The Twenty-Seventh Sunday in Ordinary Time

"I can see clearly that the thing the church needs most today is the ability to heal wounds and to warm the hearts of the faithful; it needs nearness, proximity.  I see the church as a field hospital after battle.  It is usless to ask a seriously injured person if he has high cholesterol and about the level of his blood sugars! You have to heal his wounds. Then we can talk about everything else."
~ Pope Francis, "America" interview. 

It's actually been kind of interesting for me to read "Pope Approves Gay Marriage" or "Why Pope Francis May be a Catholic Nightmare".  I think that a talent all humans have is hearing what they want to hear.  Pope Francis is stirring the pot, but he's not teaching anything new, or contradicting our founder.  Reading his famous quotes from the plane interview, and the very well written "America" interview, I am struck by this incredibly intelligent and humble man.

How is Francis stirring the pot?  Well, no one can read his comments honestly without feeling a twinge of guilt.  For those that seek to further an agenda Francis reminds us, "Ours is not a 'lab faith', but a 'journey faith', a historical faith.  God has revealed himself as a history, not as a compendium of abstract truths.  I am afraid of laboratories because in the laboratory you take the problems and then you bring them home to tame them, to paint them artificially, out of their context.  You cannot bring home the frontier, but you have to live on the border and be audacious"  For those that write columns in bulletins, or try to synthesize the rich quotes of our Holy Father, "when it comes to social issues, it is one thing to have a meeting to study the problem of doing drugs in a slum neighborhood and quite another thing to go there, live there and understand the problem from the inside and study it."  He is hitting people on every frontier, and reminding us not to limit ourselves to a few issues.  "Instead of being just a church that welcomes and receives by keeping the doors open, let us try also to be a church that finds new roads, that is able to step outside itself and go to those who do not attend mass, to those who have quit or are indifferent"  The ones who quit sometimes do it for reasons that, if properly understood and assessed, can lead to a return.  But that takes audacity and courage."

The Pope is making news, stirring hearts, and prompting questions; these are not bad things.  It is important that we hear what he says, not what we want him to say.  If you have 15 minutes, read that interview in America Magazine.  I think you will find that Pope Francis is not out to make headlines, or to cause scandal, he is searching for God and leading us as well.  I look forward to more from him. 

"Christian hope is not a ghost and it does not deceive.  It is a theological virtue and therefore, ultimately, a gift from God that cannot be reduced to optimism, which is only human.  God does not mislead hope; God cannot deny himself.  God is all promise." ~ Pope Francis

-Fr. Benjamin Green