Pope turning his back on ‘straitjacket of moralism’

The C8 coordinator Cardinal Oscar Rodríguez Maradiaga said in an interview with the German Catholic News Agency KNA on the occasion of the first anniversary of Pope Francis’ election that the Pope was breaking away from “moralism”.

“I am a moral theologian myself but I feel very much at ease with what the Pope says, as moralism is often more like a straitjacket than an answer to the call of the Good Tidings,” Cardinal Rodríguez said. One did not encounter God in a lecture hall but in the form “of a human person who is calling us”, he underlined.

The reform of the Curia which the Pope had begun carried risks for Pope Francis. People were saying the Pope was carrying out a revolution, he recalled, and added, “I have even heard people say ‘We are praying for him to die as soon as possible’. That is wicked – but such people think they are Christians,” the cardinal said. There had always been such people, he recalled, saying, “That was what the scribes who turned against the Lord said.”

Jorge Maria Bergoglio had not changed on becoming Pope, Cardinal Rodríguez pointed out. “He has remained the same all his life. But this new perspective has fired a new passion in him. As Archbishop of Buenos Aires his thoughts were already on retirement but when he received the call at the conclave, he responded full of enthusiasm.”

Cardinal Rodríguez especially praised the Pope’s simple way of addressing people. The Church’s theological approach was often “way above people’s heads”, he said. Francis, on the other hand, had “that special gift of making himself understood straight away”.

The Pope’s gestures, such as his visit to refugees in Lampedusa, were “veritable encyclicals”, the cardinal pointed out.