As well as lugging an over-large biography of Goebbels to the beach when on holiday in Devon last week, I took the opportunity to visit our former parish priest who has retired to Teignmouth.
He had been an Anglican minister for many years, before coming into the Catholic Church over the question of women’s ordination back in the 1990s.
So he is not a member of the Ordinariate. As a convert he is able to look at the Church from the ‘outside’, from the perspective of someone looking in – as I am not able to do.
Our conversation was mainly about evangelisation – or the New Evangelisation as it is called. The parish priest’s theme was that it’s simply doesn’t work for the Church to announce to the outside world, “We’re here. Come and find us.”
To properly evangelise we have to go outside our institutional comfort zone and seek people where they are.
He mentioned the packed venues that have hosted Jeremy Corbyn’s campaign speeches up and down the country. Why don’t we hire a large central hall in town, invite all comers and proclaim our faith there, was one of his suggestions.
Living at the seaside and remembering the beach missions of his Evangelical childhood, he also felt the Church could organise a similar event. In other words, to go out into the highways and byways and the market-place if we are really serious about evangelisation and about proclaiming the good news of our faith.
It struck me later that this is exactly what Pope Francis is urging us to do.
I have been reading ‘Encountering Truth’, the morning homilies from St Martha’s Chapel from March 2013 to March 2014, edited by Antonio Spadaro SJ and prefaced by Federico Lombardi SJ, the papal press secretary. It is published by Image Books and is actually well worth reading.
I say this because I have to confess to suffering from ‘Pope-fatigue’ i.e. often not reading what he says any more.
Partly this is because he talks such a lot in an impromptu fashion and partly because I fear that his words will be twisted (yet again) by the media and then the airwaves will be filled by counter-interpretations by his loyal staff, particularly Fr Lombardo.
But when you read the Pope’s daily homilies for a whole year, on the page and without media interruption, it is a different story.
Pope Francis is determined to be pastoral in style, detached from the papal apartments (in which he doesn’t live) in order to live on ground level and communicate the personal love of Jesus for fallen humanity – meaning everyone.
Of course all popes are by definition ‘pastoral’ and they all seek to make the person of Jesus come alive in people’s hearts.
But Pope Francis’s style is to be much more accessible to the common man than his predecessors, especially to the regular personnel, workmen, staff and visitors who attend St Martha’s chapel for his daily Mass and homily.
The homilies reproduced in the book are not literal transcriptions. They have been edited and abbreviated for their central theme to come across, usually on a single page.
They are not polished, classical or flowing, they are ‘homely’, conversational, sometimes repetitive, humorous, enlivened by personal anecdotes, designed to make the scriptural readings of the Mass relate to the daily personal lives of his congregation, with all their burdens and anxieties.
What is emphasised again and again in these homilies is that we Christians are not meant to be sitting comfortably in the pew, in ‘closed communities’, feeling triumphal, behaving as ‘armchair Christians’.
Our faith is meant to transform us – to help us to see the great drama of life is not so much following the rules but recognising we are sinners, only saved by the love of God.
It is Pope Francis’s sense of the drama of the faith that informs his images such as “We can’t proclaim Jesus with funeral faces”, looking like “pickled peppers”; bishops and priests must be “shepherds, not wolves” and “Jesus in the confessional is not a dry cleaner”.
The secular press buzzes with these images, but for us Catholics they make a coherent whole, always inviting the urgent question “What has the Holy Spirit done in me today?”
Pope Francis comments, “Lukewarm Christians build small churches”; too true.
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