Perhaps the most revealing detail in Pope Francis’s lengthy
interview, conducted by the Italian Jesuit Antonio Spadaro and published
yesterday in English translation in the Jesuit journal America, is the pontiff’s reflection on one of his favorite Roman walks, prior to his election:
When I had to come to to Rome, I always stayed in [the neighborhood of the] Via della Scrofa. From there I often visited the Church of St. Louis of France, and I went there to contemplate the painting of “The Calling of St. Matthew” by Caravaggio. That finger of Jesus, pointing at Matthew. That’s me. I feel like him. Like Matthew. . . . This is me, a sinner on whom the Lord has turned his gaze.
The Calling of St. Matthew is
an extraordinary painting in many ways, including Caravaggio’s
signature use of light and darkness to heighten the spiritual tension of
a scene. In this case, though, the chiaroscuro setting is further
intensified by a profoundly theological artistic device: The finger of
Jesus, pointing at Matthew, seems deliberately to invoke the finger of
God as rendered by Michelangelo on the Sistine Chapel ceiling. Thus
Caravaggio, in depicting the summons of the tax collector, unites
creation and redemption, God the Father and the incarnate Son, personal
call and apostolic mission.
That is who Jorge Mario Bergoglio is: a radically converted Christian
disciple who has felt the mercy of God in his own life and who
describes himself, without intending any dramatic effect, as “a sinner
whom the Lord has looked upon.” Having heard the call to conversion and
responded to it, Bergoglio wants to facilitate others’ hearing of that
call, which never ceases to come from God through Christ and the Church.
And that, Bergoglio insists, is what the Church is for: The Church is
for evangelization and conversion. Those who have found the new pope’s
criticism of a “self-referential Church” puzzling, and those who will
find something shockingly new in his critical comments, in his recent
interview, about a Church reduced “to a nest protecting our mediocrity,”
haven’t been paying sufficient attention. Six years ago, when the
Catholic bishops of Latin America and the Caribbean met at the Brazilian
shrine of Aparecida to consider the future, the archbishop of Buenos
Aires, Bergoglio, was one of the principal intellectual architects of
the bishops’ call to put evangelization at the center of Catholic life,
and to put Jesus Christ at the center of evangelization. The Latin
American Church, long used to being “kept,” once by legal establishment
and then by cultural tradition, had to rediscover missionary zeal by
rediscovering the Lord Jesus Christ. And so the Latin American bishops,
led by Bergoglio, made in their final report a dramatic proposal that
amounted to a stinging challenge to decades, if not centuries, of
ecclesiastical complacency:
The Church is called to a deep and profound rethinking of its mission. . . . It cannot retreat in response to those who see only confusion, dangers, and threats. . . . What is required is confirming, renewing, and revitalizing the newness of the Gospel . . . out of a personal and community encounter with Jesus Christ that raises up disciples and missionaries. . . .
A Catholic faith reduced to mere baggage, to a collection of rules and prohibitions, to fragmented devotional practices, to selective and partial adherence to the truths of faith, to occasional participation in some sacraments, to the repetition of doctrinal principles, to bland or nervous moralizing, that does not convert the life of the baptized would not withstand the trials of time. . . . We must all start again from Christ, recognizing [with Pope Benedict XVI] that “being Christian is . . . the encounter with an event, a person, which gives life a new horizon and a decisive direction.”
The 21st-century proclamation of Christ must take place in a deeply
wounded and not infrequently hostile world. In another revealing
personal note, Francis spoke of his fondness for Marc Chagall’s White Crucifixion,
one of the most striking religious paintings of the 20th century.
Chagall’s Jesus is unmistakably Jewish, the traditional blue and white tallis or
prayer-shawl replacing the loincloth on the Crucified One. But
Chagall’s Christ is also a very contemporary figure, for around the
Cross swirl the death-dealing political madnesses and hatreds of the
20th century. And so the pope’s regard for Chagall’s work is of a piece
with his description of the Catholic Church of the 21st century as a
kind of field hospital on a battlefield strewn with the human wreckage
caused by false ideas of the human person and false claims of what makes
for happiness. Thus Francis in his interview on the nature of the
Church:
I see clearly that the thing the Church needs most today is the ability to heal wounds and to warm the hearts of the faithful; it needs nearness, proximity. I see the Church as a field hospital after battle. It is useless to ask a seriously injured person if he has high cholesterol and about the level of his blood sugars! You have to heal his wounds. Then we can talk about everything else. Heal the wounds, heal the wounds.
And how are the wounds of late-modern and postmodern humanity to be
healed? Through an encounter with Jesus Christ, the Son of the living
God. “The most important thing, “ Francis insisted in his interview, “is
the first proclamation: Jesus Christ has saved you.” The Church of the
21st century must offer Jesus Christ as the answer to the question that
is every human life (as John Paul II liked to put it). The moral law is
important, and there should be no doubt that Francis believes and
professes all that the Catholic Church believes and professes to be true
about the moral life, the life that leads to happiness and beatitude.
But he also understands that men and women are far more likely to
embrace those moral truths — about the inalienable right to life from
conception until natural death; about human sexuality and how it should
be lived — when they have first embraced Jesus Christ as Lord. That, it
seems to me, is what the pope was saying when he told Antonio Spadaro
that “proclamation in a missionary style focuses on the essentials, on
the necessary things.” These are what make “the heart burn: as it did
for the disciples at Emmaus. . . . The proposal of the Gospel must be
more simple, profound, radiant. It is from this proposition that the
moral consequences then flow.”
Francis underscores that “the teaching of the Church is clear” on
issues like abortion, euthanasia, the nature of marriage, and chastity
and that he is “a son of the Church” who accepts those teachings as
true. But he also knows that “when we speak about these issues, we have
to talk about them in a context.” That “context” is Jesus Christ and his
revelation of the truth about the human person. For as the Second
Vatican Council taught inGaudium et Spes, its Pastoral
Constitution on the Church in the Modern World, “It is only in the
mystery of the Word made flesh that the mystery of man truly comes
clear. For Adam, the first man, was the type of him who was to come.
Christ the Lord, Christ the new Adam, in the very revelation of the
mystery of the Father and of his love, fully reveals man to himself and
brings to light his most high calling.”
Thus Pope Francis, the pastor who is urging a new pastoral style on
his fellow bishops and fellow priests, insists that every time the
Church says “no,” it does so on the basis of a higher and more
compelling “yes”: yes to the dignity and value of every human life,
which the Church affirms because it has embraced Jesus as Lord and
proclaims him to a world increasingly tempted to measure human beings by
their utility rather than their dignity.
Francis’s radical Christocentricity — his insistence that everything
in the Church begins with Jesus Christ and must lead men and women to
Jesus Christ — also sheds light on his statement that there is a
hierarchy of truths in Catholicism or, as he put it, that “the dogmatic
and moral teachings of the Church are not all equivalent.” That does not
mean, of course, that some of those those teachings are not really,
well, true; but it does mean that some truths help us make sense of
other truths. The Second Vatican Council reclaimed this notion of a
“hierarchy of truths” in Unitatis Redintegratio, its Decree on Ecumenism, and it’s an important idea, the pope understands, for the Church’s evangelical mission.
If you don’t believe in Jesus Christ as Lord — if you’ve never heard
the Gospel — then you aren’t going to be very interested in what the
Catholic Church has to say in Jesus’s name about what makes for human
happiness and what makes for decadence and unhappiness; indeed, you’re
quite likely to be hostile to what the Church says about how we ought to
live. By redirecting the Church’s attention and pastoral action to the
Church’s most basic responsibility — the proclamation of the Gospel and
the invitation to friendship with Jesus Christ — Pope Francis is
underscoring that a very badly disoriented 21st century will be more
likely to pay attention to evangelists than to scolds: “We need to
proclaim the Gospel on every street corner, preaching the good news of
the kingdom and healing, even with our preaching, every kind of disease
and wound. . . . The proclamation of the saving love of God comes before
moral and religious imperatives.” The Church says “yes” before the
Church says “no,” and there isn’t any “no” the Church pronounces that
isn’t ultimately a reflection of the Church’s “yes” to Jesus Christ, to
the Gospel, and to what Christ and the Gospel affirm about human
dignity.
It’s going to take some time for both the Church and the world to
grow accustomed to an evangelical papacy with distinctive priorities.
Those who imagine the Catholic Church as an essentially political agency
in which “policy” can change the way it changes when a new governor
moves into an American statehouse will continue — as they did within
minutes of the release of the America interview — to
misrepresent Pope Francis as an advocate of doctrinal and moral change,
of the sort that would be approved by the editorial board of the New York Times. This is nonsense. Perhaps more urgently, it is a distraction.
Jorge Mario Bergoglio is determined to redirect the Church’s
attention, and the world’s attention, to Jesus Christ. In this, his
papacy will be in continuity with those of John Paul II and Benedict
XVI. Pope Francis is going to be radically Christ-centered in his own
way, though, and some may find that way jarring. Those willing to take
him in full, however, rather than excising 17 words from a 12,000-word
interview, will find the context in which those 17 words make classic
Catholic sense. “We cannot insist only on issues related to abortion,
gay marriage, and the use of contraceptive methods,” the pope told his
interviewer. Why? Because it is by insisting on conversion to Jesus
Christ, on lifelong deepening of the believer’s friendship with him, and
on the Church’s ministry as an instrument of the divine mercy that the
Church will help others make sense of its teaching on those matters —
with which the New York Times, not the Catholic Church, is obsessed — and will begin to transform a deeply wounded culture.
