(Vatican Radio) Pope Francis met with the leadership of the Council of Bishops’ Conferences
of Latin America and the Caribbean, CELAM, which is holding its general coordinating
meeting this week. The meeting was one of two appointments expressly desired by the
Holy Father outside the context of World Youth Day, during his week-long visit to
Rio for the World Youth Day celebrations. The first was a visit to the Marian shrine
at Aparecida.
It was in Aparecida in 2007 that the CELAM bishops held their
5th General Conference, which produced a major three-part document outlining
a plan for assessment of the situation of the Church in Latin America and implementing
pastoral strategies to renew and revitalize the faith in the region. In his remarks
to the CELAM leadership, Pope Francis said that the desired renewal is already underway
in many particular Churches. His prepared address focused on the legacy of CELAM 5.
Please
find the full text of Pope Francis’ prepared remarks, below:
Apostolic
Journey of Pope Francis to Brazil Address to the Leadership of the Episcopal Conferences
of Latin America during the General Coordination Meeting Rio de Janeiro – 28
July 2013
1. Introduction
I thank the Lord for this opportunity to
speak with you, my brother bishops, the leadership of CELAM for the four-year period
from 2011 to 2015. For 57 years CELAM has served the 22 Episcopal Conferences of
Latin America and the Caribbean, working in a spirit of solidarity and subsidiarity
to promote, encourage and improve collegiality among the bishops and communion between
the region’s Churches and their pastors.
Like yourselves, I too witnessed
the powerful working of the Spirit in the Fifth General Conference of the Latin American
and Caribbean Episcopate in Aparecida, in May 2007, which continues to inspire the
efforts of CELAM for the desired renewal of the Particular Churches. In many of them,
this renewal is clearly taking place. I would like to focus this conversation on
the legacy of that fraternal encounter, which all of us have chosen to call a Continental
Mission.
2. Particular characteristics of Aparecida
There are four
hallmarks of the Fifth Conference. They are like four pillars for the implementation
of Aparecida, and they are what make it distinctive.
1) Starting without a
document
Medellín, Puebla and Santo Domingo began their work with a process
of preparation which culminated in a sort of Instrumentum Laboris which then served
as a basis for discussion, reflection and the approval of the final document. Aparecida,
on the other hand, encouraged the participation of the Particular Churches as a process
of preparation culminating in a document of synthesis. This document, while serving
as a point of reference throughout the Fifth General Conference, was not taken as
a starting point. The initial work consisted in pooling the concerns expressed by
the bishops as they considered the new period of history we are living and the need
to recover the life of discipleship and mission with which Christ founded the Church.
2) A
setting of prayer with the people of God
It is important to remember the prayerful
setting created by the daily sharing of the Eucharist and other liturgical moments,
in which we were always accompanied by the People of God. On the other hand, since
the deliberations took place in the undercroft of the Shrine, the music which accompanied
them were the songs and the prayers of the faithful.
3) A document which continues
in commitment, with the Continental Mission This context of prayer and the life
of faith gave rise to a desire for a new Pentecost for the Church and the commitment
to undertake a Continental Mission. Aparecida did not end with a document; it continues
in the Continental Mission.
4) The presence of Our Lady, Mother of America
It
was the first conference of the bishops of Latin America and the Caribbean to be held
in a Marian shrine.
3. Dimensions of the Continental Mission
The
Continental Mission is planned along two lines: the programmatic and the paradigmatic.
The programmatic mission, as its name indicates, consists in a series of missionary
activities. The paradigmatic mission, on the other hand, involves setting in a missionary
key all the day-to-day activities of the Particular Churches. Clearly this entails
a whole process of reforming ecclesial structures. The “change of structures” (from
obsolete ones to new ones) will not be the result of reviewing an organizational flow
chart, which would lead to a static reorganization; rather it will result from the
very dynamics of mission. What makes obsolete structures pass away, what leads to
a change of heart in Christians, is precisely missionary spirit. Hence the importance
of the paradigmatic mission.
The Continental Mission, both programmatic
and paradigmatic, calls for creating a sense of a Church which is organized to serve
all the baptized, and men and women of goodwill. Christ’s followers are not individuals
caught up in a privatized spirituality, but persons in community, devoting themselves
to others. The Continental Mission thus implies membership in the Church.
An
approach like this, which begins with missionary discipleship and involves understanding
Christian identity as membership in the Church, demands that we clearly articulate
the real challenges facing missionary discipleship. Here I will mention only two:
the Church’s inner renewal and dialogue with the world around us.
The Church’s
inner renewal
Aparecida considered Pastoral Conversion to be a necessity.
This conversion involves believing in the Good News, believing in Jesus Christ as
the bearer of God’s Kingdom as it breaks into the world and in his victorious presence
over evil, believing in the help and guidance of the Holy Spirit, believing in the
Church, the Body of Christ and the prolonging of the dynamism of the incarnation.
Consequently,
we, as pastors, need to ask questions about the actual state of the Churches which
we lead. These questions can serve as a guide in examining where the dioceses stand
in taking up the spirit of Aparecida; they are questions which we need to keep asking
as an examination of conscience.
1. Do we see to it that our work, and that
of our priests, is more pastoral than administrative? Who primarily benefits from
our efforts, the Church as an organization or the People of God as a whole?
2. Do
we fight the temptation simply to react to complex problems as they arise? Are we
creating a proactive mindset? Do we promote opportunities and possibilities to manifest
God's mercy? Are we conscious of our responsibility for refocusing pastoral approaches
and the functioning of Church structures for the benefit of the faithful and society?
3. In
practice, do we make the lay faithful sharers in the Mission? Do we offer them the
word of God and the sacraments with a clear awareness and conviction that the Holy
Spirit makes himself manifest in them?
4. Is pastoral discernment a habitual
criterion, through the use of Diocesan Councils? Do such Councils and Parish Councils,
whether pastoral or financial, provide real opportunities for lay people to participate
in pastoral consultation, organization and planning? The good functioning of these
Councils is critical. I believe that on this score, we are far behind.
5. As
pastors, bishops and priests, are we conscious and convinced of the mission of the
lay faithful and do we give them the freedom to continue discerning, in a way befitting
their growth as disciples, the mission which the Lord has entrusted to them? Do we
support them and accompany them, overcoming the temptation to manipulate them or infantilize
them? Are we constantly open to letting ourselves be challenged in our efforts to
advance the good of the Church and her mission in the world?
6. Do pastoral
agents and the faithful in general feel part of the Church, do they identify with
her and bring her closer to the baptized who are distant and alienated?
As
can be appreciated, what is at stake here are attitudes. Pastoral Conversion is chiefly
concerned with attitudes and reforming our lives. A change of attitudes is necessarily
something ongoing: “it is a process”, and it can only be kept on track with the help
of guidance and discernment. It is important always to keep in mind that the compass
preventing us from going astray is that of Catholic identity, understood as membership
in the Church.
Dialogue with the world around us
We do well to recall
the words of the Second Vatican Council: “The joys and hopes, the grief and anguish
of the people of our time, especially of those who are poor or afflicted, are the
joys and hopes, the grief and anguish of the followers of Christ as well” (Gaudium
et Spes, 1). Here we find the basis for our dialogue with the contemporary world.
Responding to the existential issues of people today, especially the young,
listening to the language they speak, can lead to a fruitful change, which must take
place with the help of the Gospel, the magisterium, and the Church’s social doctrine.
The scenarios and the areopagi involved are quite varied. For example, a single city
can contain various collective imaginations which create “different cities”. If we
remain within the parameters of our “traditional culture”, which was essentially rural,
we will end up nullifying the power of the Holy Spirit. God is everywhere: we have
to know how to find him in order to be able to proclaim him in the language of each
and every culture; every reality, every language, has its own rhythm.
4. Some
temptations against missionary discipleship
The decision for missionary discipleship
will encounter temptation. It is important to know where the evil spirit is afoot
in order to aid our discernment. It is not a matter of chasing after demons, but
simply one of clear-sightedness and evangelical astuteness. I will mention only a
few attitudes which are evidence of a Church which is “tempted”. It has to do with
recognizing certain contemporary proposals which can parody the process of missionary
discipleship and hold back, even bring to a halt, the process of Pastoral Conversion.
1. Making the Gospel message an ideology. This is a temptation which has been
present in the Church from the beginning: the attempt to interpret the Gospel apart
from the Gospel itself and apart from the Church. An example: Aparecida, at one particular
moment, felt this temptation. It employed, and rightly so, the method of “see, judge
and act” (cf. No. 19). The temptation, though, was to opt for a way of “seeing” which
was completely “antiseptic”, detached and unengaged, which is impossible. The way
we “see” is always affected by the way we direct our gaze. There is no such thing
as an “antiseptic” hermeneutics. The question was, rather: How are we going to look
at reality in order to see it? Aparecida replied: With the eyes of discipleship.
This is the way Nos. 20-32 are to be understood. There are other ways of making the
message an ideology, and at present proposals of this sort are appearing in Latin
America and the Caribbean. I mention only a few:
a) Sociological reductionism.
This is the most readily available means of making the message an ideology. At certain
times it has proved extremely influential. It involves an interpretative claim based
on a hermeneutics drawn from the social sciences. It extends to the most varied
fields, from market liberalism to Marxist categorization.
b) Psychologizing.
Here we have to do with an elitist hermeneutics which ultimately reduces the “encounter
with Jesus Christ” and its development to a process of growing self- awareness. It
is ordinarily to be found in spirituality courses, spiritual retreats, etc. It ends
up being an immanent, self-centred approach. It has nothing to do with transcendence
and consequently, with missionary spirit.
c) The Gnostic solution. Closely
linked to the previous temptation, it is ordinarily found in elite groups offering
a higher spirituality, generally disembodied, which ends up in a preoccupation with
certain pastoral “quaestiones disputatae”. It was the first deviation in the early
community and it reappears throughout the Church’s history in ever new and revised
versions. Generally its adherents are known as “enlightened Catholics” (since they
are in fact rooted in the culture of the Enlightenment).
d) The Pelagian solution.
This basically appears as a form of restorationism. In dealing with the Church’s
problems, a purely disciplinary solution is sought, through the restoration of outdated
manners and forms which, even on the cultural level, are no longer meaningful. In
Latin America it is usually to be found in small groups, in some new religious congregations,
in tendencies to doctrinal or disciplinary “safety”. Basically it is static, although
it is capable of inversion, in a process of regression. It seeks to “recover” the
lost past.
2. Functionalism. Its effect on the Church is paralyzing. More
than being interested in the road itself, it is concerned with fixing holes in the
road. A functionalist approach has no room for mystery; it aims at efficiency. It
reduces the reality of the Church to the structure of an NGO. What counts are quantifiable
results and statistics. The Church ends up being run like any other business organization.
It applies a sort of “theology of prosperity” to the organization of pastoral work.
3.
Clericalism is also a temptation very present in Latin America. Curiously, in the
majority of cases, it has to do with a sinful complicity: the priest clericalizes
the lay person and the lay person kindly asks to be clericalized, because deep down
it is easier. The phenomenon of clericalism explains, in great part, the lack of
maturity and Christian freedom in a good part of the Latin American laity. Either
they simply do not grow (the majority), or else they take refuge in forms of ideology
like those we have just seen, or in partial and limited ways of belonging. Yet in
our countries there does exist a form of freedom of the laity which finds expression
in communal experiences: Catholic as community. Here one sees a greater autonomy,
which on the whole is a healthy thing, basically expressed through popular piety.
The chapter of the Aparecida document on popular piety describes this dimension in
detail. The spread of bible study groups, of ecclesial basic communities and of Pastoral
Councils is in fact helping to overcome clericalism and to increase lay responsibility.
We
could continue by describing other temptations against missionary discipleship, but
I consider these to be the most important and influential at present for Latin America
and the Caribbean.
5. Some ecclesiological guidelines
1. The missionary
discipleship which Aparecida proposed to the Churches of Latin America and the Caribbean
is the journey which God desires for the present “today”. Every utopian (future-oriented)
or restorationist (past-oriented) impulse is spiritually unhealthy. God is real and
he shows himself in the “today”. With regard to the past, his presence is given to
us as “memory” of his saving work, both in his people and in each of us as individuals;
with regard to the future, he gives himself to us as “promise” and hope. In the past
God was present and left his mark: memory helps us to encounter him; in the future
is promise alone… he is not in the thousand and one “futuribles”. The “today” is
closest to eternity; even more: the “today” is a flash of eternity. In the “today”,
eternal life is in play.
Missionary discipleship is a vocation: a call and
an invitation. It is given in the “today”, but also “in tension”. There is no such
thing as static missionary discipleship. A missionary disciple cannot be his own
master, his immanence is in tension towards the transcendence of discipleship and
towards the transcendence of mission. It does not allow for self-absorption: either
it points to Jesus Christ or it points to the people to whom he must be proclaimed.
The missionary disciple is a self-transcending subject, a subject projected towards
encounter: an encounter with the Master (who anoints us as his disciples) and an encounter
with men and women who await the message.
That is why I like saying that the
position of missionary disciples is not in the centre but at the periphery: they live
poised towards the peripheries… including the peripheries of eternity, in the encounter
with Jesus Christ. In the preaching of the Gospel, to speak of “existential peripheries”
decentralizes things; as a rule, we are afraid to leave the centre. The missionary
disciple is someone “off centre”: the centre is Jesus Christ, who calls us and sends
us forth. The disciple is sent to the existential peripheries.
2. The Church
is an institution, but when she makes herself a “centre”, she becomes merely functional,
and slowly but surely turns into a kind of NGO. The Church then claims to have a
light of her own, and she stops being that “mysterium lunae” of which the Church Fathers
spoke. She becomes increasingly self-referential and loses her need to be missionary.
From an “institution” she becomes a “enterprise”. She stops being a bride and ends
up being an administrator; from being a servant, she becomes an “inspector”. Aparecida
wanted a Church which is bride, mother and servant, a facilitator of faith and not
an inspector of faith.
3. In Aparecida, two pastoral categories stand out;
they arise from the uniqueness of the Gospel, and we can employ them as guidelines
for assessing how we are living missionary discipleship in the Church: nearness and
encounter. Neither of these two categories is new; rather, they are the way God has
revealed himself to us in history. He is the “God who is near” to his people, a nearness
which culminates in the incarnation. He is the God who goes forth to meet his people.
In Latin America and the Caribbean there are pastoral plans which are “distant”, disciplinary
pastoral plans which give priority to principles, forms of conduct, organizational
procedures… and clearly lack nearness, tenderness, a warm touch. They do not take
into account the “revolution of tenderness” brought by the incarnation of the Word.
There are pastoral plans designed with such a dose of distance that they are incapable
of sparking an encounter: an encounter with Jesus Christ, an encounter with our brothers
and sisters. Such pastoral plans can at best provide a dimension of proselytism,
but they can never inspire people to feel part of or belong to the Church. Nearness
creates communion and belonging; it makes room for encounter. Nearness takes the
form of dialogue and creates a culture of encounter. One touchstone for measuring
whether a pastoral plan embodies nearness and a capacity for encounter is the homily.
What are our homilies like? Do we imitate the example of our Lord, who spoke “as
one with authority”, or are they simply moralizing, detached, abstract?
4. Those
who direct pastoral work, the Continental Mission (both programmatic and paradigmatic)
are the bishops. Bishops must lead, which is not the same thing as being authoritarian.
As well as pointing to the great figures of the Latin American episcopate, which we
all know, I would like to add a few things about the profile of the bishop, which
I already presented to the Nuncios at our meeting in Rome. Bishops must be pastors,
close to people, fathers and brothers, and gentle, patient and merciful. Men who
love poverty, both interior poverty, as freedom before the Lord, and exterior poverty,
as simplicity and austerity of life. Men who do not think and behave like “princes”.
Men who are not ambitious, who are married to one church without having their eyes
on another. Men capable of watching over the flock entrusted to them and protecting
everything that keeps it together: guarding their people out of concern for the dangers
which could threaten them, but above all instilling hope: so that light will shine
in people’s hearts. Men capable of supporting with love and patience God’s dealings
with his people. The Bishop has to be among his people in three ways: in front of
them, pointing the way; among them, keeping them together and preventing them from
being scattered; and behind them, ensuring that no one is left behind, but also, and
primarily, so that the flock itself can sniff out new paths.
I do not wish
to go into further detail about the person of the Bishop, but simply to add, including
myself in this statement, that we are lagging somewhat as far as Pastoral Conversion
is concerned. We need to help one another a bit more in taking the steps that the
Lord asks of us in the “today” of Latin America and the Caribbean. And this is a
good place to start.
I thank you for your patience in listening to me. Pardon
me if my remarks have been somewhat disjointed and please, I beg that we take seriously
our calling as servants of the holy and faithful people of God, for this is where
authority is exercised and demonstrated: in the ability to serve. Many thanks.
The
Pope added several "off the cuff" comments which will be available on our website
shortly.