Francis’ radical vision for the Church

Pope Francis has strongly criticised clericalism, Vatican “courtiers” and the institutional Church’s historical entanglement with worldliness in a new and lengthy interview with the left-leaning Italian paper, La Repubblica.

In the 4,500-word transcript, published on Tuesday in the Rome-based daily, the 76-year old Pope also speaks of his desire for a poor and missionary Church that is present as a tiny “leaven” in society and whose main aim is to build brotherhood and agape among all people, rather than proselytise to gain new members.

And he expresses his intention to recover – with “humility and ambition” – the Second Vatican Council’s decision to “be open to modern culture” and bolster “religious ecumenism and dialogue with non-believers”.

The interview was conducted on 24 September by La Repubblica’s founder, Eugenio Scalfari, a noted secularist intellectual with whom the Argentine Pope had an earlier exchange of letters that also appeared in the same paper.

Its publication came as Francis started an inaugural three-day meeting with his Council of Cardinals, the group he formed in April to help advise him on universal church governance and the reform of the Roman Curia. In the new interview, the Pope says the eight cardinal members were “not courtiers, but wise people” who shared his feelings. “This is the beginning of a Church with an organisation that is not just top-down, but also horizontal,” he says, admitting that it is likely to be a “long and difficult road”.

Some of the Pope’s newly published comments – especially his frank criticism of certain attitudes in the Church – are likely to cause even more consternation among conservative Catholics who took exception to certain remarks from his 19 September interview with La Civiltà Cattolica.
“The [Vatican] court is the leprosy of the papacy,” Francis says. “Heads of the Church have often been narcissists, flattered and thrilled by their courtiers,” he adds. Acknowledging that courtiers “sometimes” still exist, the Pope says the real problem with the Roman Curia is that it is too “Vatican-centric” and concerned with its own “temporal interests” to the point that it “neglects” the rest of the world.

“I do not share this view and I’ll do everything I can to change it,” he declares. He points out that the Holy See is not the Church, but is at the service of the Church.

“It also happens to me that when I meet a clericalist I suddenly become anti-clerical. Clericalism should not have anything to do with Christianity.”

The Jesuit Pope says the Church that “Jesus and his disciples preached” was “missionary and poor”, which he says is still valid today. He shrugs off concerns the Church constitutes a minority in most places. “Personally, I think that being a minority is actually a strength,” he says. “We have to be a leavening of life and love,” he continues.

“Our goal is not to proselytise but to listen to needs, desires and disappointments, despair and hope. We must restore hope to young people, help the old, be open to the future, spread love. Be poor among the poor.”

He calls proselytism “solemn nonsense, it makes no sense”. The main thing is to help every person “follow the good and fight evil as he conceives them”. This, he says, “will be enough to make the world a better place”.

“The Son of Man became flesh to instil in people’s souls the sentiment of brotherhood,” Pope Francis says. “Agape and the love of each one of us towards others, from those closest to those furthest away, is the only way Jesus gave to find the way of salvation and the Beatitudes,” he adds.
In the interview the Pope expresses his spiritual affinity with St Augustine and St Francis; calls the Jesuits “perhaps the most effective leaven” in the Church; and says “youth unemployment and the loneliness of the elderly” are the “most serious evils” in the world and “most urgent problem the Church is facing”.

He says the Church will stay out of politics “beyond its task of expressing and spreading its values, at least as long as I am here”.