Firenze 2015
From the Cathedral of Santa Maria del Fiore, the Pope delivered eight clinchers and called upon the bishops “not to be closed inside the structures”. The dream of an Italian Church ever closer to “the abandoned, the forlorn, the imperfect”. “Humbleness, selflessness, beatitude” represent the ideal identikit, Pelagianism and Gnosticism are the temptations to be shunned. To youths: “Overcome apathy!” The launch of a synodal process based on “Evangelii Gaudium”
The image of the dome of Santa Maria del Fiore, its internal walls frescoed with the Last Judgment. Guareschi’s fictional characters of Peppone and Don Camillo face each other with respect, from opposite sides, without fear of arguing. A bishop in a crowded subway who does not know where to stand finds support by leaning on his people. These three images describe, in a nutshell, Pope Francis’ speech to 2 200 representatives of the Italian Church gathered in Florence until Friday for their fifth ecclesial national meeting. Earlier, Francis had had the opportunity to admire Marc Chagall’s “White Crucifixion”, one of his favourite paintings. The tenth pastoral visit of Pope Francis to Italy had begun two hours earlier, in Prato, where during a meeting with labourers and labour representatives he had called for “pacts of proximity”. “I like a restless Church in Italy, ever close to the abandoned, the forgotten, the imperfect,” is the Pope’s dream from Santa Maria del Fiore, where he urged Catholics to be “creative”, and to believe “in the genius of Italian Christianity”. In the Mass at the Artemio Franchi stadium, the closing event of the visit, Francis recalled that humanism, starting from Florence to which it gave birth, “always had the face of charity”. “May this heritage bear the fruits of a new humanism for this city and for Italy as a whole”, said the Holy Father.
The fresco bears the inscription “Ecce Homo”. The Pope fixed his gaze on the painting in the opening remarks of his speech in Santa Maria del Fiore. He said: “humanism should take its starting point from the centrality of Jesus, in whom we discover “the features of the authentic face of man”. “We must not tame the power of the face of Jesus, he is the misericordiae vultus ,” who takes on “the face of the humiliated, the enslaved and the emptied,” The first clincher: “Even if our words are beautiful, cultivated, refined we will understand nothing of Christian humanism if they are not words of faith. They will be words with no meaning”.
“Humbleness, selflessness, beatitude”. For the Pope these three words exemplify the identity of the Italian Church. “Selflessness” means “seeking the joy of those near us”, since “the humanity of Christian faithful is always outgoing, it is not narcissistic or self-referential”. When the heart “is rich and self-complacent, there is no room for God”. The second clincher: “Please, let us avoid remaining shut up within structures which give us a false sense of security, within rules which make us harsh judges, within habits that make us feel safe”. “For the great saints, beatitude is about humiliation and poverty. But also in the most humble of our people there is much of this beatitude”. The third clincher: “We must not be obsessed with power. A Church concerned about her own interests would be a sad Church”. He then mentioned one of the key-themes of this Pontificate:
“’I prefer a Church which is bruised, hurting and dirty because it has been out on the streets, rather than a Church which is unhealthy from being confined and from clinging to its own security”.
Temptations to be avoided. The fourth clincher is to say no “to plans that are perfect because they are abstract”, to “assuming a style of control, of hardness, normativity”: “Faced with the ills or the problems of the Church, it is useless to seek solutions in conservatism or fundamentalism, in the restoration of outdated forms and conduct that have no capacity for meaning, even culturally”. In addition to Pelagianism, the second temptation to guard against is Gnosticism, “that leads us to place our trust in logical and clear reasoning that, however, loses the tenderness of our brother’s flesh”. “Not putting into practice, not leading the Word to reality, means building on sand, remaining in the pure idea and degenerating into intimisms that do not bear fruit, that render its dynamism sterile”, is the fifth clincher.
We must learn from the “great saints” like St. Francis of Assisi and St. Philip of Neri, But also from invented characters such as Don Camillo and Peppone”. “Closeness to the people and prayer are the keys to living a popular, humble, generous, happy Christian humanism. If we lose this contact with the faithful people of God we will loose our humanity and we will be going nowhere”.
The poor first. “People and pastors together”, was the Pope’s sixth clincher. “I ask the bishops to be pastors. It will be the people, your flock, who support you”. Like the story of the bishop on the underground at rush hour, he “leaned on the people around him so as not to fall”. A “bishop will find support by leaning on his people”. The seventh clincher was delivered in the form of a prayer: “May God protect the Church in Italy from any kind of surrogate of power, image and money”. The poor first: “The mother Church has the other side of the coin of everyone and she recognises all her abandoned, oppressed and weary children”.
“Dialogue does not mean to negotiate”, Francis said, highlighting the culture of encounter: “the best way to engage in dialogue is not that of speaking and discussing, but rather of doing something together,: not alone, among Catholics, but along with all people of goodwill”, is the eighth clincher, as “our brother is more important than positions we deem distant from certainties, however authentic they may be”. “The nation is not a museum”, the Church is entitled to intervene in public debate. The Pope’s appeal to the young is “to overcome apathy”, and not look down on life from the balcony. For the whole Italian Church, at all levels, an indication: a synodal pathway centred on the “Evangelii Gaudium”.
