Rome Newsroom, Dec 13, 2023 / 09:38 am (CNA).
Pope Francis on Wednesday closed his catechetical series on apostolic zeal, delivered during his recent general audiences, by noting that the attitude of being open is a duty for every Christian and a precondition for authentically announcing the Gospel.
“The Christian must be open to the Word of God and to the service of others,” the pope said during the audience. He went on to juxtapose this notion of openness with a mentality of “closure,” noting that the latter contradicts the central message of the Gospel and allows for people to fall into ideological ways of thinking.
“Closed Christians always end up badly, because they are not Christians, they are ideologues, ideologues of closure,” the pope said.
The pope highlighted this openness by pointing to the Gospel of Mark when Jesus performs the miracle of healing a deaf-mute man, using “the decisive word” of “effatà,” which the Holy Father noted means “open up” in Aramaic.
“And for this reason, this effatà, this ‘open up,’ is an invitation to all of us to open up,” he continued.
While acknowledging the condition of “physical deafness,” the pope noted that in the biblical context it assumes a metaphorical character, conveying that “one who is deaf to the word of God is mute, who does not communicate the word of God.”
The Holy Father closed his remarks by suggesting that before becoming a witness to the Gospel, it is critical to have a moment of reflection and ask ourselves a series of key questions.
“Do I really love the Lord, to the point of wanting to announce him? Do I want to become his witness or am I content with being his disciple? Do I take the people I meet to heart, do I bring them to Jesus in prayer? Do I want to do something so that the joy of the Gospel, which has transformed my life, makes their lives more beautiful?”
During his greeting to the Italian pilgrims gathered for the audience, Pope Francis recalled that Dec. 13 is the feast day of St. Lucy, a virgin and martyr of Syracuse, Sicily, who was martyred in the fourth century during the Christian persecutions of the Roman Emperor Diocletian.
“In some areas of Italy and Europe it is customary to exchange gifts for the upcoming Christmas on this occasion,” the pope said. “I would like to invite all of you to exchange the gift of friendship and Christian testimony — which is a beautiful gift.”
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You go first, Francis. Show us your devotion to the Word of God, and to service of others. Then we can follow what you do, but not that which (only) you say.
“Preach the Gospel at all times; use words when necessary.”
The Holy Father’s exegesis is itself closed. God can save “closed Christians”. At the end the Holy Father mentions that God can make the deaf hear and the dumb speak. Well, God also can stop up your hearing and your ability to speak what He wants.
But it is flawed in other ways. For example, leading people into temptation -whether in the name of fraternity or the Name of Jesus or the name of charity or the name of being open or whatever name- is not the Gospel and is not speaking of Jesus.
We do not exchange our baptism for the human virtue of brotherliness. To do that comes up to Pelagianism. VATICAN II recommends the practice of human virtues in charity because it is most fitting the call to holiness and the apostolates for these times.
In the first place the fruit of the Holy Ghost is not brotherliness but benignity. And the fruits are not summed up in brotherliness but in magnifying God in His gifts. Holy Father presents the danger not merely in what he says but also in what he does.
In its best light, might we suppose that Pope Francis goes overboard, or maybe only backwards, in his style or sequence of inculturation? Two quotes and a proposal:
FIRST, Cardinal Danielou explains:
“Christianity is always at first [at first!] led to take a stand against the errors of paganism, it [then] goes on to take to itself the good things in it. An obvious example which offers proof of this is the evangelization of the West. Christianity has taken up all that was valuable in the religions of Greece and Rome. Shrines of pagan goddesses became shrines of the Virgin Mary, and the seasonal pagan feasts were displaced by Christmas and Candlemas […] Christianity lifts them up, purifies them, and transfigures them” (“Prayer as a Political Problem,” 1953, p. 91).
SECOND, related to which, and possibly explaining the way-station of pluralist (?) “fraternity,” the Anglican convert, Fr. George William Rutler, gives us this:
“We might say that the cardinal virtues have their counterparts in the quadrivium: music and justice are both sciences of harmony; arithmetic and prudence are sciences of order; geometry and temperance are sciences of transcendence. And the theological virtues comport themselves with the fundamental trivium: grammar being to discourse what faith is to supernatural conversion; rhetoric being to grammar what hope is morally to faith; and dialectic providing a natural analogy of the heavenly discourse of love, just as love is the highest logic of creation. It is an arbitrary scheme, to be sure, but a fair reminder of the community between natural and spiritual sciences” (“Beyond Modernity: Reflections of a Post-Modern Catholic,” Ignatius, 1987, p. 123).
PROPOSAL: “The community between natural AND spiritual sciences”?
Which is to propose that once the Church gets back to making an “un-mess” [!] of things, the prevailing disconnect between so-called “concrete” experiences and so-called “abstract” rigidities might draw from reflections such as these…BECAUSE these frontward reflections are, today, messily perceived and branded as “backwardist.”
(Still, at the Synod on Youth, exchanging the papal crozier for a Wiccan stang was a bit much. Also, housing Pachamama within St. Peter’s Basilica on the same floor as the tabernacle and Real Presence.)
The “abstract rigidities” could be misnomer, Beaulieu, or a misconstrued business (or something off). In different senses too.
For Pope Francis the rigidity is the problem whether it is to do with abstraction or anything else. He is saying either grace is incipiently blocked or virtue is lacking.
I don’t accept it merely on such terms. A priest RIP of the “Francis” type mold used to converse at length about all kinds of things some of it plain out NOT our faith; eg., “Trinity” is “God with 3 hats”.
Trinity is God with 3 chips? Chocolate chips? Raiding the ref? Passing in the night? With 3 hats?
Here you encounter loose wobbly abstracting that is not “rigid” itself but is not our belief. What is behind it COULD be rigid, actually; in the sense of wrong and weighed down stubbornness.
But in another mode abstracting does not produce rigidity just so nor is it a sign of blockaded grace or undeveloped virtue or style-less-ness.
One of the priests who moved my faith now deceased RIP, was brief, repetitive, rebuking, retiring; yet uniquely real and transparent. For his 10-minute homilies he merely repeated passages from the readings. That was his level of abstracting and it was effective articulation.
And the attraction was the father.
In yet a third sense, the explanation of the faith say in the outline of a heresy, ITSELF contains the cure -incipiently; when it often happens that the rigidity lies in the one doing the resisting/rejecting of the faith or resisting/rejecting of the incipient cure that is attempting to pass.
Begging your pardon sir and the Lord’s, I wished to do this well.
The Good News is healing and empowering. Long live the Good News in thought, word, and action.