Pope urges Catholic church to disavow conservatism and fundamentalism
Pope Francis spoke to Italian bishops about need for institution to be protected from ‘every pretence of power, image and money’ amid financial allegations
Tuesday 10 November 2015 15.57 EST Last modified on Tuesday 10 November 2015 20.20 EST
Pope Francis .. http://www.theguardian.com/world/pope-francis .. called on the Catholic church on Tuesday to stop clinging to conservatism and fundamentalism as a defensive response to the problems it is facing, and said the church ought to be “bruised, hurting and dirty” instead of obsessed with money and power.
“Before the problems of the church it is not useful to search for solutions in conservatism or fundamentalism, in the restoration of obsolete conduct and forms that no longer have the capacity of being significant culturally,” the pope said.
“Christian doctrine is not a closed system incapable of generating questions, doubts, interrogatives. But it is alive, knows being unsettled ... it does not have a rigid face, it has a body that moves and grows, it has a soft flesh: it is called Jesus Christ.”
While Francis has cast himself as a reformer who is seeking to portray the church as a less rigid and less dogmatic institution, which stands with people who live on the margins of society, there are factions in the church that are vigorously resisting his plea for the church to be more flexible and open.
On Tuesday, he asked for the Italian church to be protected “from every pretence of power, image and money” and said Christians ought not to be obsessed with power even when it was power that was “useful to the social image of the church”.
“I would like an Italian church that is unsettled, always closer to the abandoned, the forgotten, the imperfect,” said Francis. “I desire a happy church with face of a mother who understands, accompanies, caresses.”
Austen Ivereigh, the papal biographer who wrote The Great Reformer .. http://www.theguardian.com/books/2015/jan/04/great-reformer-francis-radical-pope-review , said Francis was clearly aiming some of his message directly at the Italian church, which receives a subsidy from the state and could be seen by Francis as being too conformist and pro-establishment.
“The Italian church is very large and wealthy in terms of property. This was a call for the Italian church to be more missionary, less dependent on status and wealth, and more radical and pro-poor,” Ivereigh said.
“The life of every community requires that we fight the cancer of corruption, the cancer of human and labor exploitation and the poison of illegality,” he said.
.. since the church will be around for a looooong time better to have a Francis than many, if not all, of those before him .. that's an off-the-top of no expertise on the matter of Popes .. :)
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.. this is an interesting read for any still interested in the evolution of the character of Pope Francis ..
Berkeley Review of Latin American Studies, Spring 2015
Pope Francis presides at a general audience. (Photo courtesy of the Catholic Church of England and Wales.)
RELIGION: The Final Conversion of Pope Francis
By Nancy Scheper-Hughes and Jennifer Scheper Hughes
On March 12, 2013, Cardinal Jorge Mario Bergoglio of Buenos Aires entered the Vatican papal conclave in Rome with a heavy heart. He had just resigned as Cardinal Archbishop of Buenos Aires and had already chosen a simple room in an Argentine retirement center for Catholic clerics when he was suddenly summoned to the Vatican following the shocking resignation of Pope Benedict XVI/Joseph Ratzinger. Instead, he would now be sequestered with 114 other cardinals until they reached a divinely inspired consensus about who would be the next spiritual and political leader of an estimated 1.2 billion Catholics, 40 percent of whom live in Latin America.
Two days before the opening of the papal conclave, Cardinal Bergoglio took a solitary walk through Rome’s historic district dressed incognito in the black cassock of a simple village priest. On seeing an old friend, Father Thomas Rosica, Bergoglio grabbed his hand saying, “Please, pray for me.” When the acquaintance asked Jorge Mario if he was nervous, the future pope replied that, indeed, he was.
Crisis in the Roman Catholic Church had led to the abdication of Pope Benedict/Ratzinger, a scholarly and fiercely conservative prelate who owned up to being a poor administrator. He and his close friend, Pope John Paul II/Karol Józef Wojtyl, were Central Europeans who came of age during World War II and rose to preeminence in the church during the cold war. Both popes had participated in Vatican II, which was led by Pope John XXIII who sought to “open the window and let in fresh air” and to reposition the church in the modern world. However, the future popes, caught up in European cold war politics against the “evils” of a godless, Soviet Communism, became obsessed with the “errors” and “excesses” unleashed by Vatican II, in particular, the rise of Latin American liberation theology.
The Second ?Vatican Council (Vatican II) in 1962. (Photo by Lothar Wolleh/Wikimedia Commons.)
Although liberation theology was never the dominant or hegemonic Catholic theology in Latin America, it was a strong and visible social movement that realigned clergy and nuns in support of the poor and those who spoke on their behalf during civil wars in Central America and military dictatorships in South America in the 1970s and 1980s. At the 1968 Medellín Conference of Latin American bishops, liberation theologians took their message further into what this might mean in terms of everyday pastoral practice. The bishops pledged themselves to a new spiritual/social contract called a “preferential option for the poor,” which required the Latin American Church to detach itself from its colonial moorings and its favoritism toward the power elites, the landowning and industrial classes. The practitioners of liberation theology called for the growth of “ecclesiastical base communities” in favelas, poor barrios, and shantytowns where Catholic clergy and nuns working closely with lay people would read and discuss the scriptures as political as well as theological texts. Poverty and hunger were recast as “structural violence” and as social sins to be challenged and expunged. Liberation theology reconciled Christianity and social Marxism at a time when right-wing dictators overthrew democratic socialist political leaders with the help of the CIA and the U.S. Congress.
While in some circles, liberation theology was seen as a theoretical shift in the cultivation of a critical, sociological, spiritual imagination, in Nicaragua and Guatemala during the 1980s liberation theology became a call to arms against oppressive dictators. This feet-on-the ground, “barefoot” theology introduced new exemplars in a generation of beloved “red bishops”: Dom Hélder Câmara in Recife; Samuel Ruiz in Chiapas; Sergio Méndez Arceo in Cuernavaca; and the martyr-bishop of El Salvador, Óscar Romero.
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