Information service of the Pontifical Mission Societies since 1927
by Gianni Valente
Rome (Agence Fides) - On the morning of March 9, 2013, precisely 10 years ago, Argentine Cardinal Jorge Mario Bergoglio entered the Aula Nervi in the Vatican holding in his light bag a small page with a few notes written in cursive pen, in his tiny handwriting. The brief speech he would read before the Cardinals gathered in Rome in the General Congregations preceding the Conclave convened to elect a new Pope, after Benedict XVI had renounced his ministry as Bishop of Rome, was all in those meager words. The future Pope had reread and adjusted them in the cab he had exceptionally taken that morning to get from his priestly residence on VWhen his turn came, Cardinal Bergoglio read his notes in a calm voice.ia della Scrofa to St. Peter's Square, a distance he usually walked.
When his turn came, Cardinal Bergoglio read his notes in a calm voice.
In the small page of handwritten notes, there was no mention of the Roman Curia, sexual abuse of priests, or financial issues. There was no list of "challenges" and emergencies to be addressed.
In a few points, Bergoglio simply communicated a look at the Church, its nature and mission. A look that recognized and pointed to its source point, in basic terms.
Bergoglio said that evangelization is "the raison d'être of the Church." Citing Paul VI's exhortation Evangelii Nuntiandi, he referred to the "dulce y confortadora alegrìa de evangelizar." It is Christ himself," he added, "who, from within, impels us. And the Church "is called to go out of itself and to go toward the peripheries, not only the geographical ones, but also the existential ones, those of the mystery of sin, of pain, of injustice, those of ignorance and absence of faith, those of thought, those of all forms of misery."
In the flood of analyses and comments commemorating the ten years of the reigning Pope's Pontificate these days, there is neither the need nor the temptation to add new " assessments" to the network already saturated with readings and "interpretative keys" for all sorts of tastes. The 10-year anniversary is just a propitious occasion to trace some "red threads," some "background notes" that have marked the time of Pope Francis so far, often ending up being undetected by the global media system, and not even by "specialized" ecclesial-religious media. And in this regard, the notes read by the Archbishop of Buenos Aires before the other Cardinals on March 9, 2013 are a valuable document. To his fellow Cardinals, the Argentine Cardinal wanted to say a few things, sharp, elementary. That "condensation process," that aptitude for concentration on essential points and words that would later connote so many of the future pontiff's speeches, appears to be underway even then. Pope Francis keeps repeating often the same things, the same words, elementary. They are always the same. That is why he has not even been spared accusations of being "repetitive."
In his speech ten years ago, the Argentine Cardinal hinted that the Church, when it "comes out of itself," does so not out of its own effort or project, but by following Christ Himself, who "knocks from within so that we let Him out." Then he identified the root of all ecclesial pathologies in "self-referentiality," the presumption of self-sufficiency fueled by a "kind of theological narcissism," all caught up in veiling or removing, with expedients of all sorts, the fact that the Church depends in its every step and forever on the gifts of Christ's working graWhen the "self-referential Church" does not come out of itself in the following of Christ, the future Pope said, it "becomes sick," it "claims to keep Jesus Christ within itself and does not let him out," and in the end, "without even being aware of it, it believes it has light of its own." Thus it "ceases to be the mysterium lunae and gives rise to that evil so grave which is spiritual worldliness." Quoting the great French theologian Henry De Lubac, the then Archbishop of Buenos Aires defined "spiritual worldliness" as "the worst evil the Church can incur." He did not identify it with the human miseries and sinfulness of Churchmen, but rather with "That living to give glory to one another."
Citing the "Mysterium Lunae," Cardinal Bergoglio took up an ancient formula already coined by the Greek and Latin Fathers of the early Christian Centuries to indicate the Church's innermost nature and mystery. For the Christian Fathers of the first Centuries, it was evident that the Church, like the moon, does not shine by its own light and lives only by reflected light when its opaque body is illuminated by the luminous grace of Christ. The same thing was repeated by the Second Vatican Council, whose Dogmatic Constitution Lumen Gentium re-announces to the world already in its first words that "Christ is the light to all men," and only "a light brightly visible on the countenance of the Church." (LG, 1).
In his brief address to the Pre-Conclave, Bergoglio went on to quote the incipit of another key document from the last Council. He did so by juxtaposing in summary what he called "two images of the Church: the evangelizing Church that comes out of itself; that of Dei Verbum religiose audiens et fidenter proclamans (the Word of God that [the Church] religiously listens to and faithfully proclaims, ed.), or the worldly Church that lives in itself, by itself, for itself. This," he added, "must illuminate the possible changes and reforms to be made for the salvation of souls.
In this way, the future Pope suggested that by contemplating and confessing the "Mysterium Lunae" of the Church, its non-self-sufficiency, its permanent dependence on grace, "changes and reforms" could be attempted. In that circumstance he foreshadowed no engineering of the apparatuses. No plan to "change" the Church. He said, above all, that possible changes and reforms in the Church must be made not to appear MORE modern and efficient, but having as the horizon of the heart "the salvation of souls" As always, as the other great French theologian Yves Congar taught, in the Church the only necessary and interesting changes are those put in place not to redistribute "internal shares of power" or give visibility to those who need stages to inflate their Vetero or neo-clerical snootiness. But to remove ballasts and obstacles to the workings of grace in the real historical dynamism of the Church. And to make the encounter of souls with Christ easier. "In the Church everything must be conformed to the demands of the proclamation of the Gospel; not to the opinions of conservatives or progressives, but to the fact that Jesus reaches out to people's lives" (Pope Francis, catechesis of the General Audience of Wednesday, Feb. 22, 2023). (Agence Fides 9/3/2023).
