG 39). It prevents us from teaching the Gospel, as we end up preaching doctrine or moral points instead. There is no question that these are important, but they 

are not the ‘fragrance of the Gospel.’ They are not the heart of these sacred books that shape our lives. The sooner Catholics accept this, the sooner we can move forward as a Church!

38. It is important to draw out the pastoral consequences of the Council’s teaching, which reflects an ancient conviction of the Church. First, it needs to be said that in preaching the Gospel a fitting sense of proportion has to be maintained. This would be seen in the frequency with which certain themes are brought up and in the emphasis given to them in preaching. For example, if in the course of the liturgical year a parish priest speaks about temperance ten times but only mentions charity or justice two or three times, an imbalance results, and precisely those virtues which ought to be most present in preaching and catechesis are overlooked. The same thing happens when we speak more about law than about grace, more about the Church than about Christ, more about the Pope than about God’s word.

39. Just as the organic unity existing among the virtues means that no one of them can be excluded from the Christian ideal, so no truth may be denied. The integrity of the Gospel message must not be deformed. What is more, each truth is better understood when related to the harmonious totality of the Christian message; in this context all of the truths are important and illumine one another. When preaching is faithful to the Gospel, the centrality of certain truths is evident and it becomes clear that Christian morality is not a form of stoicism, or self-denial, or merely a practical philosophy or a catalogue of sins and faults. Before all else, the Gospel invites us to respond to the God of love who saves us, to see God in others and to go forth from ourselves to seek the good of others. Under no circumstance can this invitation be obscured! All of the virtues are at the service of this response of love. If this invitation does not radiate forcefully and attractively, the edifice of the Church’s moral teaching risks becoming a house of cards, and this is our greatest risk. It would mean that it is not the Gospel which is being preached, but certain doctrinal or moral points based on specific ideological options. The message will run the risk of losing its freshness and will cease to have “the fragrance of the Gospel”.

Day 18: A dogma of love.

                                                 Bergoglio, in  his pre-pope days, washing his people's feet.

   

Dogma: There’s a word that triggers many reactions in many Catholic circles today! However, with all the intensity that this word carries it in our communities, there are many who either have a wrong understanding of what it is (by interpreting it as something that restricts or dictates how one can live one’s faith), or avoid speaking about it completely. As for me, it’s not necessarily a term I have much love for.  I’ve watched too many people over the years justify intolerance and closed mindedness by hiding behind what they interpreted as ‘Church Dogma’.  The way Francis is portrayed in the media, many –including some conservatives- have assumed that this aversion to the concept of Dogma basically summarized the pope’s opinion as well.

In point 36 of Evangelii Gaudium, we discover that nothing could be further from the truth. There’s no question that the emphasis of his ministry is on the pastoral care of his people (especially the marginalized). Nevertheless, he remains committed to Church doctrine. As he expresses it here, he is faithful to the idea that some of our divine revelations are more important than others, as we strive to give a ‘direct expression of the heart of the Gospel’. Francis even goes as far as to speak of a ‘hierarchy of truths’.(EG 36)

 This is not an image that helps me embrace the importance of the Dogmas of our Church. I am after all, a product of a culture that has a lot of difficulties with hierarchies, or the idea that one truth is more valuable than others. Despite my resistance, Pope Francis wins me over by bringing us back to the basics: When he speaks of truths that are more valued than others, he speaks of fundamental things that define not only what we believe but how we ought to live. More specifically, he speaks of the saving love of God manifested in Jesus. This to him is the basic core of our lived faith. (EG 36) If we can live our faith through love (EG 37) and not through rules of moral conduct or a limited interpretation of certain passages of scripture…well, then people start paying attention! They realize ‘maybe there’s more to this Jesus guy than I thought!’.

This is an especially important theme for us as we journey through the season of Lent. So many people out there are giving up Facebook, or meat or sweets, or really anything under the sun that they love. This is an important act as we seek to enter into the sacredness of this season. However, as many have discovered over the years, perhaps it’s not just about what we sacrifice during this season, but what we take on, what we do differently, for ourselves, and for others.   Francis echoes the importance of this, saying that “our works of love …(directed to another).. are the most perfect external manifestation of the interior grace of the Spirit.” (EG 37) He uses this as a springboard to discuss Thomas Aquinas’s take on mercy, but I feel that this is inserted rather strangely in this segment. It’s the first time in the entire document so far that he quotes a Church father, and I’m not 100%  certain how Aquinas’ reflection helps us appropriate the need for a loving faith that does justice during this season. Perhaps some of you more scholarly types out there that stumble upon my reflections can pipe in!  I will end it here, eager to see where Francis goes from here in points 38-39. I hope this eagerness will translate itself in me becoming more regular in my entries, but only if it is God’s will!

36. All revealed truths derive from the same divine source and are to be believed with the same faith, yet some of them are more important for giving direct expression to the heart of the Gospel. In this basic core, what shines forth is the beauty of the saving love of God made manifest in Jesus Christ who died and rose from the dead. In this sense, the Second Vatican Council explained, “in Catholic doctrine there exists an order or a ‘hierarchy’ of truths, since they vary in their relation to the foundation of the Christian faith”.[38] This holds true as much for the dogmas of faith as for the whole corpus of the Church’s teaching, including her moral teaching.

37. Saint Thomas Aquinas taught that the Church’s moral teaching has its own “hierarchy”, in the virtues and in the acts which proceed from them.[39] What counts above all else is “faith working through love” (Gal 5:6). Works of love directed to one’s neighbour are the most perfect external manifestation of the interior grace of the Spirit: “The foundation of the New Law is in the grace of the Holy Spirit, who is manifested in the faith which works through love”.[40] Thomas thus explains that, as far as external works are concerned, mercy is the greatest of all the virtues: “In itself mercy is the greatest of the virtues, since all the others revolve around it and, more than this, it makes up for their deficiencies. This is particular to the superior virtue, and as such it is proper to God to have mercy, through which his omnipotence is manifested to the greatest degree”.[41]