Mission & Pitfalls: Words from the Holy Father

We’d like to call our readers’ attention to some remarks made today by Pope Francis at St. John Lateran in Rome.

Reflecting upon some passages from Acts and the Gospels of Mark and Luke, as well as points made in Evangelii Gaudium, the Holy Father outlined the nature of mission work in the Church, as well as some of the primary errors to be avoided in such work.

The message was offered for the Pontifical Mission Society, but perhaps it holds some valuable advice for those who wish to promote evangelization, whether in a specific area of mission, or across the Church in their area, and can help identify attitudes that do not in the end serve the missionary purpose of the Church.

Vatican News provides a summary of the remarks here, and the complete text may be read here.

Below are some excerpts from Francis’ text.

We ask that readers continue to pray for the Holy Father, bishops and for the special needs of our diocese during this week in which we remember Christ’s Ascension.

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Pitfalls to avoid:

“Self-absorption.  Church organizations and agencies, quite apart from the good intentions of their individual members, sometimes end up turning in on themselves, devoting energy and attention primarily to promoting themselves and to advertising their own initiatives.  Some seem to be dominated by an obsession to continually redefine their own importance and their own bailiwicks within the Church, under the guise of relaunching their specific mission.  In this way, as Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger once said, they can foster the misleading idea that a person is somehow more Christian if he or she is occupied with intra-ecclesial structures, whereas in reality nearly all the baptized are daily living lives of faith, hope, and charity, without ever participating in Church committees or concerned for the latest news about ecclesiastical politics (cf. Una compagnia sempre riformanda, Speech at the IX Meeting in Rimini, 1 September 1990).”

“Control anxiety.  Institutions and agencies sometimes set out to help ecclesial communities by employing the gifts generated in them by the Holy Spirit, yet over time they presume to exercise supremacy and control over the very communities they are meant to serve.  This attitude is almost always accompanied by the claim that they are exercising the role of “overseers” called to determine the legitimacy of other groups.  They end up acting as if the Church was a product of our own calculations, plans, agreements and decisions.”

“Elitism.  An elitist feeling, the unspoken notion of belonging to an aristocracy, takes hold at times among those who are part of groups and organized institutions in the Church: a superior class of specialists who strive to increase their own influence in collusion or in competition with other ecclesiastical elites, and train their members according to secular notions of activism or technical-professional competence . . .”

“Isolation from the people.  The elitist temptation in some organizations connected to the Church can be accompanied at times by a sentiment of superiority and of intolerance towards the rest of the baptized, towards the people of God who may attend parishes and visit shrines, but are not “activists” busy in Catholic organizations.  The People of God is viewed as an inert mass, always in need of being awakened and mobilized through a “consciousness-raising” consisting in arguments, appeals and teachings.  As if the certainty of faith was the consequence of persuasive speech or training methods.”

“Abstraction.  Once they become self-absorbed, institutions and entities connected to the Church lose contact with reality and fall prey to abstraction.  They needlessly multiply instances of strategic planning in order to produce projects and guidelines that serve only as means of self-promotion for those who come up with them.  They take problems and dissect them in intellectual laboratories where everything has been domesticated and is viewed through the lens of their own ideology.  Everything, even references to the faith or verbal appeals to Jesus and the Holy Spirit, once taken outside of their proper context, can thus end up rigidified and unreal.”

“Functionalism.  Self-absorbed and elitist organizations, even within the Church, often end up staking everything on the imitation of secular models of worldly efficiency, like those rooted in competition, whether economic or social.  Opting for functionalism gives the illusion of being able to “sort matters out” in a balanced way, keeping things under control, maximizing one’s own relevance, and improving the everyday management of existing structures.  However, as I already said to you at our 2016 meeting, a Church afraid of entrusting herself to the grace of Christ and focusing on the efficiency of its bureaucracy is already dead, even if structures and programmes that favour the interest of “self-absorbed” clergy or lay people linger for centuries.”

Further considerations:

“Proximity to life “in progress”  Jesus met his first disciples on the shore of the Sea of Galilee while they were focused on their work.  He did not meet them at a convention, a training workshop, or in the Temple.  It has always been the case that the proclamation of Jesus’ salvation reaches people right where they are and just how they are in the midst of their lives in progress.  Amid the needs, hopes and problems of everyday life we find the place where one who has acknowledged the love of Christ and received the gift of the Holy Spirit can offer an account of his or her faith, hope, and charity to those who ask for it.  By journeying together with others, alongside everyone.  Especially given the times in which we live, this has nothing to do with designing “specialized” training programmes, creating parallel worlds, or constructing “slogans” that merely echo our own thoughts and concerns. ”

A free gift, not the result of strategies: “All of us are called to nurture by means of love and gratitude, as well as by our works, the seeds of divine life that the Spirit of Christ causes to blossom and grow where he wills, even in the deserts.  Please, in your prayer ask above all that the Lord make everyone better prepared to recognize the signs of his activity, in order then to reveal them to the whole world.  Even this can be helpful: to ask that, in the depths of our own hearts, our prayer to the Holy Spirit may not be reduced to a mere formality in our meetings and homilies.  It is not helpful to theorize about super-strategies or mission “core guidelines” as a means of reviving missionary spirit or giving missionary patents to others.  If, in some cases, missionary fervour is fading, it is a sign that faith itself is fading.  In such cases, the attempt to revive the flame by strategies and speeches will end up only weakening it all the more, causing the desert to expand. “

The “sensus fidei” of the People of God.  There is one reality in the world that has a kind of “feel” for the Holy Spirit and his workings.  It is the People of God, called and loved by Jesus, who for their part continue to seek him amid the difficulties of their lives.  The People of God beg for the gift of his Spirit: entrusting their expectation to the simple words of their prayers and never entertaining the presumption of their own self-sufficiency.  The holy People of God are gathered together and anointed by the Lord…. The working of the Holy Spirit equips the faithful People with an “instinct” of faith, the sensus fidei, which helps them not to err when believing the things of God, even if they do not know the theological arguments and formulas that define the gifts they experience.  The mystery of the pilgrim people, who with their popular piety travel to shrines and entrust themselves to Jesus, Mary and the saints, draws from this and shows that it is connatural to the free and gratuitous initiative of God, apart from our pastoral planning.”

Mission springs from the gratitude of having met Christ, having been drawn and attracted by Him: ” If one follows Jesus, happy to be attracted by him, others will take notice.  They may even be astonished.  The joy that radiates from those attracted by Christ and by his Spirit is what can make any missionary initiative fruitful.”