Pope Francis Said What?

Don't read the news people telling you what Pope Francis said in the interview with America magazine. Read the actual interview.

Aleteia has a selection of key quotes.

Money quote:

"We must not reduce the bosom of the universal church to a nest protecting our mediocrity."

And so totally this: 

“I see clearly,” the pope continues, “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 you have to start from the ground up."

“The church sometimes has locked itself up in small things, in small-minded rules. The most important thing is the first proclamation: Jesus Christ has saved you. And the ministers of the church must be ministers of mercy above all. The confessor, for example, is always in danger of being either too much of a rigorist or too lax. Neither is merciful, because neither of them really takes responsibility for the person. The rigorist washes his hands so that he leaves it to the commandment. The loose minister washes his hands by simply saying, ‘This is not a sin’ or something like that. In pastoral ministry we must accompany people, and we must heal their wounds.

“How are we treating the people of God? I dream of a church that is a mother and shepherdess. 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. God is greater than sin. The structural and organizational reforms are secondary—that is, they come afterward. The first reform must be the attitude. 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 people of God want pastors, not clergy acting like bureaucrats or government officials. The bishops, particularly, must be able to support the movements of God among their people with patience, so that no one is left behind. But they must also be able to accompany the flock that has a flair for finding new paths.

“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. The ones who quit sometimes do it for reasons that, if properly understood and assessed, can lead to a return. But that takes audacity and courage.”

And this:

“The dogmatic and moral teachings of the church are not all equivalent. The church’s pastoral ministry cannot be obsessed with the transmission of a disjointed multitude of doctrines to be imposed insistently. Proclamation in a missionary style focuses on the essentials, on the necessary things: this is also what fascinates and attracts more, what makes the heart burn, as it did for the disciples at Emmaus. We have to find a new balance; otherwise even the moral edifice of the church is likely to fall like a house of cards, losing the freshness and fragrance of the Gospel. The proposal of the Gospel must be more simple, profound, radiant. It is from this proposition that the moral consequences then flow.

“I say this also thinking about the preaching and content of our preaching. A beautiful homily, a genuine sermon must begin with the first proclamation, with the proclamation of salvation. There is nothing more solid, deep and sure than this proclamation. Then you have to do catechesis. Then you can draw even a moral consequence. But the proclamation of the saving love of God comes before moral and religious imperatives. Today sometimes it seems that the opposite order is prevailing. The homily is the touchstone to measure the pastor’s proximity and ability to meet his people, because those who preach must recognize the heart of their community and must be able to see where the desire for God is lively and ardent. The message of the Gospel, therefore, is not to be reduced to some aspects that, although relevant, on their own do not show the heart of the message of Jesus Christ.”

Of course, as we all know, Pope Francis's comments are such a huge departure from everything Benedict ever said ohwait... Excerpts.

"...Some said Benedict was a "conservative" and that he wasn't open-minded, caring, loving, or other accusations. These are not accurate descriptions and he doesn't deserve to be accused of such things. Rather, he (like Francis) is CATHOLIC. That means he doesn't fit into the neat political framework of being either liberal, conservative, progressive, traditionalist, moderate, etc.

Take these quotes from BXVI for example - most would call them "liberal":

**"It is deplorable that homosexual persons have been and are the object of violent malice in speech or in action. Such treatment deserves condemnation from the church's pastors wherever it occurs."

**“It is theologically and anthropologically important for woman to be at the center of Christianity. Through Mary, and the other holy women, the feminine element stands at the heart of the Christian religion.”

**"the prevalence of a selfish and individualistic mindset which also finds expression in an unregulated capitalism"

**"If we refuse to share what we have with the hungry and the poor, we make of our possessions a false god. How many voices in our materialist society tell us that happiness is to be found by acquiring as many possessions and luxuries as we can! But this is to make possessions into a false god."

So, what label should we put on Benedict? How about Catholic. Just as Benedict shouldn't be reduced to political labels, neither should Francis. It isn't fair to either of them..."

Read what they've written and what they've said. Study the men themselves, not what other people have said about them, and then you'll be able to spot the books and authors who reliably represent who Benedict and Francis really are. I'd recommend the following:

To understand Pope Benedict:

• What It Means to Be a Christian: Three Sermons
• The Ratzinger Report
• Salt of the Earth: The Church at the End of the Millennium- An Interview With Peter Seewald
• God and the World: A Conversation With Peter Seewald
• Light of the World: The Pope, The Church and the Signs Of The Times
• Jesus of Nazareth: From the Baptism in the Jordan to the Transfiguration
• Jesus of Nazareth: Holy Week: From the Entrance Into Jerusalem To The Resurrection
• Jesus of Nazareth: The Infancy Narratives
• The Vatican archive of his writings and public events.

To understand Pope Francis:

• On Heaven and Earth: Pope Francis on Faith, Family, and the Church in the Twenty-First Century
• Pope Francis: Conversations with Jorge Bergoglio: His Life in His Own Words
• The Vatican archive of his writings and public events.

UPDATE: Fr. Z has some very interesting comments on Pope Francis's interview here and here.

Ralph Winter, Hollywood Storytelling, and The Awesomeness of Les Miserables

Ralph Winter, producer of such films as the Star Trek, X-Men Trilogy and Fantastic Four feature-film series and Act One teacher, says true and important things. Homilists and preachers, take note! Excerpts:

...Ultimately my goal as a movie producer—and your goal in sharing the gospel—is to make your point stick in the audience’s mind. My friend, respected researcher George Barna, says that just two hours after a sermon, most people can’t remember the theme of the message they just heard. But years after seeing a movie, the audience can quote dialogue verbatim. When you have to process the question yourself, work at understanding the formula, and make an emotional connection, the message has a much better chance of sticking.

In my opinion, the film that should have won this year’s Oscar for Best Film is Les Miserables. Early in the movie (and the book), the confrontation of the bishop with former prisoner, Jean Valjean, is a classic and has been told and retold for 150 years since Victor Hugo wrote the original novel. The bishop forgives him for stealing from him, loves, protects, challenges and sends Jean Valjean on the greatest journey of his life. And very simply, the words of Valjean’s response show the gospel in action. Pastors, tell that story; use a video clip if necessary. Les Miserables is a timeless story that has captured what forgiveness and redemption really look like and mean, and is a clear sign post to what Christ has done for us...

And a great interview with Act One founding directress Barbara Nicolosi-Herrington here.

Barbara Nicolosi-Herrington, Catholic Storytelling, and Chestertonian Paradox

Your Brilliant Posts for the Day

George Weigel is witheringly scathing about the cardinatial closure of public comment.

Pixar’s 22 Rules of Storytelling.

O’Reilly-Colmes Family Spat Shows Why There’s Fox News…And There’s Everyone Else.  Excerpts:

...Remember, O’Reilly is the LeBron James at Fox News: He’s the network’s highest-paid, most influential, most revered player on the team. He’s authored multiple best-sellers, he’s host of a program that destroys everything in the ratings and has since 2001, and is such an influential personality that he receives regular guest invites on CBS, NBC, ABC, The View, Letterman and Leno.

Yet here’s Kirsten Powers, a liberal contributor, a fellow employee at Fox News who gets infinite crap on a daily basis from fellow liberals for sleeping with the enemy, telling him he’s full of it on his own program.

You want to know why Fox is #1?

Let me answer a question with a question: Could you ever picture this scenario happening at MSNBC or CNN?...

Economic Injustice: A Case Study  (Spoiler: It's about Wal-Mart).

Simcha Fisher is brilliant. Excerpts:

...We hear a lot about young people heading into a marriage and seized with a sudden panic when they realize that they're binding themselves for a lifetime to someone they hardly know, hardly can know. What a risk! But what frightens me is not what I'm exposing myself to. What frightens me is that I will be exposed -- yes, even after fifteen years of marriage, at a point when my husband certainly knows me, and most certainly still loves me. Even after fifteen years, I'm afraid that for the next forty years, I will keep up a charade of being a good wife and mother, a decent person, someone who learns and improves throughout my life . . . until I am very old, and I no longer have the mental wherewithal to hide who I really am.

When my grandmother got Alzheimer's, she lost her words, she lost her good sense, she lost her ability to do anything. She even forgot how to swallow food. But one of the last things that lingered was her personality. She saw someone holding a peeled banana, and from the miscellaneous soup of vocabulary that her brain had become, there bobbed up a little expression of sympathy for the poor denuded fruit. "Poor thing!" she crooned. I showed up wearing jeans with a hole in the knee, and she followed me around, stooping and pawing at my leg, trying to piece the denim back together with her bare hands -- because that is what she did. She fixed things. She was fundamentally a sympathetic person, a healer, and this trait remained long after she was capable of actually being helpful.

What will come up to the surface when I'm no longer able to hide? This is the question that's been following me around this Lent, whispering in my ear like a malign old woman who knows me to the core and cannot stand what she knows. Selfish, selfish, and you'll never change.

I know this is not the voice of God....

As is Jennifer Fulwiler. Excerpts:

...It was only late in the conversion process that I came to see that I entirely misunderstood the significance of the idea that God is love. I was thunderstruck when I realized that these Christians weren't using an awkward phrasing to convey the opinion that God is a super-dooper nice guy; they were saying that God is, literally, the source and essence of all that we call love. To paraphrase a point that the Cynical Christian made in this excellent post, when we say that "God is love" we're not describing what God is, we're describing what love is -- Love is God.

It was a mind-blowing revelation, one that fundamentally changed the way I approached God and the search for truth. And the more I talk with fellow converts and potential converts, the more I've come to believe that this is the most important concept for a seeker to understand. Here are a few reasons why:...

The Strength of Europe

and the wisdom of China.  Excerpts:

...M. Shu desired for China a complete rejuvenation, and he desired that in every sphere, the country should emerge from the condition of stagnation in which the best ancestral traditions, deformed and become sterile, were leading to a result diametrically opposed to the spirit which had given them birth and which had enabled them in the past to give us our finest epochs of richness and splendor.

He wanted a modernization which should cause the spirit of Yao, of Choen and of Yu, to live again in the world of today. He studied Europe, seeking to grasp the principle of its best institutions, the source of its progress, seeking to discover, in order to win them and to give them to China, the moral forces which assured the balance of European society, and to distinguish them sharply from the forces, from the passions and infatuations, which compromised that balance.

Christianity, the Church, and in particular the Catholic Church, imposed themselves on the respectful attention of M. Shu. He had been struck by the existence of a world-wide spiritual government, of which the history went back right to the Founder of the Christian Religion. So as to study this fact more closely, in the course of a journey which took him to Europe, he had stopped in Rome and had there spent the Christmas holidays.

...M. Shu went on,

The strength of Europe is not to be found in her armaments; it is not to be found in her science; it is to be found in her religion. In the course of your diplomatic career you will have occasion to study the Christian religion. It comprehends various branches and societies.

Take the most ancient branch of that religion, that which goes back most nearly to its origins. Enter into it. Study its doctrine, practice its commandments, observe its government, closely follow all its works. And later on, when you have ended your career, perhaps you will have the opportunity to go still farther.


In this most ancient branch, choose the most ancient society. If you can do so, enter into it also. Make yourself a follower, and study the interior life which must be the secret of it. When you have understood and won the secret of that life, when you have grasped the heart of the strength of the religion of Christ, bring them and give them to China...

The Great Japanese (Catholic) Novelist

A good overview.  Excerpts:

The Japanese novelist Shusaku Endo – described by Graham Greene as one of the century's greatest writers – was always wrestling with the relation between Christianity and Japan. In an interview, he said:

"But after all it seems to me that Catholicism is not a solo, but a symphony. It fits, of course, man's sinless side, but unless a religion can find a place for man's sinful side in the ensemble, it is a false religion. If I have trust in Catholicism, it is because I find in it much more possibility than in any other religion for presenting the full symphony of humanity. The other religions have almost no fullness; they have but solo parts. Only Catholicism can present the full symphony. And unless there is in that symphony a part that corresponds to Japan's mud swamp, it cannot be a true religion. What exactly this part is – that is what I want to find out" (cited in Emi Mase-Hasegawa, Christ in Japanese Culture: Theological Themes in Shusaku Endo's Literary Works, 72)...

What Inculturation Looks Like

These are quite lovely.