PROMOTING THE EVANGELICAL RENEWAL
Dear brother Francis: Since you were chosen to be the humble "Rock" on which Jesus continues to build his church today, I have followed your words carefully. Now, I just got back from Rome, where I’ve seen you hugging the children, blessing the sick and helpless and waving to the crowd.
They say you're close, simple, humble, friendly ... and do not know what else. I believe that there is something more, much more. I could see St. Peter’s Square and the “Reconciliation Pathway” full of excited people. I do not think that crowd is attracted only by your simplicity and sympathy. In a few months you have become “good news" for the Church and even beyond the Church. Why?
Almost without realizing it, you are introducing to the world the Good News of Jesus. You are creating a new atmosphere in the Church again, that is more evangelical and human. You are bringing us the Spirit of Christ. People away from the Christian faith tell me you support them to trust in life and in the goodness of human beings.
Some who live without a way to God tell me that their inside has been enkindled a small light that invites them
to review their attitude to the ultimate mystery of existence. I know that in the Church we need profound reforms to correct deviations that have been developed for over many centuries. This, in recent years, has strengthened my faith. For such reforms to be carried out, we need a deep and radical conversion. We need to simply return to Jesus, to deepen our Christianity in truth and faith in his person, his message and his project of the Kingdom of God. So, I want to express this as what attracts me in your service as Bishop of Rome at the dawn of your task.
I thank you that you embrace children to your bosom. In this way, we’re helping to restore Jesus' prophetic gesture that has been forgotten in the Church but, nevertheless, necessary to understand what is expected of his followers. According to the Gospel story, Jesus called the Twelve, set a little child in their midst, clasped him in his arms and said, "Whoever receives one such child in my name, he is welcoming me."
We had forgotten that at the heart of the Church, attracting the attention of all, they must always be smaller, more fragile and vulnerable. It is important to be among us as a "Rock" on which Jesus builds his Church, but importantly still or more than being in our midst to embrace children and bless the sick, is to remind us how to accept Jesus. This prophetic gesture seems crucial at this time when the world runs the risk of ignoring the less privileged.
I thank you that you repeatedly call us to leave the Church in order to enter into the life where people suffer and enjoy, fight and work: that world where God wants to build a more human coexistence, justice and solidarity. I think the more serious and subtle heresy that has permeated Christianity is putting the Church at the centre of everything, shifting horizon of the project of the Kingdom of God. John Paul II reminded us that the Church is not an end in itself, but only "a seed, a sign and instrument of the Kingdom of God," but his words have been lost among many other speeches. Now, it has dawned in me a great joy when you call us to get out of the "self-referenced position" to walk to the "existential peripheries" where we find the poor, the victims, the sick, the disadvantaged...
I enjoy stressing your words: "We have to build bridges, not walls to defend the faith" we need "a Church of open doors, not of drivers of the faith" "the Church does not grow with the proselytizing, but by the attraction, the witness and the preaching". I seem to hear the voice of Jesus who, from the Vatican, urges us: "Go and proclaim the Kingdom of God is near", "id and heal the sick", "that which you have received free, without free".
I also appreciate your constant calls to convert us to the Gospel. How well you know the Church. I am surprised your freedom to name our sins. Do not with sanctimonious language, but with Evangelical force: envy, the eagerness to make career and the desire for money; "the misinformation, libel and slander" the arrogance and the clerical hypocrisy; the spiritual "worldliness" and the "bourgeoisie in spirit" "Christians lounge", the Museum "believers", Christians with 'funeral face'. You worried about "a salt without tasting", "a salt that does not know anything" and call us to be disciples who learn to live with the style of Jesus.
Call us not only to a single conversion. You urges us to a church, structural renovation. We are not used to listen to this language. Deaf to the so-called renewal of Vatican II, we have forgotten that Jesus invited his followers to "put new wine into new Wineskins". That makes me hope your homily for the feast of Pentecost: "novelty gives us always a bit scary, because we feel safer if we have everything under control, if we are to those who build, we schedule and plan our life according to our schemes, securities and tastes..." We are afraid that God takes us along new roads, we remove from our horizons, often limited, closed, selfish, to open up his own".For this reason we ask that we ask sincerely: "we are open to surprises of God or us locked with fear to the novelty of the Holy Spirit? We are determined to cross the new paths that the novelty of God presents to us or us issues on outdated structures, which have lost the ability to respond? "." Your message and your spirit are announcing a new future for the Church.I want to finish these lines expressing you humbly desire. You may not make major reforms, but you can boost the Evangelical renewal throughout the Church. You can certainly take appropriate measures so that the future bishops of dioceses around the world have a profile and a pastoral style capable of promoting that conversion to Jesus that you try to encourage from Rome. Francis, you are a gift from God. Thank you!
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Translated and revised by CIR-UNIMINUTO©2013
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