Franciscan at Home

Si entrabas a la tiendita de la esquina y preguntabas al ciudadano estadounidense promedio, "Qué es lo que representa la Iglesia Católica?", ¿cuál sería su respuesta?

Muchos enfocarían los asuntos morales: "La Iglesia Católica está en contra del aborto, en contra de la contracepción, y en contra del 'matrimonio' gay'". Casi nadie diría: "La Iglesia Católica representa a Dios quien es amor y quien nos creó por amor; quien nos invita a compartir su amor; quien envió a su Hijo para morir por nosotros por amor; y quien quiere perdonarnos sin importar lo que hemos hecho y nos sana para que estemos felices en esta vida y con Él por siempre en el cielo."

El amor y la misericordia de Dios están en el mero corazón del Evangelio; sin embargo, la mayoría de la gente, incluyendo muchos católicos, desconocen este punto central de nuestra fe. Esta es una razón por la que el Papa Francisco he hecho una llamada para este Jubileo extraordinario llamado "El Año de la Misericordia".

Those involved in youth and young adult ministry accompany and mentor young people as they center their lives on Christ. We hope you enjoy this testimony written by a young adult woman, who describes a significant instance of this conversion from her own life.

Recently, I spoke to 100 young adults on a retreat in the mountains of Prescott, Arizona. The majority of attendees were single and feeling uncertain about their lives and the direction the Lord was taking them. In addition, many spoke of the ache they have in their hearts—the longing they have to find someone to love them in marriage. I remember this feeling myself when I was a single younger adult praying for my vocation and wondering if God would ask me to be single for the rest of my life. The thought made me feel so sad and lonely. Then something changed.

All of us have experienced the natural instinct of physical thirst. Physical thirst can, therefore, be an effective starting point for a fruitful catechetical meditation on our desire for God and the fundamental disposition of the soul needed to seek him.

Throughout salvation history, we see numerous examples of thirst. After Moses led the Israelites out of Egypt, they became so thirsty in the desert that they grumbled against their liberator (Ex 17:3). Samson also cried out to the Lord in his thirst (Jdg 15:8). In both of these circumstances, God himself satisfies them. The Psalmist recognized this as he prayed, “O God, you are my God—it is you I seek! For you my body yearns; for you my soul thirsts, in a land parched, lifeless, and without water” (Ps 63:2). Another Psalm compares the longing of the soul for God to a “deer that longs for streams of water” and desires to “enter and see the face of God” (Ps 42:1). Through the prophet Isaiah, God invites “all who are thirsty” to “come to the water” (Is 55:1) and he assures the Israelites that they will “draw water joyfully from the springs of salvation” (Is 12:3). These examples of thirst give us a sense of the longing of the people for something more, something that will ultimately satisfy.

“Lo, all things fly thee, for thou fliest Me!” (The Hound of Heaven, Francis Thompson)

Christian history is awash with the affirmation that human beings have been created to desire God, like the beautiful “cor inquietum” of St. Augustine: “You have made us for yourself O Lord, and our hearts are restless until they rest in you.” Since the sixteenth century, however, many academic philosophers have disputed this and have claimed that there is no evidence that human beings are “made for God.” I have no intention of entering into this controversy. Instead, I would like to draw attention to the insights of the saints and the teaching of the Church through the centuries. St. Thomas Aquinas expressed the same thought when he wrote, “Wherefore God alone can satisfy the will of man, according to the words of Ps 102… Therefore God alone constitutes man’s happiness;” and St. Francis de Sales wrote, “Thou hast made me, O Lord, for Thyself, to the end that I may eternally enjoy the immensity of Thy glory.” St. Alphonsus Ligouri had the same idea and worded it thus: “Eternal salvation… is the one and sovereign good of man, seeing that it is the one end for which he was created.” In our own time, the Catechism insists: “The desire for God is written in the human heart because man is created by God and for God… Only in God will he find the truth and happiness he never stops searching for.” We can therefore rely on this desire to draw our students to God. My experience also tells me we can. Before I say how, I need to offer some caveats: first, it is God, who draws his children to himself at his appointed time; second, the individual human being is always free to reject God’s invitation; moreover, the relationship between God and the individual soul can never be reduced to an automated mechanical response: love can only be love if it is freely given and freely accepted.

While reflecting upon Pope Francis’ visit to the United States last fall, I continue to be struck by how Francis, though he never attended the Second Vatican Council, embodies it in many ways. The council was a singular ecclesial event of the 20th century—referred to by every pope since its inception as the guiding light for the Church’s present mission. That mission, interestingly enough, was not mainly one of doctrinal clarity but of pastoral duty. The council wanted to address how to bring the faith of the Church more powerfully and effectively to the modern world. Thus, when John XXIII convoked the council, he claimed that its success would be measured both by the extent it revivified the faith of Catholics and by its ability to speak to all people of goodwill. The faith was, he claimed, not only a treasure for Catholics but “the common heritage of mankind.” It is because of this mission that the council stands as the source of the New Evangelization. Yet, from the very start, in its effort to engage the modern world with the Catholic faith, Vatican II has prompted contrary reactions, which claim that either the Church should preserve herself from the impurity of the world, or that she should, rather, embrace the world unreservedly. Both reactions attempt to resolve the inherent tension between the faith and the world, though by different means: one by utter separation and the other by absolute equation. Pope Francis’ desire to bring the faith to the peripheries has prompted the very same reactions. One gets the impression that the Church’s stance toward the world is either all truth and no love or all love and no truth. However, the Church’s mission always proclaims both truth and love. In Francis’ words, the Church must form joy-filled evangelizers who are “able to step into the night without being overcome by the darkness … able to listen to people’s dreams without being seduced and … able to sympathize with the brokenness of others without losing their own strength and identity.” We must, in other words, form messengers of the Gospel who bring the Faith to the very heart of the world without becoming assimilated by it. With this goal in mind, this article will look more closely at one of Francis’ reflections on the Church’s mission to the world. This reflection first took the form of a 1989 lecture in Argentina (antedating his pontificate), which he gave on the occasion of the Spanish publication of Luigi Giussani’s The Religious Sense. In it, he draws from the rich teaching of John Paul II’s Fides et Ratio and signals a way in which the Church can speak to the desire for God that exists in every human heart. His thoughts offer a method the Church can use in order to address those who live in the world without conflating itself with the world.

What is it like to be a catechist in a country where Christians are persecuted? What particular virtues would a catechist need in a society where parishes are illegal, and church buildings may be constructed only with government approval? Imagine the challenges of catechizing adults, teenagers, and children when civil authorities announce plans to build a community without a church; a city where no public expression of faith is tolerated; and the State does not permit public reference to God and to the Church. This scenario is not taken from a futuristic novel or movie. It was the lived experience of Catholics in Poland, under the Communist regime in the decades following the Second World War. During this period of Polish history, the basic right to exercise and express faith in public forms and places was routinely denied or undermined. The State went so far as to plan a model workers’ town, called Nowa Huta, to be built without a church. Nowa Huta was located on the outskirts of Kraków, Poland, home to then Cardinal Karol Wojtyła, the future Saint John Paul II. This “pope of the family” is surely one of the great saints of our time. His loving and fearless witness to faith as a priest, a bishop, and as the pope offers every catechist a model to follow, even as we strive to catechize in the midst of the steady erosion of religious freedom today. From his saintly example, we may draw three lessons for catechesis in our time.

Every new year brings new hopes, dreams, promises, and possibilities, as does the Year of Mercy! The Holy Father asks us to respond wholeheartedly to the call for a widespread and generous outpouring of mercy, despite the fact that this emphasis on mercy might appear to minimize the demands of justice and the law. Some may be surprised at this, as were the pharisees and scribes at the time of Jesus. At the same time, though, millions of Catholics and non-Catholics are delighted as they observe Pope Francis and his announcement of this Extraordinary Jubilee of Mercy. How Does This Document About Mercy Affect Us? During this Year of Mercy—Annus Misericordiae—we will contemplate and reflect the Face of Mercy, Christ’s Face, or the Misericordiae Vultus. We plunge into this contemplation in order to understand and become that which we contemplate, so all might find a path to conversion, a path home to our Father. The Bull of Indiction of the Extraordinary Jubilee of Mercy outlines Pope Francis’ pastoral focus for the New Evangelization. In it, he stresses mercy as the core of a life-altering Gospel that can lead to deep metanoia, thus transforming our hearts into the meek and humble heart of Jesus, full of mercy and compassion. The pope believes, prophetically perhaps, that contemplating the face of mercy and allowing ourselves to be inwardly transformed by it will enable us to “be merciful like the Father” (cf. Lk 6:36), as the motto for the Jubilee Year pronounces. Thus transformed, we will become instruments of conversion and transformation among “insiders” and “outsiders” alike, and thereby change the world. The bull, Misericordiae Vultus, states: "Jesus speaks several times of the importance of faith over and above the observance of the law. It is in this sense that we must understand his words when, reclining at table with Matthew and other tax collectors and sinners, he says to the pharisees raising objections to him, “Go and learn the meaning of ‘I desire mercy not sacrifice.’ I have come not to call the righteous, but sinners” (Mt 9:13). Faced with a vision of justice as the mere observance of the law that judges people simply by dividing them into two groups – the just and sinners – Jesus is bent on revealing the great gift of mercy that searches out sinners and offers them pardon and salvation."[i]

Soon after promulgating Humanae Vitae in 1968, Blessed Pope Paul VI stated that what was needed for a fuller understanding of the encyclical was a fuller, more adequate anthropology. His successor, Pope Saint John Paul II, would later supply this fuller, more adequate anthropology when he expounded and developed his philosophical and theological anthropology of the human person. One needs only recall the series of Wednesday audiences wherein he developed what we now call the “theology of the body.” [i] Pope Benedict XVI later picked up a similar theme when he expounded a profound theological anthropology in Caritas in Veritate (June 9, 2009), while situating the human person in proper relation to the Trinity and to one’s neighbor in Deus Caritas Est (December 25, 2005). Pope Francis was indebted to these doctrinal developments of his predecessors when he came to write his most recent encyclical, Laudato Si (LS), a debt he acknowledges in the encyclical’s opening paragraphs (3-6). However, Laudato Si has a different emphasis, expressed in the opening words, which come from a canticle written in Old Italian and composed by St. Francis of Assisi in 1225: “Canticle of the Creatures.” By opening with this canticle, Pope Francis introduces the rich philosophical and theological anthropology of his predecessors into the relational context of the earth’s environment, which is contiguous with human life in the body. A Fundamental Human Ecology For example, Pope Francis writes in Laudato Si, “Learning to accept our body, to care for it and to respect its fullest meaning, is an essential element of any genuine ecology” (155). Far from being a form of somatolatry, or worship of the human body, Pope Francis here affirms the share we have as embodied persons in the surrounding physical environment. He gleans this insight from the account of creation in the Book of Genesis (chapters 1-3) where “in the beginning” human life was “grounded in three fundamental and closely intertwined relationships: with God, with our neighbor and with the earth itself” (66). Then the Holy Father continues: “According to the Bible, these three vital relationships have been broken, both outwardly and within us. This rupture is sin” (ibid.). This division—within ourselves, with God, with one another, and with the earth[ii]—accounts for Pope Francis’ rather sobering judgment that the earth, “our home, is beginning to look more and more like an immense pile of filth” (21). This is significant because it helps us to understand how the “human environment and the natural environment deteriorate together; we cannot adequately combat environmental degradation unless we attend to causes related to human and social degradation” (48). As it goes with ourselves, so it goes with the environment; if we neglect ourselves and our relationships to one another and God, then predictably neglect of the physical environment follows. A wholesome human ecology, which acknowledges and accepts the profound “relationship between human life and the moral law” (155), is a prerequisite for a wholesome environment. Neglect and abuse of the earth, therefore, are best explained by the deterioration in human ecology, as when the poorest and weakest among us are neglected and forgotten. Supplying in justice the proper care due to the human body would include a whole host of corporal works of mercy wherein we clothe the naked, feed the hungering, dress wounds, and supply adequate housing to the homeless. How we understand ourselves is reflected in how we treat one another and the environment. Consequently, the “acceptance of our bodies as God’s gift is vital for welcoming and accepting the entire world as a gift from the Father… whereas thinking that we enjoy absolute power over our own bodies turns, often subtly, into thinking that we enjoy absolute power over creation” (155).