What we're seeing in the life and witness of Pope Francis is a resurrection, not only of the evangelical project of Vatican II but the pastoral innovation of one of the most beloved figures in Christian history. The following is an essay about the significance of a Jesuit pope, who's taken a Franciscan name, and called us into the world as modern missionaries of Jesus Christ.
When the words, “Habemus papem!” rang out across St. Peter’s Square on March 13,
2013, the crowd’s electric applause was tempered only when the relatively
anonymous name “Bergoglio” was announced. Overcome by the deafening ovation,
many didn’t hear it, most didn’t recognize it, but the papal conclave had just
elected the first Jesuit, the first South American, and the first ever from the
Southern Hemisphere to the chair of St. Peter. History had been made.
If this were not enough, the multitudes
were downright stunned when the regnal name was finally spoken, “Francesco!” In a gesture as shocking as
St. Francis’ famous disrobing before the local prelate, a Jesuit pope had taken
the name Francis – not Francis Xavier, the famous sixteenth-century Jesuit
missionary to Asia, but the beloved Francis and thirteenth-century friar from
Assisi. In the eighty-nine popes elected since the extraordinary life of St.
Francis, not a single pope had taken the appellation. For most, the moniker
approached the status of off limits, untouchable, unrepeatable. In the minds of
most Catholics, taking the name Francis was tantamount to taking the name
Jesus, although the humble saint from Assisi would cower at the comparison.
Who could possibly assume even a portion
of the audacity, simplicity, and revolutionary genius of the chivalrous playboy
turned religious luminary, Giovanni di Pietro di Bernardone? Yet this intrepid
move would herald a sign of the missionary acumen and evangelical spirit of our
Holy Father that would soon shock the ecclesiastical status quo and intoxicate the world over. It appears that the
legacy of the Lesser Brothers is
alive and well today.
In this essay, I will explore the plebian
papacy of Pope Francis as it relates to the enduring spiritual legacy of
Francis and Clare. While it may seem odd to view Franciscan spirituality
through the lens of a contemporary Jesuit figure, archbishop Bergoglio’s
assumption of the papal signature Francis highlights precisely the perennial
power and lasting influence of the Franciscan tradition. Within this paragon of spirituality, I will
focus on two fundamental themes – radical poverty and the associated principle
of incarnational relationship – in an effort to answer one essential question: What
do apostolic poverty and a relational approach to evangelization have to
contribute to pastoral ministry today? I will argue that these enduring pillars
of the Franciscan spiritual tradition are uniquely suited to answer the
missionary mandate of the Church and address the unique postmodern challenges
of the 21st century.
Frontiers and Laboratories
It is important to note from the start
that St. Francis of Assisi was not an academic. Francis never even mastered
Latin, the mother tongue of the western Church. Donald Spoto notes, “[It] is
clear from the two existing manuscripts that have survived in his own hand, he
could not even write it without the help of a secretary.”
Thus we do not see in Francis the language of a theologian steeped in the
technical minutia of the scholarly elite but the ordinary penmanship of a
common man whose identity was forged by a prodigal past and a superabundant
portion of God’s amazing grace.
Francis was revolutionary, a reformer, a
visionary and a pastor of the people. His voice and vision did not emanate from
the lecture hall but from the gritty daily experience of 13th
century life. No doubt informed by the chivalrous frivolity of his first
twenty-five years, Francis understood, on a deep and personal level, the “joys
and hopes, the grief and anguish” of the human condition.
He understood the struggles and temptations that accosted the human spirit and,
on the other hand, the renewing fire that sets the soul ablaze in Christ.
His thorough experience of human life,
paired with an unrivaled commitment to Christ and his kingdom, served as
guiding lights of this magnanimous medieval figure and important keys to
understanding his enduring spiritual legacy. “Francis was no theoretician of
the spiritual life,” writes Spoto. “He never spoke of God in any but
experiential terms . . . He could speak only of what he saw, heard and felt.”
He did not minister from a textbook. Francis forged an innovative and
completely original path to follow God’s call and address the unique frontiers
of his cultural milieu.
As we will soon discover, this experiential
predisposition would foster the very foundation of the Franciscan order and
test his leadership as he faced the never-ending onslaught of ecclesial
challenges in the thirteenth century. Speaking
of Francis’ style, “He did not try to understand what the Gospel meant and then
attempt to find ways of carrying out its message,” Spoto continues. “Rather, he
dared the experiment of first living that message, and from living it,
discovering a new and practical way of understanding it.”
Thus, Francis did not simply espouse the gospel with his lips but witnessed the
Good News with his life.
Pope Francis: On the
Frontier of a New Evangelization
The same experiential style can be
seen in the life and witness of Jorge Mario Bergoglio. Unlike Francis, he did
receive formal academic training as a Jesuit, but Bergoglio’s strengths and
aptitudes place him in notable distinction from the professorial papacies of
his predecessors, John Paul II and Benedict XVI. Like St. Francis of Assisi,
Pope Francis has already established himself not so much as an intellect, but
as a penetrating personal embodiment of the God we call Emmanuel, God-with-us.
“Ours is not a ‘lab faith,’ but a ‘journey faith,’” Pope Francis noted. “I am
afraid of laboratories because in the laboratory you take the problems and then
you bring them home to tame them, to paint them, out of their context. You
cannot bring home the frontier, but you have to live on the border and be
audacious.”
The life of the Church, according to Pope Francis, is not nourished in the
ecclesial laboratory of abstract truths but in the messy reality of human life.
In Buenos Aires, where Bergoglio served
as archbishop for over twenty years, Bergoglio was widely known in the
neighborhoods locals refer to as villas
miserias, or “villas of misery.”
These are Argentina’s most destitute slums, places where the poorest of
the poor are found. Bergoglio would
arrive, not with the press corps and ecclesial entourage, but in his common
priestly “blacks” and trench coat. “He’d take the bus and just come walking
around the corner like a normal guy,” reported one of the local priests who
knew the archbishop well. “It was the
most natural thing in the world. He’d
sit around and drink tea, talking with people about whatever was going on. He’d start talking to the doorman even. He was totally comfortable.”
For Pope Francis, it is of far greater import to reach out and touch one poor
person with his hands than to write a thousand volumes about the poor with his pen. Pope Francis seeks to live close to
the people – kissing babies, embracing the broken, comforting the downtrodden, and
washing the feet of criminals.
In a move that is quickly becoming his
papal signature, not to mention earning him the unofficial nickname “The Cold
Call Pope,” Francis regularly picks up the phone and makes spontaneous calls to
people in need. In early September, Pope Francis was moved by a letter from an
Italian woman whose boyfriend had unsuccessfully pressured her to abort the
child. Now an expecting single mother, the woman expressed her anxiety about
her standing with the Church. Francis, the preeminent pastor, called the woman,
comforted her and offered to personally baptize the baby when it was born.
Francis’ warmth and solidarity with the people make him an exciting symbol of
Christ at a time when talk is cheap and action is everything. Reviving not only
the name but the spirit of the humble friar from Assisi, Pope Francis is a
living witness of the enduring pastoral heirloom of the Franciscan tradition.
Radical Poverty/Simplicity
On a cold April morning in 1208, Francis
gathered himself and two lowly disciples in the church, opened the missal
blindly and read these words, “Go, sell what you own, and give to the poor, and
you will have treasure in heaven; then come, follow me.”
He turned to the next passage, “Take nothing for your journey – no staff, nor
bag, nor bread, nor money – not even an extra tunic.”
And finally the third, “If any want to become my followers, let them deny
themselves, take up their cross daily, and follow me.”
Thus marks the humble beginnings of the Lesser
Brothers. Inspired by radical poverty, simplicity, and a denial of oneself
for the sake of the Suffering Servant, Francis of Assisi inaugurated a quiet
revolution that would transform the Church and renew the face of Christian
mission in the world.
Perhaps nothing is more constitutive of
Franciscan spirituality than the unwavering commitment to radical poverty.
After “boiling in the sins of youthful heat,” having become a “slave of sin by
a voluntary servitude,” Francis ultimately renounced the folly of material
things and set out to follow Christ with nothing but the naked grace of God.
In direct contradistinction to the opulence and privilege that had infected the
ecclesial culture of his time, Francis understood Christian discipleship in a
literal way, following Jesus of Nazareth who himself had no place to lay his
head and who plainly asserted, “No one can serve two masters. . . You cannot
serve both God and Money.”
Francis was not entranced by the growing opportunities for power and
advancement that accompanied the bourgeoning commercial enterprise of 12-13th
century Spain. Instead, “Francis brought the world a life of radical
simplicity,” notes Spoto, “unmoored to possessions and therefore free to follow
the promptings of grace and the path toward God, wherever and whenever God
summoned him.”
For Francis, his disinvestment from material gain meant everlasting freedom for
the kingdom of God.
Francis’ contemporary, Clare of
Assisi, manifested the same unwavering commitment to poverty as the foundation
for the spiritual life. “O God-centered poverty,” she writes in her First Letter to Agnes of Prague, “whom
the Lord Jesus Christ Who ruled and still rules heaven and earth, Who spoke and
things were made, came down to embrace before all else!” For Clare, the road to God’s kingdom is paved
with the poverty, humility and self-sacrifice reflected in the life of Jesus. Choosing
“a spouse of a more noble stock,” Clare saw poverty as a life-long marriage
with Christ bringing a dignity and honor far surpassing the temporary splendor
of secular wealth.
It is important to note that Clare’s
insistence on poverty in the image of the crucified Christ is not ultimately
about a depravity of possessions but about a receptivity to relationship.
“Poverty is not so much about want or need; it is about relationship,”
says Delio. Clare assumes the foundation of apostolic
poverty established by Francis while expanding it, deepening it, and coupling
it with contemplative practice. “Gaze,
consider, contemplate, imitate” Clare instructs us. This poverty of spirit and contemplation of
Christ is meant to elicit a personal transformation and an overflowing impulse
to participate in the life of God. “May you be inflamed ever more strongly with
the fire of love!” she exhorts. Our poverty makes us both available to
receive God’s love in relationship but also to share that love in relationship
with others. It is a matter of allowing Christ’s life to live through us in a
way that transforms us and reshapes the world.
Pope Francis and the Church
of the Poor
When Pope Francis refused the
traditional vestments of papal tradition in favor of the simple white cassock,
when he eschewed the trappings of the papal palace and chose the humbler
dwellings of Room 201, when he rejected the pageantry of the papal limousine to
drive a Ford Focus, he was not simply making a statement about his personal
preferences. Pope Francis was signaling a return to the radical simplicity that
marked the life of St. Francis of Assisi. Following the conclave of 2013, it
was clear that this pope was breaking with much of the pomp and circumstance
that has characterized the papacy since the Middle Ages. “[We] must be pastors,
close to people, fathers and brothers,” the pope exhorted at a recent address
to South American bishops. “Men who love poverty, both interior poverty, as
freedom before the Lord, and exterior poverty, as simplicity and austerity of life.
Men who do not think and behave like ‘princes’”
For Pope Francis, apostolic poverty is an essential prerequisite to spiritual
leadership.
This posture of poverty was revealed
further in a recent interview with Fr. Antonio Spadaro, editor-in-chief of La Civilta Cattolica. When asked, “Who
is Jorge Mario Bergoglio?” Pope Francis answered, “I am a sinner. This is the
most accurate definition. It is not a figure of speech, a literary genre. I am
a sinner.”
His own self-assessment illuminates the very poverty that St. Francis and St.
Clare espoused over seven hundred years ago, a spirit of penance and humility
that silences the ego and allows God’s presence to take center stage.
Pope Francis’ spirit of poverty
informs his pastoral vision of the Church and allows God’s life to spill out
into the lives around him. “This church with which we should be thinking is the
home of all, not a small chapel that can hold only a small group of selected
people,” Pope Francis asserted.
Comparing the modern church to a field hospital, he declared “The thing the
church needs most today is the ability to heal the wounds and to warm the
hearts of the faithful; it needs nearness, proximity.”
The
ministers of the Gospel must be people who can warm the hearts of the people,
who walk through the dark night with them, who know how to dialogue and to
descend themselves into their people’s night, into the darkness, but without
getting lost. . .The church’s ministers must be merciful, take responsibility
for the people and accompany them like the good Samaritan, who washes, cleans
and raises up his neighbor. This is pure Gospel.
For Pope Francis, the world is the
Courtyard of the Gentiles, the grand stage upon which the drama of God’s
merciful redemption is played. It is the theater of nearness and encounter, a
place where the intimacy of God shown forth in Christ is manifest in our
intimacy with God’s children here and now. Much in the same way as Francis and
Clare, the pope is calling the Church to return to its evangelical roots,
stripped down and unadorned, “a poor Church for the poor.”
Relationship
Drawing on Ilia Delio’s commentary on
Clare, we see in Pope Francis a similar understanding of poverty as it corresponds,
on an ultimate level, to relationship. “The foundation of the evangelical life
is the human person and the sharing among persons of the experience of Christ.
The experience of God in the flesh emphasizes being a ‘person in relationship,’
that is, a brother or sister,” notes Delio. The upshot of our daily encounters
with Christ and the expression of our faith in God are manifest in the concrete
human relationships that constitute society today. We are not isolated monads,
each with our own solitary relationship with God, but an interconnected web of
relationships, a body, who is invited to personify the very message we have
been entrusted to proclaim. Cambridge theologian John A.T. Robinson offered a
prophetic word on this point in his 1952 manuscript, The Body:
The
redemption of man to-day means his release to become, not an individual . . .
but a person, who may find rather than lose himself in the interdependence of
the community. The content of social salvation for the modern man is to
discover himself as a person, as one who freely chooses interdependence because
his nature is to be made for others. . . The alternative to the ‘They’ is not
the ‘I’ but the ‘We’. . .
While part of Pope Francis’ decision
to forego the luxuries of the papal palace arose from his evangelical commitment
to poverty, his recent interview offered a further insight into the Argentine
pontiff that affirms this relational point. Pope Francis did not so much object
to the extravagance of the palace but its architectural design. “The entrance
is really tight,” the pope explained. “People can come only in dribs and drabs,
and I cannot live without people. I need to live my life with others.”
For Pope Francis, like Francis and Clare who went before him, poverty is
explicitly connected to relationship and our ability to minister to others in
the spirit of Christ.
This might explain why Pope Francis
so readily visits the poor, comforts the afflicted and picks up the phone to
offer personal encouragement. He is a man of the people, a shepherd of his
flock, and modern witness to Jesus, the Good Shepherd of us all. In the words
of St. Bonaventure, he is perfectly suited for this post, “so that through him,
more by example than by word, God might invite all truly spiritual men to this
kind of passing over.”
The love of Christ is not private property but a communal heritage. In this
light, God’s love is always manifest in relationship. For Pope Francis there is
little to be understood of Christian faith without the corporate experience of
the body of Christ, the Church:
There
is no full identity without belonging to a people. No one is saved alone, as an
isolated individual, but God attracts us looking at the complex web of
relationships that take place in the human community. God enters into this
dynamic, this participation in the web of human relationships.
Franciscan Spirituality:
Pioneering New Paths for Ministry in the 21st Century
What practical import do these two
Franciscan foundations have for the pastoral minister today? While it is hard to accuse the vast cadre of
pastoral ministers of being “in it for the money,” renewing our commitment to
apostolic poverty in light of Francis and Clare may enjoy uncommon purchase in
today’s cultural economy. True poverty allows the spiritual leader to dispense
with the notion that he or she is the primary protagonist of fruitful ministry.
Ever dependent on the provision of God and the partnership of others,
evangelical poverty empties the soul of self-will so as to receive the
life-giving sap of unmerited grace. St. Clare notes, “The kingdom of heaven is
promised and given by the Lord only to the poor because she who loves what is
temporal loses the fruit of love. ”
The fruit of God’s grace is love, the fulfillment and consummation of our Christian
faith. Poverty’s pursuit of God alone is the lifeblood of healthy ministry
because it sacrifices the uncanny seduction of “success” and renders us fully
available for God’s often unseen or misunderstood purposes.
St. Francis struggled with this
vainglorious temptation for most of his life, pursuing self-centered victories
in both his secular and spiritual affairs. Yet through his personal encounters
with God, Francis was able to embrace the truth of his utter dependence on
divine mercy and the existential destitution of his life without the sustaining
goodness of his heavenly Father. Spoto notes, “At the deepest core of his being
[was] a constant, constantly maturing reliance on the God he experienced as
unimaginable love and mercy – a God Who asked him to collaborate in the healing
of the world.”
Poverty kept Francis humble, and it kept God in the driver’s seat of his
ministry.
Yet evangelical poverty has more global
implications for the pastoral minister. According to World Bank Development
Indicators, almost half the world’s inhabitants, over three billion people,
live on less than $2.50 per day.
Over 80% of humanity lives on less than $10 per day.
Of such abominations to human dignity, Pope John Paul II once asked, “And what
should we say of the thousand inconsistencies of a globalized world where the
weakest, the most powerless and the poorest appear to have so little hope? It
is in this world that Christian hope must shine forth!”
More than ever before, the global Church is aware that her message will attract
the world’s attention not so much in its internal logic and theological
consistency but in her valiant witness of liberating action.
Let me
be clear that the pastoral minister should not attend to the poor because of
the self-reproaching guilt of a pricked conscience. We, as disciples of Christ,
should serve in solidarity with the poor because this is the very nature of
God, because we are filled with the true presence of God who is already there,
because “Christ’s love compels us.”
As Cuban-born professor of ethics at Hope College, Miguel De La Torre asserts:
Christians
make an option for the poor, for those on the margins, not so much because it
is the “ethical” thing to do but because of the need on the part of believers
to imitate God as fully revealed in the life of Jesus Christ.
Pope
Francis’ call for a poor church in service to the poor draws widespread appeal because
it stands precisely at the intersection of the world’s greatest need and his
own deepest identity. In this Jesuit pontiff sworn to continue the legacy of
St. Francis, we see the telltale signs of God-with-us “who takes on the
infirmities of his people, walks with them, saves them and makes them one.
Pope Francis is most himself, most radiantly authentic as an image-bearer of
God, when he denies himself, takes up his cross and follows Jesus into the
plight of the poor. And we are most beautifully ourselves when we follow him.
As St. Francis revolutionized
evangelization in the 13th century, challenging the cloistered
confines of monasticism to engage the people in their own language and style,
Pope Francis calls the Church of the 21st century to depart from the
smug dogmatism of Counter-Reformation Catholicism to engage the frontiers of
the postmodern era. “Instead of being just a church that welcomes and receives
by keeping the doors open, let us try also to be a church that finds new roads,
that is able to step outside itself and go to those who do not attend Mass, to
those who have quit or are indifferent,” Pope Francis exhorted.
The pope is openly critical of a pastoral approach that neglects nearness and
relationship for the sake of organizational procedures and disciplinary actions.
“They do not take into account the ‘revolution of tenderness’ brought by the
incarnation of the Word.”
For many young people today, the cool institutionalization of the Church is
exactly what makes it so inhospitable, and they are leaving in droves.
According to a USCCB report, nearly four times as many adults have left the
Catholic Church than have entered it.
What is needed is an evangelical
poverty which makes us broken vessels carrying the living waters of Jesus
Christ, a brokenness that places us in solidarity with the earth’s largest
demographic. What the world is waiting for is an incarnate witness of the God
who is not afraid to enter into the sultry circumstances of the human condition
and transform the world in love. This relational nearness, revealed in Christ,
refocused in St. Francis, and recapitulated in our Holy Father today,
underscores the enduring legacy of the reluctant saint from Assisi and the
eight hundred-year tradition that followed. “I beg that we take seriously our
calling as servants of the holy and faithful people of God,” Pope Francis
implored, “for this is where authority is exercised and demonstrated: in the
ability to serve.”
May we respond to that humble calling with the kind of poverty, simplicity and
compassion that would make St. Francis proud.
Following the Gregorian reforms of the
late 11th century, the Church seemed to have cemented its
hierarchical ordo and its
understanding of the apostolic life in terms of the ecclesiastically ordained
priesthood and in those bishops who served as successors to Peter and the early
apostles. Yet this same period found a
clergy steeped in the corruption of simony, usury and unchaste practices which
called into question the “worthiness of the priest” whose life failed to embody
gospel values. Quite naturally, many
began to question whether the Church’s hierarchical and juridical focus had
somehow neglected the essence of Christianity, particularly for the vast
majority of Church, lay men and women who also took refuge in the gospel
message.
In
this climate, various laygroups arose in northern Italy, France and western
Germany which sought a way of life that could satisfy their longing for a more
personal and participatory response to the witness of Jesus Christ. Inspired by the biblical norms of evangelical
poverty and apostolic action, these groups (Waldensians, Humiliati, Cathars) yearned for something more than a forensic
connection with the hierarchical Church and mere intellectual assent to
orthodox formulations of Christian dogma.
The faith of these courageous men and women and the auspicious
approbation of Pope Innocent III set the stage for Francis and an impressive
epoch of religious innovation and a broader, more inclusive understanding of
Catholic ecclesiology. A new structure, consciousness and lifestyle of
Christian spirituality was born.
