Pope Francis' quotes, homilies are often deeply pastoral. LCWR & sisters = his natural allies!
2/23/2014 - Homily for new cardinals: "The Holy Spirit also speaks to us today through the words of Saint Paul: 'You are God’s temple … God’s temple is holy, and that temple you are' (1 Cor 3:16-17). In this temple, which we are, an existential liturgy is being celebrated: that of goodness, forgiveness, service; in a word,the liturgy of love. This temple of ours is defiled if we neglect our duties towards our neighbour. Whenever the least of our brothers and sisters finds a place in our hearts, it is God himself who finds a place there. When that brother or sister is shut out, it is God himself who is not beingwelcomed. A heart without love is like a deconsecrated church, a building withdrawn from God’s service and given over to another use."
12/14/12 - Andrea Tornielli interviews Pope Francis about Christmas, hunger in the world, the suffering of children, the reform of the Roman Curia, women cardinals, the Institute for the Works of Religion (IOR), and the upcoming visit to the Holy Land.
"When God meets us he tells us two things. The first thing he says is: have hope. God always opens doors, he never closes them. He is the father who opens doors for us. The second thing he says is: don’t be afraid of tenderness. When Christians forget about hope and tenderness they become a cold Church, that loses its sense of direction and is held back by ideologies and worldly attitudes, whereas God’s simplicity tells you: go forward, I am a Father who caresses you."
"God never gives someone a gift they are not capable of receiving. If he gives us the gift of Christmas, it is because we all have the ability to understand and receive it. All of us from the holiest of saints to the greatest of sinners; from the purest to the most corrupt among us. Even a corrupt person has this ability: poor him, it’s probably a bit rusty but he has it. Christmas in this time of conflicts is a call from God who gives us this gift. Do we want to receive Him or do we prefer other gifts? In a world afflicted by war, this Christmas makes me think of God’s patience. The Bible clearly shows that God’s main virtue is that He is love. He waits for us; he never tires of waiting for us. He gives us the gift and then waits for us."
Tornielli: "What do you have to say about this innocent suffering [of seriously ill children]?" Pope Francis: "When the child asks a question, he or she doesn’t wait to hear the full answer, they immediately start bombarding you with more 'whys'. What they are really looking for, more than an explanation, is a reassuring look on their parent’s face. When I come across a suffering child, the only prayer that comes to mind is the “why” prayer. Why Lord? He doesn’t explain anything to me. But I can feel Him looking at me. So I can say: You know why, I don’t and You won’t tell me, but You’re looking at me and I trust You, Lord, I trust your gaze.”
Tornielli: "The most striking part of the Exhortation was where it refers to an economy that 'kills'… Pope Francis: “There is nothing in the Exhortation that cannot be found in the social Doctrine of the Church... The only specific quote I used was the one regarding the 'trickle-down theories' which assume that economic growth, encouraged by a free market, will inevitably succeed in bringing about greater justice and social inclusiveness in the world. The promise was that when the glass was full, it would overflow, benefitting the poor. But what happens instead, is that when the glass is full, it magically gets bigger nothing ever comes out for the poor."
Of ecumenical relations and meetings with Orthodox prelates: "I believe that the way forward is this: friendship, common work and prayer for unity. We blessed each other; one brother blesses the other, one brother is called Peter and the other Andrew, Mark, Thomas…”."Today there is an ecumenism of blood. In some countries they kill Christians for wearing a cross or having a Bible and before they kill them they do not ask them whether they are Anglican, Lutheran, Catholic or Orthodox. Their blood is mixed. To those who kill we are Christians. We are united in blood, even though we have not yet managed to take necessary steps towards unity between us..."
"[In Evangelii Gaudium] I spoke about baptism and communion as spiritual food that helps one to go on; it is to be considered a remedy not a prize. Some immediately thought about the sacraments for remarried divorcees, but I did not refer to any specific cases; I simply wanted to point out a principle. We must try to facilitate people’s faith, rather than control it."
[On reform of the Curia] "At the last meeting, the eight cardinals told me the time has come for concrete proposals and at the next meeting in February they will present their suggestions to me. I am always present at the meetings, except for Wednesday mornings when I have the General Audience. But I don’t speak, I just listen and that does me good."
"Politics is noble; it is one of the highest forms of charity, as Paul VI used to say. We sully it when we mix it with business. The relationship between the Church and political power can also be corrupted if common good is not the only converging point.”
Tornielli: "May I ask you if the Church will have women cardinals in the future?" Pope Francis: “I don’t know where this idea sprang from. Women in the Church must be valued not “clericalised”. Whoever thinks of women as cardinals suffers a bit from clericalism.”
12/7/13 - "Unfortunately, in our time, so full of so many hopes and achievements, there are powers and forces that end up producing a ‘throw-away culture’; and this tends to become a common mentality. The victims of this culture are its most weak and fragile humans – the unborn, the poor, the elderly sick, severely disabled…those who risk being ‘thrown away,’ expelled by a mechanism that must be efficient at all costs.” “This false model of man and of society effects a practical atheism (by) denying, de facto, the Word of God that says, ‘let us make man in our image, according to our likeness.’”
12/3/13 - "You can’t imagine a Church without joy,” the pontiff explained in his Dec. 3 homily, “and the joy of the Church lies precisely in this: to proclaim the name of Jesus.” the peace of which the prophet speaks “is a peace that is so moving, it is a peace of joy, a peace of praise,” which we can also say is “noisy, in praise, a peace that bears fruit in becoming a mother of new children.”
12/2/13 - Christmas “isn’t just a temporal celebration or the memory of a beautiful (event); Christmas is more…Christmas is an encounter!”
12/1/13 - “For the great human family it is necessary to renew always the common horizon toward which we are journeying. The horizon of hope! This is the horizon that makes a good journey." "“Let us rediscover the beauty of being together along the way: the Church, with her vocation and mission, and the whole of humanity, the people, the civilizations, the cultures, all together on the paths of time.” "We bet on hope, on the hope of peace, and it will be possible! The journey is never finished, just as in each of our own lives, there is always a need to restart, to rise again, to recover a sense of the goal of one’s own existence."
11/30/13 - At evening prayer with local university students: "The socio-cultural context in which you are placed is sometimes weighed down by mediocrity and boredom. We must not resign ourselves to the monotony of everyday life, but cultivate large-scale projects, going beyond the ordinary: don’t let your youthful enthusiasm be stolen!” Christian youth must find the balance between independent thought and fidelity to the truth, he noted. “The model to follow is not the sphere, in which every protrusion is leveled and every difference disappears; instead, the model is the prism, which includes a multiplicity of elements and respects unity in variety.... In fact, the plurality of thought and of individuality reflects the multiform wisdom of God when it approaches truth, when it approaches the good, when it approaches beauty, with honesty and intellectual rigor.”
11/29/13 - "What path does the Lord want? Always with the spirit of intelligence with which to understand the signs of the times. It is beautiful to ask the Lord for this grace." “What is the meaning of what is happening now? These are the signs of the times!” “Restricted thought, equal thought, weak thought, a thought so widespread. The spirit of the world does not want us to ask ourselves before God: ‘But why, why this other, why did this happen?’” This is “what Jesus asks of us: free thought, the thought of a man and a women who are part of the people of God, and salvation is exactly this!”
11/26/13 - Pope Francis' apostolic exhortation, The Joy of the Gospel, is full of so many quotes that it will need its own section. it is long, and it is worth reading in full.
11/25/13 - Speaking of the day's readings of the young Jewish men in the book of Daniel, and of the widow's mite:
“Both of them - the widow and the youth - have risked something. In their risk they chose the Lord, with a big heart, without personal interest, without pettiness. They did not have a stingy attitude. The Lord, the Lord is everything. The Lord is God and they entrusted themselves to the Lord.” "When we listen to the life of the martyrs, when we read in the papers of the persecution against Christians today, we think of these brothers and sisters in extreme situations that make this choice."
11/24/13 - "“The attitude demanded of us as true believers is that of recognizing and accepting in our lives the centrality of Jesus Christ, in our thoughts, in our words, and in our works."
10/1/13 - Pope Francis invited the atheist founder of Italy's biggest daily newspaper, La Repubblica, to come by for conversation on 9/24/13. Worth reading in full! (On July 7 and August 9, Scalfari had published questions for Pope Francis; Francis surprised him by writing in reply on September 11.) Some highlights from Pope Francis 9/24:
"Proselytism is solemn nonsense, it makes no sense. We need to get to know each other, listen to each other and improve our knowledge of the world around us. Sometimes after a meeting I want to arrange another one because new ideas are born and I discover new needs. This is important: to get to know people, listen, expand the circle of ideas. The world is crisscrossed by roads that come closer together and move apart, but the important thing is that they lead towards the Good."
"Everyone has his own idea of good and evil and must choose to follow the good and fight evil as he conceives them. That would be enough to make the world a better place."
"The Son of God became incarnate in the souls of men to instill the feeling of brotherhood. All are brothers and all children of God. Abba, as he called the Father. I will show you the way, he said. Follow me and you will find the Father and you will all be his children and he will take delight in you. Agape, the love of each one of us for the other, from the closest to the furthest, is in fact the only way that Jesus has given us to find the way of salvation and of the Beatitudes."
"Heads of the Church have often been narcissists, flattered and thrilled by their courtiers. The court is the leprosy of the papacy."
"The curia...It is what in an army is called the quartermaster's office, it manages the services that serve the Holy See. But it has one defect: it is Vatican-centric. It sees and looks after the interests of the Vatican, which are still, for the most part, temporal interests. This Vatican-centric view neglects the world around us. I do not share this view and I'll do everything I can to change it. The Church is or should go back to being a community of God's people, and priests, pastors and bishops who have the care of souls, are at the service of the people of God."
"When I meet a clericalist, I suddenly become anti-clerical. Clericalism should not have anything to do with Christianity. St. Paul, who was the first to speak to the Gentiles, the pagans, to believers in other religions, was the first to teach us that."
"A religion without mystics is a philosophy."
"Someone who is not touched by grace may be a person without blemish and without fear, as they say, but he will never be like a person who has touched grace. This is Augustine's insight."
"Francis is great because he is everything. He is a man who wants to do things, wants to build, he founded an order and its rules, he is an itinerant and a missionary, a poet and a prophet, he is mystical. He found evil in himself and rooted it out. He loved nature, animals, the blade of grass on the lawn and the birds flying in the sky. But above all he loved people, children, old people, women. He is the most shining example of that agape we talked about earlier."
""Francis wanted a mendicant order and an itinerant one. Missionaries who wanted to meet, listen, talk, help, to spread faith and love. Especially love. And he dreamed of a poor Church that would take care of others, receive material aid and use it to support others, with no concern for itself. 800 years have passed since then and times have changed, but the ideal of a missionary, poor Church is still more than valid. This is still the Church that Jesus and his disciples preached about."
[In response to Scandaro's comment that practicing Catholics are a minority in Italy and the world] "Being a minority is actually a strength. We have to be a leavening of life and love and the leavening is infinitely smaller than the mass of fruits, flowers and trees that are born out of it. I believe I have already said that our goal is not to proselytize but to listen to needs, desires and disappointments, despair, hope. We must restore hope to young people, help the old, be open to the future, spread love. Be poor among the poor. We need to include the excluded and preach peace. Vatican II, inspired by Pope Paul VI and John, decided to look to the future with a modern spirit and to be open to modern culture. The Council Fathers knew that being open to modern culture meant religious ecumenism and dialogue with non-believers. But afterwards very little was done in that direction. I have the humility and ambition to want to do something."
"The first thing I decided was to appoint a group of eight cardinals to be my advisers. Not courtiers but wise people who share my own feelings. This is the beginning of a Church with an organization that is not just top-down but also horizontal. When Cardinal Martini talked about focusing on the councils and synods he knew how long and difficult it would be to go in that direction. Gently, but firmly and tenaciously."
"God is the light that illuminates the darkness, even if it does not dissolve it, and a spark of divine light is within each of us. In the letter I wrote to you, you will remember I said that our species will end but the light of God will not end and at that point it will invade all souls and it will all be in everyone."
9/23/13 - "After the Pope's Interview: Three Hard Things" by Jesuit Father Francis X. Clooney. in America magazine. "First, Francis expects us actually to discern, to find the will of God out there before us, in the large and small, easy and difficult things before us... Second,...A call to discernment as the church’s way forward requires tremendous effort at every level, a free and grown-up search for the will of God, and not determining the future by what had seemed best in the past... Third, Francis is giving us a lot to do... Where there are such great needs, there the church must be." Bottom line: "No one can be a spectator in Francis' fresh vision of church."
9/19/13 - Pope Francis made headlines internationally with his astonishing interview, published in multiple Jesuit periodicals around the world. Here are reports in the NY Times and in NCR. America magazine was one of the publishers of the full text. Jesuit Father Antonio Spadaro, editor in chief of La Civiltà Cattolica, conducted the interview in person, in Italian, over three days in August. Editorial teams at La Civiltà Cattolica, America, and several other major Jesuit journals around the world had proposed questions to Father Spadaro. After Pope Francis approved the Italian text, America commissioned a team of five independent experts to translate it into English.
Father Spadaro described his experience interviewing Pope Francis: "The pope had spoken earlier about his great difficulty in giving interviews. He said that he prefers to think rather than provide answers on the spot in interviews. In this interview the pope interrupted what he was saying in response to a question several times, in order to add something to an earlier response. Talking with Pope Francis is a kind of volcanic flow of ideas that are bound up with each other. Even taking notes gives me an uncomfortable feeling, as if I were trying to suppress a surging spring of dialogue."
Some quotes from Pope Francis follow - but please read the whole interview. It is truly worth your time.
"In my experience as superior in the Society [of Jesus, the Jesuits]... I did not always do the necessary consultation. And this was not a good thing. My style of government as a Jesuit at the beginning had many faults. That was a difficult time for the Society: an entire generation of Jesuits had disappeared. Because of this I found myself provincial when I was still very young. I was only 36 years old. That was crazy. I had to deal with difficult situations, and I made my decisions abruptly and by myself. Yes, but I must add one thing: when I entrust something to someone, I totally trust that person. He or she must make a really big mistake before I rebuke that person."
"I have never been a right-winger. It was my authoritarian way of making decisions that created problems."
“The Lord has allowed this growth in knowledge of government through my faults and my sins. So as Archbishop of Buenos Aires, I had a meeting with the six auxiliary bishops every two weeks, and several times a year with the council of priests. They asked questions and we opened the floor for discussion. This greatly helped me to make the best decisions. But now I hear some people tell me: ‘Do not consult too much, and decide by yourself.’ Instead, I believe that consultation is very important. I do not want token consultations, but real consultations...."
"All the faithful, considered as a whole, are infallible in matters of belief..."
"This church...is the home of all, not a small chapel that can hold only a small group of selected people. We must not reduce...the universal church to a nest protecting our mediocrity. "
"The young Catholic churches, as they grow, develop a synthesis of faith, culture and life, and so it is a synthesis different from the one developed by the ancient churches. For me, the relationship between the ancient Catholic churches and the young ones is similar to the relationship between young and elderly people in a society. They build the future, the young ones with their strength and the others with their wisdom. "
"I see clearly 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’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 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."
"A person once asked me, in a provocative manner, if I approved of homosexuality. I replied with another question: ‘Tell me: when God looks at a gay person, does he endorse the existence of this person with love, or reject and condemn this person?’ We must always consider the person."
"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."
“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 proclamation of the saving love of God comes before moral and religious imperatives. Today sometimes it seems that the opposite order is prevailing...”
"The feminine genius is needed wherever we make important decisions. The challenge today is this: to think about the specific place of women also in those places where the authority of the church is exercised for various areas of the church.” [Will we see a day when the "specific place of women" is everywhere?]
"If one has the answers to all the questions—that is the proof that God is not with him. It means that he is a false prophet using religion for himself. The great leaders of the people of God, like Moses, have always left room for doubt. You must leave room for the Lord, not for our certainties; we must be humble.... God is always a surprise, so you never know where and how you will find him. "
"There is always the lurking danger of living in a laboratory. Ours is not a ‘lab faith,’ but a ‘journey faith,’ a historical faith… You cannot bring home the frontier, but you have to live on the border and be audacious.”
"The deposit of faith... grows and is strengthened with time. Here, human self-understanding changes with time and so also human consciousness deepens. Let us think of when slavery was accepted or the death penalty was allowed without any problem. So we grow in the understanding of the truth… The view of the church’s teaching as a monolith to defend without nuance or different understandings is wrong.”
8/19/13 - "Faith is not a decoration, as if it were simply the icing on the cake! Faith involves choosing God as a basic criterion for life, and God is not empty, it is not neutral, God is love....Faith and violence are incompatible! Faith and violence are incompatible! The Christian is not violent, but he is strong with the force of love."
8/18/13 - Vatican Radio reports that Pope Francis spoke of Jesus' words in Luke 12:51: "Do you think I came to bring peace on earth? No, I tell you, but division." Pope Francis emphasized that the Gospel does not authorize the use of force to spread the faith. It is "just the opposite: the true strength of the Christian is the power of truth and love, which leads to the renunciation of all violence. Faith and violence are incompatible."
8/17/13 - "We cannot sleep peacefully while babies are dying of hunger and the elderly are without medical assistance." - Tweet from @pontifex.
8/9/13 - A surprise visit to Vatican utilities workers, reported by L'Osservatore Romano and Vatican radio: "On a normal August morning, when the city seemed empty, an ordinary work day had just begun in the carpentry workshop." Pope Francis suddenly appeared at the door with a simple "good day." He talked with the workers around their work benches, shook hands, and moved on to the adjacent smithy and the heating and hydraulic plants. He asked employees about their jobs, and listened with interest to a story from a worker on the morning shift. Just 20 minutes - but what a great way for Vatican workers to start the day!
7/25/13 - "I want to tell you something. What is it that I expect as a consequence of World Youth Day? I want a mess. We knew that in Rio there would be great disorder, but I want trouble in the dioceses!" he said, speaking off the cuff in his native Spanish. "I want to see the church get closer to the people. I want to get rid of clericalism, the mundane, this closing ourselves off within ourselves, in our parishes, schools or structures. Because these need to get out!" - at a spontaneously scheduled meeting with Argentine youth
7/25/13 - "No one can remain insensitive to the inequalities that persist in the world!" Francis told a crowd of thousands who braved a cold rain and stood in a muddy soccer field to welcome him at World Youth Day in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. "No amount of peace-building will be able to last, nor will harmony and happiness be attained in a society that ignores, pushes to the margins or excludes a part of itself." - to residents of Varginha, a violent slum area in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. According to John L. Allen, Jr. in NCR, Pope Francis "also argued that in the fight against poverty, offering material assistance isn't enough. It's also critical, he suggested, to build up the moral fiber of a society by defending certain core values:
7/8/13 - [Background: For his first official trip outside of Rome, Pope Francis chose the tiny Sicilian island of Lampedusa and celebrated mass to commemorate thousands of migrants who have died crossing the sea from North Africa as they sought refuge in Italy. Lapedusa is one of the main migrant entry points into the European Union. He celebrated mass in a sports field that served as a reception center for tens of thousands of mainly Muslim migrants who fled Arab Spring unrest in North Africa in 2011, greatly increasing an exodus that has gone on for years.He praised the local people and security forces who "show attention to people on their voyage to something better.... You offer an example of solidarity!"]
"The culture of well-being, that makes us think of ourselves, that makes us insensitive to the cries of others, that makes us live in soap bubbles, that are beautiful but are nothing, are illusions of futility, of the transient, that brings indifference to others, that brings even the globalization of indifference....We are accustomed to the suffering of others, it doesn’t concern us, it’s none of our business.... 'Adam, where are you?' 'Where is your brother?' These are the two questions that God puts at the beginning of the story of humanity, and that He also addresses to the men and women of our time, even to us. But I want to set before us a third question: 'Who among us has wept for these things, and things like this?' Who has wept for the deaths of these brothers and sisters?
Earlier in his homily, the pope saluted "the dear Muslim immigrants that are beginning the fast of Ramadan, with best wishes for abundant spiritual fruits. The Church is near to you in the search for a more dignified life for yourselves and for your families. I say to you 'O’ scia’!' [trans.: a friendly greeting in the local dialect]."
7/6/13 - “In the Christian life, even in the life of the Church, there are old structures, passing structures: it is necessary to renew them! And the Church has always been attentive to this, with dialogue with cultures . . . It always allows itself to be renewed according to places, times, and persons.... Don’t be afraid of that! Don’t be afraid of the newness of the Gospel! Don’t be afraid of the newness that the Holy Spirit works in us! Don’t be afraid of the renewal of structures!”
6/26/13 - "No one is useless in the Church! And should anyone tell you, 'Go home! You're useless!' that is not true. No one is useless in the church. We are all needed to build this Temple! And no one is secondary: 'Ah, I am the most important one in the Church!' No! We are all equal in the eyes of God. All! All! But one of you might say, "Mr. Pope, sir, you are not equal to us.' But I am just like you. We are all equal.
"If we ask ourselves, 'Where can we meet God? Where can we enter into communion with Him through Christ? Where can we find the light of the Holy Spirit to enlighten our lives?' the answer is, 'In the People of God, among us, for we are Church -- there we shall meet Jesus, we shall meet the Holy Spirit, we shall meet the Father. "
6/22/13 - "We must be careful not to be confused about true richness. There are risky treasures that threaten to seduce us, but must be left behind. Treasures gathered in life that are destroyed by death. I have never seen a moving van following a funeral procession. Love, charity, service, patience, goodness, (and) tenderness are very beautiful treasures – these we bring with us. The other things, no.”
6/20/13 - "Jesus has promised us the Holy Spirit: it is He who teaches us, from within, from the heart, how to say 'Father' and how to say 'our'. Today we ask the Holy Spirit to teach us to say 'Father' and to be able to say 'our', and thus make peace with all our enemies."
6/19/13 - The scribes and the Pharisees "are intellectuals without talent, ethicists without goodness, the bearers of museum beauty. These are the hypocrites that Jesus rebukes so strongly. There are even hypocrites... who make a show of fasting, of giving alms, of praying. These do not know beauty, they do not know love, these do not know the truth: they are small, cowardly. We think about the hypocrisy in the Church: how bad it makes all of us.... [In contrast,] the publican... prayed with humble simplicity, 'Have mercy on me, O Lord, a sinner'... with concrete sins, not theoretical. But all of us also have grace, the grace that comes from Jesus Christ: the grace of joy; the grace of magnanimity, of largesse. Hypocrites do not know what joy is, what largesse is, what magnanimity is.”
6/18/13 - Vatican Radio says Pope Francis began his homily with questions: How can we love our enemies? Those who “bomb and kill so many people?" "Those who out of their for love money prevent the elderly from accessing the necessary medicine and leave them to die"? Those who only seek "their own best interests, power for themselves and do so much evil?" "Jesus says, we must do this! Because otherwise you will be like the tax collectors, like pagans. Not Christians.'"
6/15/13 - ""Philosophers say that peace is a certain ordered tranquility: everything is tidy and quiet ... That is not the Christian peace! Christian peace is an uneasy peace, not a quiet peace: it is an uneasy peace, which goes on to carry this message of reconciliation. The Christian Peace pushes us to move forward.... What the Lord wants from us is to announce this reconciliation, which is his own core message."
6/13/13 - "There is no need to go to a psychologist to know that when we denigrate another person it is because we are unable to grow up and need to belittle others, to feel more important. ...Jesus, with all simplicity, says: 'Do not speak ill of one another. Do not denigrate one another. Do not belittle one another.' In the end we are all traveling on the same road. We are all traveling on that road that will take us to the very end. If we do not choose a fraternal path, it will end badly, for the person who insults and the insulted. If we are not able to keep our tongues in check, we lose.... Natural aggression, that of Cain toward Abel, repeats itself throughout history. I would ask the Lord to give us all the grace to watch our tongues, to watch what we say about others. It is a small penance, but it bears a lot of fruit."
6/12/13 - "The law reaches its maturity when it becomes the law of the Spirit. Moving forward on this road is somewhat risky, but it is the only road to maturity. The law of the Spirit makes us free! This freedom frightens us a little, because we are afraid we will confuse the freedom of the Spirit with human freedom. We, at this moment in the history of the Church, we cannot go backwards or off the track! The track is that of freedom in the Holy Spirit that makes us free, in continuous discernment of God's will to move forward on this path, without going back and without going off-track."
6/12/13 - "What is the law of the People of God? It is the law of love, love for God and love for our neighbor according to the new commandment that the Lord left us (cf. Jn 13:34). It is a love, however, that is not sterile sentimentality or something vague, it is recognizing God as the only Lord of life and, at the same time, accepting the other as a true brother, overcoming divisions, rivalry, misunderstandings, selfishness; the two things go together. We have still so far to go to be able to live concretely according to this new law, the law of the Holy Spirit working within us, the law of charity, of love! When we see in the many wars between Christians in the newspapers or on TV, how can the people of God understand this? Within the people of God there are so many wars! And in neighborhoods, in workplaces, so many wars due to envy, jealousy. Even within the same family, there are so many internal wars. We must ask the Lord to help us understand this law of love.... At least let’s say to the Lord: 'Lord, I am angry with him or with her. I pray for him and for her. I pray to you.' To pray for those with whom we are angry. It's a big step in this law of love. Let's do it today!
"What mission does this people have? To bring to the world the hope and the salvation of God: to be a sign of the love of God who calls all to be friends of His; to be the yeast that ferments the dough, the salt that gives flavour and preserves from decay, the light that brightens. Just as I said, it is enough to open a newspaper, and we see that around us there is the presence of evil, the Devil is at work. But I would like to say in a loud voice: God is stronger! ...And I would like to add that reality which is sometimes dark and marked by evil can change, if we are the first to bring the light of the Gospel especially with our lives. If in a stadium, let’s think of the Olympic Stadium in Rome, or that of San Lorenzo in Buenos Aires, if on a dark night one person lights up a lamp, you can barely see it, but if each of over seventy thousand spectators switches on his own light, the whole Stadium lights up. Let's make our lives a light of Christ; and together we will bring the light of the Gospel to the whole world." - Pope Francis in his weekly public audience
6/11/13 - "St. Peter did not have a bank account, and when he had to pay taxes, the Lord sent him to the sea to catch fish and find the money in the fish, to pay. Philip, when he met Queen Candace’s finance minister, did not think, 'Ah, good, let’s set up an organization to support the Gospel ...' No! He did not strike a ‘deal’ with him: he preached, baptized and left.... There is the temptation to seek strength elsewhere than in grace. This creates a little confusion.... [and] proclamation becomes proselytizing. Our strength is the grace of the Gospel. ...The Church does not grow through proselytizing but by drawing people to her [through] those who freely proclaim the grace of salvation.
"Everything is grace. Everything. And what are the signs of when an apostle lives this grace? There are so many, but I will underline only two: First, poverty. The proclamation of the Gospel must follow the path of poverty. The testimony of this poverty: I have no wealth, my wealth is the gift I received, God: this grace is our wealth! And this poverty saves us from becoming managers, entrepreneurs ... The works of the Church must be brought forward, and some are a little complex, but with a heart of poverty, not with the heart of an investment broker or an entrepreneur… The Church is not an NGO: it is something else, something more important, and this is the result of grace. Received and proclaimed". Poverty "is one of the signs of this gratuity.
"These two are the signs of an apostle who lives this grace: poverty and the ability to praise the Lord. And when we find the apostles who want to build a rich Church and a Church without the grace of praise, the Church becomes old, the Church becomes an NGO, the Church becomes lifeless.... Let us move forward in preaching the Gospel."
6/8/13 - "We would do well to ask ourselves: 'With the things that happen in life, I ask myself the question: what is the Lord saying to me with His Word, right now?'. This is called keeping the Word of God, because the Word of God is precisely the message that the Lord gives us in every moment. Let us... safeguard it with our memory. And safeguard it with our hope. We ask the Lord for the grace to receive the Word of God and keep it."
6/7/13 - When Pope Francis met with about 7,000 school children from Jesuit schools in Italy and Albania, he set aside his prepared remarks as "boring" and instead answered questions from a few of the children. A boy told the pope that he has doubts about his faith. Pope Francis replied, "There are days of darkness and some days of falls, one falls. But always think this, don’t be afraid of the failures, don’t be afraid of the falls.... [I]n the art of falling what is important isn’t not falling, but not remaining down.... This is beautiful, working on this each day, this walking humanly, but it is ugly and boring to walk alone. Walk in community with friends and it helps us arrive to the end where we need to arrive." A young girl asked him if he still keeps his friends in Argentina. He answered, "I'’ve only been Pope for two and a half months and my friends are very far from here, but they write me. You can’t live without friends, that’s important.” Another child asked why he decided to live in Saint Martha’s House instead of the Papal Apartments in the Vatican palace. “I can’t live alone, do you understand?” he remarked. “It's not a question of my personal virtue, it's just that I can't live alone. A professor asked me this question, ‘Why don't you go live there?’ and I answered, ‘Listen, professor, it’s for psychiatric reasons’ because that’s my personality.'” He also commented, "I didn't want to be pope." And he reminded the children, “Poverty today is a cry, we all have to think if we can become a little poorer, all of us have to do this."
6/8/13 - "We would do well to ask ourselves: 'With the things that happen in life, I ask myself the question: what is the Lord saying to me with His Word, right now?' This is called keeping the Word of God, because the Word of God is precisely the message that the Lord gives us in every moment. Let us... safeguard it with our memory. And safeguard it with our hope. We ask the Lord for the grace to receive the Word of God and keep it."
6/5/13 - Pope Francis spoke of the Sadducees who present to Jesus the difficult case of a woman who is the widow of seven men. “The Sadducees were talking about this woman as if she were a laboratory, all aseptic - hers was an [abstract] moral [problem]. When we think of the people who suffer so much, do we think of them as though they were an [abstract moral conundrum], pure ideas, ‘but in this case ... this case ...’, or do we think about them with our hearts, with our flesh, too? I do not like it when people speak about tough situations in an academic and not a human manner, sometimes with statistics ... and that’s it. In the Church there are many people in this situation.... Pray for them. They must come into my heart, they must be a [cause of] restlessness for me: my brother is suffering, my sister suffers. Here [is] the mystery of the communion of saints: pray to the Lord, ‘But, Lord, look at that person: he cries, he is suffering. Pray, let me say, with the flesh: that our flesh pray. Not with ideas. Praying with the heart.”
6/2/13 - "Wars are always madness: all is lost in war, all is to be gained in peace."
5/25/13 - Today Pope Francis urged Catholics to open doors, welcome people - not just aim "to control the faith." E.g.: "Think about a single mother who goes to church, in the parish and to the secretary she says: 'I want my child baptized.' And then this Christian, this Christian says: 'No, you cannot because you’re not married!' But look, this girl who had the courage to carry her pregnancy and not to return her son to the sender, what is it? A closed door! This is not zeal! It is far from the Lord! It does not open doors! And so when we are on this street, have this attitude, we do not do good to people, the people, the People of God, but Jesus instituted the seven sacraments with this attitude and we are establishing the eighth: the sacrament of pastoral customs!"
5/19 - “If investments in the banks fail, ‘Oh, it’s a tragedy,’ ” he said, speaking extemporaneously for more than 40 minutes at a Pentecost vigil, after a private audience with the German chancellor, Angela Merkel, the architect of Europe’s austerity policies. “But if people die of hunger or don’t have food or health, nothing happens. This is our crisis today.”
5/19 - Pentecost homily - "'All of them were filled with the Holy Spirit', who unleashed his irresistible power with amazing consequences.... Are we open to 'God’s surprises'? Or are we closed and fearful before the newness of the Holy Spirit? Do we have the courage to strike out along the new paths which God’s newness sets before us, or do we resist, barricaded in transient structures which have lost their capacity for openness to what is new? We would do well to ask ourselves these questions all through the day." "One of Fathers of the Church has an expression which I love: the Holy Spirit himself is harmony – 'Ipse harmonia est'. He is indeed harmony. Only the Spirit can awaken diversity, plurality and multiplicity, while at the same time building unity.... let us ask ourselves: Am I open to the harmony of the Holy Spirit, overcoming every form of exclusivity? Do I let myself be guided by him, living in the Church and with the Church?"
5/10/13 - "A Christian is a man or a woman of joy! Jesus teaches us this, the church teaches us this. If we keep this joy to ourselves it will make us sick in the end, our hearts will grow old and wrinkled and our faces will no longer transmit that great joy only nostalgia, melancholy which is not healthy. Sometimes these melancholy Christians faces have more in common with pickled peppers than the joy of having a beautiful life. Joy cannot be held at heel: it must be let go. Joy is a pilgrim virtue. It is a gift that walks, walks on the path of life, that walks with Jesus: preaching, proclaiming Jesus, proclaiming joy, lengthens and widens that path."
4/1713 - "To say it clearly, the Holy Spirit annoys us. Because he moves us, he makes us journey, he pushes the Church to go forward. And we are like Peter at the Transfiguration: 'Oh, how wonderful it is for us to be here, all together!' But let it not inconvenience us. We would like the Holy Spirit to doze off. We want to subdue the Holy Spirit. And that just will not work. For he is God and he is that wind that comes and goes, and you do not know from where. He is the strength of God; it is he who gives us consolation and strengthen to continue forward.... Even in our personal life, in our private lives, the same thing happens: the Spirit pushes us to take a more evangelical path, and we [say]: 'But no, it goes like this, Lord'... Do not oppose the Holy Spirit. It is the Spirit who makes us free, with that freedom from Jesus, by that freedom of the sons of God!"
In the same homily 4/17/13 - “Vatican Council II was a beautiful work of the Holy Spirit. Think of Pope John: he seemed a good parish priest and he was obedient to the Holy Spirit. But after 50 years, have we done everything which the Holy Spirit told us in the council, in that continuity in the Church's growth, which was the council? No. We celebrate its anniversary [as if erecting] a monument, [but] we do not wish to change. There are voices which would have us go backwards. This is called 'to be stiff-necked', this we call wishing 'to subdue the Holy Spirit', this means becoming 'foolish and slow of heart'.”
Reflecting these and other actions by Pope Francis, on 5/25/13 the New York Times noted widespread new enthusiasm for the Pope's "new tone" at the Vatican, his "humility and emphasis on the poor" and his "simple, direct", personal style.
You can find today's homily by entering "Pope Francis homilies Vatican Radio" into your search engine. Or you can go to the Vatican website, which includes many of the pope's homilies and all public speeches but tends to be about a week out of date. The pope delivers most daily homilies informally and without notes, in a "familial" way; that's why they aren't always formally reported.
Fr. Hans Kung, one of the most important and influential theologians of our time, wrote an article on May 11, 2013, soon after Cardinal Jorge Maria Bergoglio became Pope Francis, reflecting on papal history and on the significance of the choice of the name Francis.
12/14/12 - Andrea Tornielli interviews Pope Francis about Christmas, hunger in the world, the suffering of children, the reform of the Roman Curia, women cardinals, the Institute for the Works of Religion (IOR), and the upcoming visit to the Holy Land.
"When God meets us he tells us two things. The first thing he says is: have hope. God always opens doors, he never closes them. He is the father who opens doors for us. The second thing he says is: don’t be afraid of tenderness. When Christians forget about hope and tenderness they become a cold Church, that loses its sense of direction and is held back by ideologies and worldly attitudes, whereas God’s simplicity tells you: go forward, I am a Father who caresses you."
"God never gives someone a gift they are not capable of receiving. If he gives us the gift of Christmas, it is because we all have the ability to understand and receive it. All of us from the holiest of saints to the greatest of sinners; from the purest to the most corrupt among us. Even a corrupt person has this ability: poor him, it’s probably a bit rusty but he has it. Christmas in this time of conflicts is a call from God who gives us this gift. Do we want to receive Him or do we prefer other gifts? In a world afflicted by war, this Christmas makes me think of God’s patience. The Bible clearly shows that God’s main virtue is that He is love. He waits for us; he never tires of waiting for us. He gives us the gift and then waits for us."
Tornielli: "What do you have to say about this innocent suffering [of seriously ill children]?" Pope Francis: "When the child asks a question, he or she doesn’t wait to hear the full answer, they immediately start bombarding you with more 'whys'. What they are really looking for, more than an explanation, is a reassuring look on their parent’s face. When I come across a suffering child, the only prayer that comes to mind is the “why” prayer. Why Lord? He doesn’t explain anything to me. But I can feel Him looking at me. So I can say: You know why, I don’t and You won’t tell me, but You’re looking at me and I trust You, Lord, I trust your gaze.”
Tornielli: "The most striking part of the Exhortation was where it refers to an economy that 'kills'… Pope Francis: “There is nothing in the Exhortation that cannot be found in the social Doctrine of the Church... The only specific quote I used was the one regarding the 'trickle-down theories' which assume that economic growth, encouraged by a free market, will inevitably succeed in bringing about greater justice and social inclusiveness in the world. The promise was that when the glass was full, it would overflow, benefitting the poor. But what happens instead, is that when the glass is full, it magically gets bigger nothing ever comes out for the poor."
Of ecumenical relations and meetings with Orthodox prelates: "I believe that the way forward is this: friendship, common work and prayer for unity. We blessed each other; one brother blesses the other, one brother is called Peter and the other Andrew, Mark, Thomas…”."Today there is an ecumenism of blood. In some countries they kill Christians for wearing a cross or having a Bible and before they kill them they do not ask them whether they are Anglican, Lutheran, Catholic or Orthodox. Their blood is mixed. To those who kill we are Christians. We are united in blood, even though we have not yet managed to take necessary steps towards unity between us..."
"[In Evangelii Gaudium] I spoke about baptism and communion as spiritual food that helps one to go on; it is to be considered a remedy not a prize. Some immediately thought about the sacraments for remarried divorcees, but I did not refer to any specific cases; I simply wanted to point out a principle. We must try to facilitate people’s faith, rather than control it."
[On reform of the Curia] "At the last meeting, the eight cardinals told me the time has come for concrete proposals and at the next meeting in February they will present their suggestions to me. I am always present at the meetings, except for Wednesday mornings when I have the General Audience. But I don’t speak, I just listen and that does me good."
"Politics is noble; it is one of the highest forms of charity, as Paul VI used to say. We sully it when we mix it with business. The relationship between the Church and political power can also be corrupted if common good is not the only converging point.”
Tornielli: "May I ask you if the Church will have women cardinals in the future?" Pope Francis: “I don’t know where this idea sprang from. Women in the Church must be valued not “clericalised”. Whoever thinks of women as cardinals suffers a bit from clericalism.”
12/7/13 - "Unfortunately, in our time, so full of so many hopes and achievements, there are powers and forces that end up producing a ‘throw-away culture’; and this tends to become a common mentality. The victims of this culture are its most weak and fragile humans – the unborn, the poor, the elderly sick, severely disabled…those who risk being ‘thrown away,’ expelled by a mechanism that must be efficient at all costs.” “This false model of man and of society effects a practical atheism (by) denying, de facto, the Word of God that says, ‘let us make man in our image, according to our likeness.’”
12/3/13 - "You can’t imagine a Church without joy,” the pontiff explained in his Dec. 3 homily, “and the joy of the Church lies precisely in this: to proclaim the name of Jesus.” the peace of which the prophet speaks “is a peace that is so moving, it is a peace of joy, a peace of praise,” which we can also say is “noisy, in praise, a peace that bears fruit in becoming a mother of new children.”
12/2/13 - Christmas “isn’t just a temporal celebration or the memory of a beautiful (event); Christmas is more…Christmas is an encounter!”
12/1/13 - “For the great human family it is necessary to renew always the common horizon toward which we are journeying. The horizon of hope! This is the horizon that makes a good journey." "“Let us rediscover the beauty of being together along the way: the Church, with her vocation and mission, and the whole of humanity, the people, the civilizations, the cultures, all together on the paths of time.” "We bet on hope, on the hope of peace, and it will be possible! The journey is never finished, just as in each of our own lives, there is always a need to restart, to rise again, to recover a sense of the goal of one’s own existence."
11/30/13 - At evening prayer with local university students: "The socio-cultural context in which you are placed is sometimes weighed down by mediocrity and boredom. We must not resign ourselves to the monotony of everyday life, but cultivate large-scale projects, going beyond the ordinary: don’t let your youthful enthusiasm be stolen!” Christian youth must find the balance between independent thought and fidelity to the truth, he noted. “The model to follow is not the sphere, in which every protrusion is leveled and every difference disappears; instead, the model is the prism, which includes a multiplicity of elements and respects unity in variety.... In fact, the plurality of thought and of individuality reflects the multiform wisdom of God when it approaches truth, when it approaches the good, when it approaches beauty, with honesty and intellectual rigor.”
11/29/13 - "What path does the Lord want? Always with the spirit of intelligence with which to understand the signs of the times. It is beautiful to ask the Lord for this grace." “What is the meaning of what is happening now? These are the signs of the times!” “Restricted thought, equal thought, weak thought, a thought so widespread. The spirit of the world does not want us to ask ourselves before God: ‘But why, why this other, why did this happen?’” This is “what Jesus asks of us: free thought, the thought of a man and a women who are part of the people of God, and salvation is exactly this!”
11/26/13 - Pope Francis' apostolic exhortation, The Joy of the Gospel, is full of so many quotes that it will need its own section. it is long, and it is worth reading in full.
11/25/13 - Speaking of the day's readings of the young Jewish men in the book of Daniel, and of the widow's mite:
“Both of them - the widow and the youth - have risked something. In their risk they chose the Lord, with a big heart, without personal interest, without pettiness. They did not have a stingy attitude. The Lord, the Lord is everything. The Lord is God and they entrusted themselves to the Lord.” "When we listen to the life of the martyrs, when we read in the papers of the persecution against Christians today, we think of these brothers and sisters in extreme situations that make this choice."
11/24/13 - "“The attitude demanded of us as true believers is that of recognizing and accepting in our lives the centrality of Jesus Christ, in our thoughts, in our words, and in our works."
10/1/13 - Pope Francis invited the atheist founder of Italy's biggest daily newspaper, La Repubblica, to come by for conversation on 9/24/13. Worth reading in full! (On July 7 and August 9, Scalfari had published questions for Pope Francis; Francis surprised him by writing in reply on September 11.) Some highlights from Pope Francis 9/24:
"Proselytism is solemn nonsense, it makes no sense. We need to get to know each other, listen to each other and improve our knowledge of the world around us. Sometimes after a meeting I want to arrange another one because new ideas are born and I discover new needs. This is important: to get to know people, listen, expand the circle of ideas. The world is crisscrossed by roads that come closer together and move apart, but the important thing is that they lead towards the Good."
"Everyone has his own idea of good and evil and must choose to follow the good and fight evil as he conceives them. That would be enough to make the world a better place."
"The Son of God became incarnate in the souls of men to instill the feeling of brotherhood. All are brothers and all children of God. Abba, as he called the Father. I will show you the way, he said. Follow me and you will find the Father and you will all be his children and he will take delight in you. Agape, the love of each one of us for the other, from the closest to the furthest, is in fact the only way that Jesus has given us to find the way of salvation and of the Beatitudes."
"Heads of the Church have often been narcissists, flattered and thrilled by their courtiers. The court is the leprosy of the papacy."
"The curia...It is what in an army is called the quartermaster's office, it manages the services that serve the Holy See. But it has one defect: it is Vatican-centric. It sees and looks after the interests of the Vatican, which are still, for the most part, temporal interests. This Vatican-centric view neglects the world around us. I do not share this view and I'll do everything I can to change it. The Church is or should go back to being a community of God's people, and priests, pastors and bishops who have the care of souls, are at the service of the people of God."
"When I meet a clericalist, I suddenly become anti-clerical. Clericalism should not have anything to do with Christianity. St. Paul, who was the first to speak to the Gentiles, the pagans, to believers in other religions, was the first to teach us that."
"A religion without mystics is a philosophy."
"Someone who is not touched by grace may be a person without blemish and without fear, as they say, but he will never be like a person who has touched grace. This is Augustine's insight."
"Francis is great because he is everything. He is a man who wants to do things, wants to build, he founded an order and its rules, he is an itinerant and a missionary, a poet and a prophet, he is mystical. He found evil in himself and rooted it out. He loved nature, animals, the blade of grass on the lawn and the birds flying in the sky. But above all he loved people, children, old people, women. He is the most shining example of that agape we talked about earlier."
""Francis wanted a mendicant order and an itinerant one. Missionaries who wanted to meet, listen, talk, help, to spread faith and love. Especially love. And he dreamed of a poor Church that would take care of others, receive material aid and use it to support others, with no concern for itself. 800 years have passed since then and times have changed, but the ideal of a missionary, poor Church is still more than valid. This is still the Church that Jesus and his disciples preached about."
[In response to Scandaro's comment that practicing Catholics are a minority in Italy and the world] "Being a minority is actually a strength. We have to be a leavening of life and love and the leavening is infinitely smaller than the mass of fruits, flowers and trees that are born out of it. I believe I have already said that our goal is not to proselytize but to listen to needs, desires and disappointments, despair, hope. We must restore hope to young people, help the old, be open to the future, spread love. Be poor among the poor. We need to include the excluded and preach peace. Vatican II, inspired by Pope Paul VI and John, decided to look to the future with a modern spirit and to be open to modern culture. The Council Fathers knew that being open to modern culture meant religious ecumenism and dialogue with non-believers. But afterwards very little was done in that direction. I have the humility and ambition to want to do something."
"The first thing I decided was to appoint a group of eight cardinals to be my advisers. Not courtiers but wise people who share my own feelings. This is the beginning of a Church with an organization that is not just top-down but also horizontal. When Cardinal Martini talked about focusing on the councils and synods he knew how long and difficult it would be to go in that direction. Gently, but firmly and tenaciously."
"God is the light that illuminates the darkness, even if it does not dissolve it, and a spark of divine light is within each of us. In the letter I wrote to you, you will remember I said that our species will end but the light of God will not end and at that point it will invade all souls and it will all be in everyone."
9/23/13 - "After the Pope's Interview: Three Hard Things" by Jesuit Father Francis X. Clooney. in America magazine. "First, Francis expects us actually to discern, to find the will of God out there before us, in the large and small, easy and difficult things before us... Second,...A call to discernment as the church’s way forward requires tremendous effort at every level, a free and grown-up search for the will of God, and not determining the future by what had seemed best in the past... Third, Francis is giving us a lot to do... Where there are such great needs, there the church must be." Bottom line: "No one can be a spectator in Francis' fresh vision of church."
9/19/13 - Pope Francis made headlines internationally with his astonishing interview, published in multiple Jesuit periodicals around the world. Here are reports in the NY Times and in NCR. America magazine was one of the publishers of the full text. Jesuit Father Antonio Spadaro, editor in chief of La Civiltà Cattolica, conducted the interview in person, in Italian, over three days in August. Editorial teams at La Civiltà Cattolica, America, and several other major Jesuit journals around the world had proposed questions to Father Spadaro. After Pope Francis approved the Italian text, America commissioned a team of five independent experts to translate it into English.
Father Spadaro described his experience interviewing Pope Francis: "The pope had spoken earlier about his great difficulty in giving interviews. He said that he prefers to think rather than provide answers on the spot in interviews. In this interview the pope interrupted what he was saying in response to a question several times, in order to add something to an earlier response. Talking with Pope Francis is a kind of volcanic flow of ideas that are bound up with each other. Even taking notes gives me an uncomfortable feeling, as if I were trying to suppress a surging spring of dialogue."
Some quotes from Pope Francis follow - but please read the whole interview. It is truly worth your time.
"In my experience as superior in the Society [of Jesus, the Jesuits]... I did not always do the necessary consultation. And this was not a good thing. My style of government as a Jesuit at the beginning had many faults. That was a difficult time for the Society: an entire generation of Jesuits had disappeared. Because of this I found myself provincial when I was still very young. I was only 36 years old. That was crazy. I had to deal with difficult situations, and I made my decisions abruptly and by myself. Yes, but I must add one thing: when I entrust something to someone, I totally trust that person. He or she must make a really big mistake before I rebuke that person."
"I have never been a right-winger. It was my authoritarian way of making decisions that created problems."
“The Lord has allowed this growth in knowledge of government through my faults and my sins. So as Archbishop of Buenos Aires, I had a meeting with the six auxiliary bishops every two weeks, and several times a year with the council of priests. They asked questions and we opened the floor for discussion. This greatly helped me to make the best decisions. But now I hear some people tell me: ‘Do not consult too much, and decide by yourself.’ Instead, I believe that consultation is very important. I do not want token consultations, but real consultations...."
"All the faithful, considered as a whole, are infallible in matters of belief..."
"This church...is the home of all, not a small chapel that can hold only a small group of selected people. We must not reduce...the universal church to a nest protecting our mediocrity. "
"The young Catholic churches, as they grow, develop a synthesis of faith, culture and life, and so it is a synthesis different from the one developed by the ancient churches. For me, the relationship between the ancient Catholic churches and the young ones is similar to the relationship between young and elderly people in a society. They build the future, the young ones with their strength and the others with their wisdom. "
"I see clearly 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’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 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."
"A person once asked me, in a provocative manner, if I approved of homosexuality. I replied with another question: ‘Tell me: when God looks at a gay person, does he endorse the existence of this person with love, or reject and condemn this person?’ We must always consider the person."
"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."
“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 proclamation of the saving love of God comes before moral and religious imperatives. Today sometimes it seems that the opposite order is prevailing...”
"The feminine genius is needed wherever we make important decisions. The challenge today is this: to think about the specific place of women also in those places where the authority of the church is exercised for various areas of the church.” [Will we see a day when the "specific place of women" is everywhere?]
"If one has the answers to all the questions—that is the proof that God is not with him. It means that he is a false prophet using religion for himself. The great leaders of the people of God, like Moses, have always left room for doubt. You must leave room for the Lord, not for our certainties; we must be humble.... God is always a surprise, so you never know where and how you will find him. "
"There is always the lurking danger of living in a laboratory. Ours is not a ‘lab faith,’ but a ‘journey faith,’ a historical faith… You cannot bring home the frontier, but you have to live on the border and be audacious.”
"The deposit of faith... grows and is strengthened with time. Here, human self-understanding changes with time and so also human consciousness deepens. Let us think of when slavery was accepted or the death penalty was allowed without any problem. So we grow in the understanding of the truth… The view of the church’s teaching as a monolith to defend without nuance or different understandings is wrong.”
8/19/13 - "Faith is not a decoration, as if it were simply the icing on the cake! Faith involves choosing God as a basic criterion for life, and God is not empty, it is not neutral, God is love....Faith and violence are incompatible! Faith and violence are incompatible! The Christian is not violent, but he is strong with the force of love."
8/18/13 - Vatican Radio reports that Pope Francis spoke of Jesus' words in Luke 12:51: "Do you think I came to bring peace on earth? No, I tell you, but division." Pope Francis emphasized that the Gospel does not authorize the use of force to spread the faith. It is "just the opposite: the true strength of the Christian is the power of truth and love, which leads to the renunciation of all violence. Faith and violence are incompatible."
8/17/13 - "We cannot sleep peacefully while babies are dying of hunger and the elderly are without medical assistance." - Tweet from @pontifex.
8/9/13 - A surprise visit to Vatican utilities workers, reported by L'Osservatore Romano and Vatican radio: "On a normal August morning, when the city seemed empty, an ordinary work day had just begun in the carpentry workshop." Pope Francis suddenly appeared at the door with a simple "good day." He talked with the workers around their work benches, shook hands, and moved on to the adjacent smithy and the heating and hydraulic plants. He asked employees about their jobs, and listened with interest to a story from a worker on the morning shift. Just 20 minutes - but what a great way for Vatican workers to start the day!
7/25/13 - "I want to tell you something. What is it that I expect as a consequence of World Youth Day? I want a mess. We knew that in Rio there would be great disorder, but I want trouble in the dioceses!" he said, speaking off the cuff in his native Spanish. "I want to see the church get closer to the people. I want to get rid of clericalism, the mundane, this closing ourselves off within ourselves, in our parishes, schools or structures. Because these need to get out!" - at a spontaneously scheduled meeting with Argentine youth
7/25/13 - "No one can remain insensitive to the inequalities that persist in the world!" Francis told a crowd of thousands who braved a cold rain and stood in a muddy soccer field to welcome him at World Youth Day in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. "No amount of peace-building will be able to last, nor will harmony and happiness be attained in a society that ignores, pushes to the margins or excludes a part of itself." - to residents of Varginha, a violent slum area in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. According to John L. Allen, Jr. in NCR, Pope Francis "also argued that in the fight against poverty, offering material assistance isn't enough. It's also critical, he suggested, to build up the moral fiber of a society by defending certain core values:
- "'Life, which is a gift of God, a value always to be protected and promoted';
- "'The family, the foundation of coexistence and a remedy against social fragmentation';
- "'Integral education, which cannot be reduced to the mere transmission of information for purposes of generating profit';
- "'Health, which must seek the integral well-being of the person, including the spiritual dimension';
- "'Security, in the conviction that violence can be overcome only by changing human hearts.'"
7/8/13 - [Background: For his first official trip outside of Rome, Pope Francis chose the tiny Sicilian island of Lampedusa and celebrated mass to commemorate thousands of migrants who have died crossing the sea from North Africa as they sought refuge in Italy. Lapedusa is one of the main migrant entry points into the European Union. He celebrated mass in a sports field that served as a reception center for tens of thousands of mainly Muslim migrants who fled Arab Spring unrest in North Africa in 2011, greatly increasing an exodus that has gone on for years.He praised the local people and security forces who "show attention to people on their voyage to something better.... You offer an example of solidarity!"]
"The culture of well-being, that makes us think of ourselves, that makes us insensitive to the cries of others, that makes us live in soap bubbles, that are beautiful but are nothing, are illusions of futility, of the transient, that brings indifference to others, that brings even the globalization of indifference....We are accustomed to the suffering of others, it doesn’t concern us, it’s none of our business.... 'Adam, where are you?' 'Where is your brother?' These are the two questions that God puts at the beginning of the story of humanity, and that He also addresses to the men and women of our time, even to us. But I want to set before us a third question: 'Who among us has wept for these things, and things like this?' Who has wept for the deaths of these brothers and sisters?
Earlier in his homily, the pope saluted "the dear Muslim immigrants that are beginning the fast of Ramadan, with best wishes for abundant spiritual fruits. The Church is near to you in the search for a more dignified life for yourselves and for your families. I say to you 'O’ scia’!' [trans.: a friendly greeting in the local dialect]."
7/6/13 - “In the Christian life, even in the life of the Church, there are old structures, passing structures: it is necessary to renew them! And the Church has always been attentive to this, with dialogue with cultures . . . It always allows itself to be renewed according to places, times, and persons.... Don’t be afraid of that! Don’t be afraid of the newness of the Gospel! Don’t be afraid of the newness that the Holy Spirit works in us! Don’t be afraid of the renewal of structures!”
6/26/13 - "No one is useless in the Church! And should anyone tell you, 'Go home! You're useless!' that is not true. No one is useless in the church. We are all needed to build this Temple! And no one is secondary: 'Ah, I am the most important one in the Church!' No! We are all equal in the eyes of God. All! All! But one of you might say, "Mr. Pope, sir, you are not equal to us.' But I am just like you. We are all equal.
"If we ask ourselves, 'Where can we meet God? Where can we enter into communion with Him through Christ? Where can we find the light of the Holy Spirit to enlighten our lives?' the answer is, 'In the People of God, among us, for we are Church -- there we shall meet Jesus, we shall meet the Holy Spirit, we shall meet the Father. "
6/22/13 - "We must be careful not to be confused about true richness. There are risky treasures that threaten to seduce us, but must be left behind. Treasures gathered in life that are destroyed by death. I have never seen a moving van following a funeral procession. Love, charity, service, patience, goodness, (and) tenderness are very beautiful treasures – these we bring with us. The other things, no.”
6/20/13 - "Jesus has promised us the Holy Spirit: it is He who teaches us, from within, from the heart, how to say 'Father' and how to say 'our'. Today we ask the Holy Spirit to teach us to say 'Father' and to be able to say 'our', and thus make peace with all our enemies."
6/19/13 - The scribes and the Pharisees "are intellectuals without talent, ethicists without goodness, the bearers of museum beauty. These are the hypocrites that Jesus rebukes so strongly. There are even hypocrites... who make a show of fasting, of giving alms, of praying. These do not know beauty, they do not know love, these do not know the truth: they are small, cowardly. We think about the hypocrisy in the Church: how bad it makes all of us.... [In contrast,] the publican... prayed with humble simplicity, 'Have mercy on me, O Lord, a sinner'... with concrete sins, not theoretical. But all of us also have grace, the grace that comes from Jesus Christ: the grace of joy; the grace of magnanimity, of largesse. Hypocrites do not know what joy is, what largesse is, what magnanimity is.”
6/18/13 - Vatican Radio says Pope Francis began his homily with questions: How can we love our enemies? Those who “bomb and kill so many people?" "Those who out of their for love money prevent the elderly from accessing the necessary medicine and leave them to die"? Those who only seek "their own best interests, power for themselves and do so much evil?" "Jesus says, we must do this! Because otherwise you will be like the tax collectors, like pagans. Not Christians.'"
6/15/13 - ""Philosophers say that peace is a certain ordered tranquility: everything is tidy and quiet ... That is not the Christian peace! Christian peace is an uneasy peace, not a quiet peace: it is an uneasy peace, which goes on to carry this message of reconciliation. The Christian Peace pushes us to move forward.... What the Lord wants from us is to announce this reconciliation, which is his own core message."
6/13/13 - "There is no need to go to a psychologist to know that when we denigrate another person it is because we are unable to grow up and need to belittle others, to feel more important. ...Jesus, with all simplicity, says: 'Do not speak ill of one another. Do not denigrate one another. Do not belittle one another.' In the end we are all traveling on the same road. We are all traveling on that road that will take us to the very end. If we do not choose a fraternal path, it will end badly, for the person who insults and the insulted. If we are not able to keep our tongues in check, we lose.... Natural aggression, that of Cain toward Abel, repeats itself throughout history. I would ask the Lord to give us all the grace to watch our tongues, to watch what we say about others. It is a small penance, but it bears a lot of fruit."
6/12/13 - "The law reaches its maturity when it becomes the law of the Spirit. Moving forward on this road is somewhat risky, but it is the only road to maturity. The law of the Spirit makes us free! This freedom frightens us a little, because we are afraid we will confuse the freedom of the Spirit with human freedom. We, at this moment in the history of the Church, we cannot go backwards or off the track! The track is that of freedom in the Holy Spirit that makes us free, in continuous discernment of God's will to move forward on this path, without going back and without going off-track."
6/12/13 - "What is the law of the People of God? It is the law of love, love for God and love for our neighbor according to the new commandment that the Lord left us (cf. Jn 13:34). It is a love, however, that is not sterile sentimentality or something vague, it is recognizing God as the only Lord of life and, at the same time, accepting the other as a true brother, overcoming divisions, rivalry, misunderstandings, selfishness; the two things go together. We have still so far to go to be able to live concretely according to this new law, the law of the Holy Spirit working within us, the law of charity, of love! When we see in the many wars between Christians in the newspapers or on TV, how can the people of God understand this? Within the people of God there are so many wars! And in neighborhoods, in workplaces, so many wars due to envy, jealousy. Even within the same family, there are so many internal wars. We must ask the Lord to help us understand this law of love.... At least let’s say to the Lord: 'Lord, I am angry with him or with her. I pray for him and for her. I pray to you.' To pray for those with whom we are angry. It's a big step in this law of love. Let's do it today!
"What mission does this people have? To bring to the world the hope and the salvation of God: to be a sign of the love of God who calls all to be friends of His; to be the yeast that ferments the dough, the salt that gives flavour and preserves from decay, the light that brightens. Just as I said, it is enough to open a newspaper, and we see that around us there is the presence of evil, the Devil is at work. But I would like to say in a loud voice: God is stronger! ...And I would like to add that reality which is sometimes dark and marked by evil can change, if we are the first to bring the light of the Gospel especially with our lives. If in a stadium, let’s think of the Olympic Stadium in Rome, or that of San Lorenzo in Buenos Aires, if on a dark night one person lights up a lamp, you can barely see it, but if each of over seventy thousand spectators switches on his own light, the whole Stadium lights up. Let's make our lives a light of Christ; and together we will bring the light of the Gospel to the whole world." - Pope Francis in his weekly public audience
6/11/13 - "St. Peter did not have a bank account, and when he had to pay taxes, the Lord sent him to the sea to catch fish and find the money in the fish, to pay. Philip, when he met Queen Candace’s finance minister, did not think, 'Ah, good, let’s set up an organization to support the Gospel ...' No! He did not strike a ‘deal’ with him: he preached, baptized and left.... There is the temptation to seek strength elsewhere than in grace. This creates a little confusion.... [and] proclamation becomes proselytizing. Our strength is the grace of the Gospel. ...The Church does not grow through proselytizing but by drawing people to her [through] those who freely proclaim the grace of salvation.
"Everything is grace. Everything. And what are the signs of when an apostle lives this grace? There are so many, but I will underline only two: First, poverty. The proclamation of the Gospel must follow the path of poverty. The testimony of this poverty: I have no wealth, my wealth is the gift I received, God: this grace is our wealth! And this poverty saves us from becoming managers, entrepreneurs ... The works of the Church must be brought forward, and some are a little complex, but with a heart of poverty, not with the heart of an investment broker or an entrepreneur… The Church is not an NGO: it is something else, something more important, and this is the result of grace. Received and proclaimed". Poverty "is one of the signs of this gratuity.
"These two are the signs of an apostle who lives this grace: poverty and the ability to praise the Lord. And when we find the apostles who want to build a rich Church and a Church without the grace of praise, the Church becomes old, the Church becomes an NGO, the Church becomes lifeless.... Let us move forward in preaching the Gospel."
6/8/13 - "We would do well to ask ourselves: 'With the things that happen in life, I ask myself the question: what is the Lord saying to me with His Word, right now?'. This is called keeping the Word of God, because the Word of God is precisely the message that the Lord gives us in every moment. Let us... safeguard it with our memory. And safeguard it with our hope. We ask the Lord for the grace to receive the Word of God and keep it."
6/7/13 - When Pope Francis met with about 7,000 school children from Jesuit schools in Italy and Albania, he set aside his prepared remarks as "boring" and instead answered questions from a few of the children. A boy told the pope that he has doubts about his faith. Pope Francis replied, "There are days of darkness and some days of falls, one falls. But always think this, don’t be afraid of the failures, don’t be afraid of the falls.... [I]n the art of falling what is important isn’t not falling, but not remaining down.... This is beautiful, working on this each day, this walking humanly, but it is ugly and boring to walk alone. Walk in community with friends and it helps us arrive to the end where we need to arrive." A young girl asked him if he still keeps his friends in Argentina. He answered, "I'’ve only been Pope for two and a half months and my friends are very far from here, but they write me. You can’t live without friends, that’s important.” Another child asked why he decided to live in Saint Martha’s House instead of the Papal Apartments in the Vatican palace. “I can’t live alone, do you understand?” he remarked. “It's not a question of my personal virtue, it's just that I can't live alone. A professor asked me this question, ‘Why don't you go live there?’ and I answered, ‘Listen, professor, it’s for psychiatric reasons’ because that’s my personality.'” He also commented, "I didn't want to be pope." And he reminded the children, “Poverty today is a cry, we all have to think if we can become a little poorer, all of us have to do this."
6/8/13 - "We would do well to ask ourselves: 'With the things that happen in life, I ask myself the question: what is the Lord saying to me with His Word, right now?' This is called keeping the Word of God, because the Word of God is precisely the message that the Lord gives us in every moment. Let us... safeguard it with our memory. And safeguard it with our hope. We ask the Lord for the grace to receive the Word of God and keep it."
6/5/13 - Pope Francis spoke of the Sadducees who present to Jesus the difficult case of a woman who is the widow of seven men. “The Sadducees were talking about this woman as if she were a laboratory, all aseptic - hers was an [abstract] moral [problem]. When we think of the people who suffer so much, do we think of them as though they were an [abstract moral conundrum], pure ideas, ‘but in this case ... this case ...’, or do we think about them with our hearts, with our flesh, too? I do not like it when people speak about tough situations in an academic and not a human manner, sometimes with statistics ... and that’s it. In the Church there are many people in this situation.... Pray for them. They must come into my heart, they must be a [cause of] restlessness for me: my brother is suffering, my sister suffers. Here [is] the mystery of the communion of saints: pray to the Lord, ‘But, Lord, look at that person: he cries, he is suffering. Pray, let me say, with the flesh: that our flesh pray. Not with ideas. Praying with the heart.”
6/2/13 - "Wars are always madness: all is lost in war, all is to be gained in peace."
5/25/13 - Today Pope Francis urged Catholics to open doors, welcome people - not just aim "to control the faith." E.g.: "Think about a single mother who goes to church, in the parish and to the secretary she says: 'I want my child baptized.' And then this Christian, this Christian says: 'No, you cannot because you’re not married!' But look, this girl who had the courage to carry her pregnancy and not to return her son to the sender, what is it? A closed door! This is not zeal! It is far from the Lord! It does not open doors! And so when we are on this street, have this attitude, we do not do good to people, the people, the People of God, but Jesus instituted the seven sacraments with this attitude and we are establishing the eighth: the sacrament of pastoral customs!"
5/19 - “If investments in the banks fail, ‘Oh, it’s a tragedy,’ ” he said, speaking extemporaneously for more than 40 minutes at a Pentecost vigil, after a private audience with the German chancellor, Angela Merkel, the architect of Europe’s austerity policies. “But if people die of hunger or don’t have food or health, nothing happens. This is our crisis today.”
5/19 - Pentecost homily - "'All of them were filled with the Holy Spirit', who unleashed his irresistible power with amazing consequences.... Are we open to 'God’s surprises'? Or are we closed and fearful before the newness of the Holy Spirit? Do we have the courage to strike out along the new paths which God’s newness sets before us, or do we resist, barricaded in transient structures which have lost their capacity for openness to what is new? We would do well to ask ourselves these questions all through the day." "One of Fathers of the Church has an expression which I love: the Holy Spirit himself is harmony – 'Ipse harmonia est'. He is indeed harmony. Only the Spirit can awaken diversity, plurality and multiplicity, while at the same time building unity.... let us ask ourselves: Am I open to the harmony of the Holy Spirit, overcoming every form of exclusivity? Do I let myself be guided by him, living in the Church and with the Church?"
5/10/13 - "A Christian is a man or a woman of joy! Jesus teaches us this, the church teaches us this. If we keep this joy to ourselves it will make us sick in the end, our hearts will grow old and wrinkled and our faces will no longer transmit that great joy only nostalgia, melancholy which is not healthy. Sometimes these melancholy Christians faces have more in common with pickled peppers than the joy of having a beautiful life. Joy cannot be held at heel: it must be let go. Joy is a pilgrim virtue. It is a gift that walks, walks on the path of life, that walks with Jesus: preaching, proclaiming Jesus, proclaiming joy, lengthens and widens that path."
4/1713 - "To say it clearly, the Holy Spirit annoys us. Because he moves us, he makes us journey, he pushes the Church to go forward. And we are like Peter at the Transfiguration: 'Oh, how wonderful it is for us to be here, all together!' But let it not inconvenience us. We would like the Holy Spirit to doze off. We want to subdue the Holy Spirit. And that just will not work. For he is God and he is that wind that comes and goes, and you do not know from where. He is the strength of God; it is he who gives us consolation and strengthen to continue forward.... Even in our personal life, in our private lives, the same thing happens: the Spirit pushes us to take a more evangelical path, and we [say]: 'But no, it goes like this, Lord'... Do not oppose the Holy Spirit. It is the Spirit who makes us free, with that freedom from Jesus, by that freedom of the sons of God!"
In the same homily 4/17/13 - “Vatican Council II was a beautiful work of the Holy Spirit. Think of Pope John: he seemed a good parish priest and he was obedient to the Holy Spirit. But after 50 years, have we done everything which the Holy Spirit told us in the council, in that continuity in the Church's growth, which was the council? No. We celebrate its anniversary [as if erecting] a monument, [but] we do not wish to change. There are voices which would have us go backwards. This is called 'to be stiff-necked', this we call wishing 'to subdue the Holy Spirit', this means becoming 'foolish and slow of heart'.”
Reflecting these and other actions by Pope Francis, on 5/25/13 the New York Times noted widespread new enthusiasm for the Pope's "new tone" at the Vatican, his "humility and emphasis on the poor" and his "simple, direct", personal style.
You can find today's homily by entering "Pope Francis homilies Vatican Radio" into your search engine. Or you can go to the Vatican website, which includes many of the pope's homilies and all public speeches but tends to be about a week out of date. The pope delivers most daily homilies informally and without notes, in a "familial" way; that's why they aren't always formally reported.
Fr. Hans Kung, one of the most important and influential theologians of our time, wrote an article on May 11, 2013, soon after Cardinal Jorge Maria Bergoglio became Pope Francis, reflecting on papal history and on the significance of the choice of the name Francis.