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Pope Francis’ address to Bishops on his ecumenical peace pilgrimage to Congo)
CENCO (Kinshasa) – Friday, 3rd February 2023
Readings: Jeremiah 1:4 The word of Yahweh came to me, saying: ‘Before I formed you in the womb I knew you; before you came to birth I consecrated you; I appointed you as prophet to the nations.’ I then said, ‘Ah, ah, ah, Lord Yahweh; you see, I do not know how to speak: I am only a child!’ But Yahweh replied, ‘Do not say, “I am only a child,” for you must go to all to whom I send you and say whatever I command you. Do not be afraid of confronting them, for I am with you to rescue you, Yahweh declares.’ Then Yahweh stretched out his hand and touched my mouth, and Yahweh said to me: ‘There! I have put my words into your mouth.
Dear brother Bishops,
I am pleased to meet with you and I express you my heartfelt gratitude for your warm welcome. I thank Archbishop Utembi Tapa for his kind words of greeting in your name.
I am grateful for the way in which you courageously proclaim the consolation of the Lord, walking among your people and sharing their hardships and their hopes.
It has been a joy for me to spend these days in your country which, with its great forest, represents the “green heart” of Africa, a lung for the whole world.
The importance of this natural heritage reminds us that we are called to protect the beauty of creation and to defend it from the wounds inflicted by greed and selfishness.
This vast green expanse that is your forest is also an image that speaks to our Christian life.
As a Church we need to breathe the pure air of the Gospel, to drive out the polluted air of worldliness, to protect the young heart of faith.
This is how I imagine the African Church and this is how I see this Congolese Church: a young, dynamic and joyful Church, motivated by missionary zeal, by the good news that God loves us and that Jesus is Lord. Your Church is present in the lived history of this people, deeply rooted in their daily life, and at the forefront of charity. It is a community capable of attracting others, filled with contagious enthusiasm and therefore, like your forests, full of “oxygen”. Thank you, for you are a lung that helps the universal Church to breathe!
It is not good to start a paragraph with the word “sad”, but I have to do it!
Sadly, I know that the Christian community of this country also has another face.
Indeed, your young, radiant and noble face also shows pain and weariness, and at times fear and discouragement. It is the face of a Church that suffers for its people, a heart in which the life of the people, with its joys and trials, beats anxiously. A Church that is a visible sign of Christ, who even today is rejected, condemned and reviled in the many crucified people of our world; a Church that weeps with their tears, and, like Jesus, also wants to dry those tears. A Church that is anxious to embrace the material and spiritual wounds people and to let the living and healing water from the side of Christ flow over them.
With you, dear brothers, I see Jesus suffering in the history of this people, a people crucified and oppressed, ravaged by ruthless violence, marked by the suffering of the innocent, forced to live with the polluted waters of corruption and injustice that contaminate society, and suffering the poverty of so many of its children.
But at the same time, I see a people that has not lost hope, but embraces the faith with enthusiasm and looks to its pastors.
I see a people capable of turning to the Lord and entrusting themselves to his hands, so that the peace they yearn for, though stifled by exploitation, partisan selfishness, the poison of conflict and the manipulation of truth, may finally come as a gift from on high.
This begs the question: how do we carry out our ministry in this situation?
As I thought of you, the shepherds of God’s holy People, the story of Jeremiah came to mind. Jeremiah was a prophet called to carry out his own mission at a dramatic time in the history of Israel, amid injustices, detestable practices and sufferings.
He spent his life proclaiming that God never abandons his people and that he has plans for peace even in situations that seem lost and irredeemable.
But above all, Jeremiah experienced this consoling proclamation of faith personally; he was the first to experience God’s closeness.
Only in this way was he able to offer others a courageous prophecy of hope.
Your episcopal ministry too is carried out between these two realities, that I would like to speak now: God’s closeness and prophecy for the people.
God’s closeness
The first thing I would say is, let yourselves be touched and comforted by the closeness of God. He is close to us. The first thing that the Lord told Jeremiah was this: “Before I formed you in the womb I knew you” (Jer 1:5). This is a declaration of love that God writes on the heart of each one of us, which no one can erase and which is a source of comfort in the midst of life’s storms.
It is important for us, who are called to be pastors of the People of God, to rely on this closeness of the Lord, “to form ourselves in prayer”, and to spend much time in his presence.
Only in this way will the people entrusted to us come closer to the Good Shepherd and only in this way will we ourselves become shepherds, for without him we can do nothing (cf. Jn 15:5).
Otherwise we would be businessmen, “masters”, but we would not be following the Lord’s call.
Without Him we can do nothing.
May we never think of ourselves as self-sufficient, much less see in the episcopate as an opportunity to advance in society and to exercise power.
This is the ugly spirit of “careerism”.
Above all else, let us never open the door to the spirit of worldliness, for it makes us interpret the ministry according to the criteria of our own advantage.
It makes us become cold and detached in the administration of what has been entrusted to us.
It leads us to use our role to serve ourselves instead of serving others, and to neglect the one relationship that matters, that of humble and daily prayer.
Let us remember that worldliness is the worst thing that can happen to the Church, the worst.
I have always been moved by the end of Cardinal De Lubac’s book on the Church, the last three or four pages, where he puts it like this: spiritual worldliness is the worst thing that can happen, even worse than the time of the Popes who were worldly and had concubines.
It is the worst thing. And worldliness is always lurking. So let us be careful!
Dear brother Bishops, let us cherish our closeness to the Lord, in order to be credible and eloquent witnesses of him and of his love in the midst of our people.
Through us he wants to anoint them with the oil of consolation and of hope! You are the voice with which God wants to say to the Congolese people: “You are a people holy to the Lord your God” (Deut 7:6).
The Proclamation the Gospel, the animation of pastoral life and the exercise of leadership cannot become ideas that have little to do with the reality of daily life.
On the contrary, they must touch the wounds and communicate God’s closeness, so that people may realize their dignity as his beloved children and learn to walk with their heads held high, never lowering them in the face of humiliation and oppression.
Through you, this people has the grace to hear the same words that the Lord spoke to Jeremiah: “You are a blessed people: before I formed you in the womb, I thought of you, knew you and loved you”.
When we cherish our closeness to God, we will be drawn to our people and will always feel compassion for those entrusted to us.
The attitude of compassion is not an emotion; it is suffering with them.
Encouraged and strengthened by the Lord, let us in turn become channels of consolation and reconciliation for others, to heal the wounds of the suffering, to ease the pain of those who weep, to lift up the poor and to liberate individuals from various forms of slavery and oppression.
In a word, our closeness to God makes us prophets for the people, sowing the seed of his saving Word in the wounded history of their land.
Prophecy for the people
To consider the second point, prophecy for the people, let us look once again at the experience of Jeremiah.
After receiving God’s loving and consoling word, he was called to become a “prophet to the nations” (cf. Jer 1:5), sent to bring light into the darkness, to bear witness in an environment of violence and corruption.
Jeremiah, who devoured the word of the Lord, which became the joy and the delight of his heart (cf. Jer 15:16 –When your words came, I devoured them: your word was my delight and the joy of my heart; for I was called by your Name, Yahweh, God of hosts), tells us that the same word awakened within him an unbridled restlessness and led him to reach out to others so that they too would be touched by God’s presence.
He writes: “There is a burning fire in my heart, as it were, shut up in my bones, and I am weary of keeping it in, and I cannot” (Jer 20:9).
We cannot keep God’s word to ourselves, we cannot restrict its power: it is a fire that burns away our apathy and kindles in us the desire to enlighten those in darkness.
The Word of God is a fire that burns us and urges us to go forth!
This, then, is what we are as Bishops: men set on fire by the Word of God, sent forth with apostolic zeal to the People of God!
But, we may ask ourselves, what does this prophetic proclamation of the Word, this fiery passion, entail?
The Lord told the prophet Jeremiah: “Behold, I have put my words in your mouth.
Behold, I have set you this day over nations and over kingdoms, to root out and to pull down, to destroy and to overthrow, to build and to plant” (Jer. 1:9-10).
These are powerful verbs: to uproot and to overthrow, and then to build and to plant.
They have to do with cooperating in a new chapter of history that God wants to bring about in the midst of a world of perversity and injustice.
You are called to continue to make your prophetic voice heard, so that consciences may feel challenged and each person may take an active and responsible role in building a different future.
We are called, then, to uproot the poisonous plants of hatred and selfishness, anger, resentment and violence; to tear down the altars built by money and corruption;to build a coexistence based on justice, truth and peace; and finally, to sow the seeds of rebirth, so that tomorrow’s Congo will truly be what the Lord dreams of: a blessed and happy land, no longer exploited, oppressed and drenched in blood.
At the same time, let us be careful: we are not talking about political activity.
Christian prophecy is embodied in a wide variety of political and social activities, but this is not generally the task of Bishops and pastors, which is to proclaim the word, to awaken consciences, to denouncing evil and to encouraging those who are broken-hearted and without hope. “Comfort, comfort my people”: this theme that appears again and again is an invitation from the Lord. It is a proclamation made not only with words but also with closeness and personal witness.
Closeness
First of all closeness to the priests, since they are the ones closest to the Bishop, concern for the pastoral workers and encouragement to work together in a synodal spirit.
Witness
The Pastors of the Church must first of all be credible, especially in their work of promoting communion, in their moral life and in their administration of goods.
In this regard, it is essential to create harmony, without on a pedestal or showing harshness, but by setting a good example of mutual support and forgiveness, working together as models of fraternity, peace and evangelical simplicity.
May it never be said of you, while others are suffering from hunger, “They didn’t care; some went to their fields, others to their businesses” (Mt 22:5). No, please, let us keep business affairs out of the Lord’s vineyard! A pastor cannot be an entrepreneur! Let us be pastors and servants of the people of God, not managers of things, not entrepreneurs but pastors!
The leadership of the Bishop must be that of a pastor; in front of the flock, in the midst of the flock, and behind the flock.
1. In front of the flock to point out the way;
2. in the midst of the flock to have the smell of the sheep and not to lose it;
3. behind the flock to help those who are going more slowly,
and also to leave the flock alone for a bit to see where it finds good pasture.
The shepherd must move in these three directions.
Dear brother Bishops, I have shared with you what I have felt in my heart.
Nourish your own closeness to the Lord so that you may be prophetic signs of his mercy for your people. I urge you not to neglect dialogue with God or to allow the flame of prophecy be extinguished by an ambiguous relationship with those in powers that be, or by a complacent and routine life. In situations of injustice and suffering, the Gospel demands that we speak out. We take a risk when we raise our voices in response to what God calls us to do.
One of your brothers did this, the Servant of God Archbishop Christophe Munzihirwa, a courageous shepherd and prophetic voice, who defended his people at the cost of his life.
The day before he died, he sent a radio message to everyone, saying: “What can we still do these days? Let us remain firm in faith. We trust that God will not abandon us and that somewhere there will be a small ray of hope for us. God will not abandon us if we are committed to respecting the life of our neighbors, whatever their ethnicity”. The next day he was killed in a town square, but the seeds he planted in this country, along with many others, will bear fruit.
It is good to remember with gratitude the great pastors who marked the history of your country and your Church, those who preached the Gospel to you and who went before you in faith. Dear brothers, they are the solid roots that strengthen you in evangelical zeal.
Here I think of the benefit I personally received from knowing Cardinal Laurent Monsengwo Pasinya.
Dear brothers, do not be afraid to be prophets of hope for the people, concordant voices of the consolation of the Lord, witnesses and joyful proclaimers of the Gospel, apostles of justice, Samaritans of solidarity.
Be witnesses of mercy and reconciliation in the midst of the violence unleashed not only by the exploitation of resources and by ethnic and tribal conflicts, but also and above all by the dark power of the evil one, the enemy of God and humanity.
At the same time, we must never grow discouraged: the crucified Lord is risen, Jesus has triumphed and has already overcome the world (cf. Jn 16:33).
He now wants to shine forth in you, in your precious work, in your fruitful sowing of peace!
Dear brothers, I thank you for your ministry, your pastoral zeal and your witness.
And now, at the end of my journey, I would like to express my deepest gratitude to you and to all those who have worked to prepare for this. You have had the patience to wait for a new year, you are good! Thank you for this! You had to work twice as hard, because the first visit was canceled, but I know that you will forgive the Pope! Thank you for everything!
Next June, you will celebrate the National Eucharistic Congress at Lubumbashi.
Jesus is truly present and active in the Eucharist; there he reconciles and heals, consoles and unites, enlightens and transforms; there he inspires and sustains your ministry and makes it fruitful.
May the presence of Jesus, the shepherd who is meek and humble of heart, the victor over evil and death, transform this great country and always be your joy and your hope!
I bless you with all my heart.
I want to add one more thing: I said “be merciful”. Mercy. Always forgive.
When a member of the faithful comes for confession, he or she comes to ask for forgiveness, to ask for the Father’s caress. And we, pointing an accusing finger, say: “How many times? And how did you do it?…”. No, not that. Forgive. Always. “But I don’t know…, because the code tells me…”. We have to observe the code, because it is important, but the shepherd’s heart goes beyond that! Take a risk on the side of forgiveness.
Always forgive in the Sacrament of Reconciliation.
In this way, you will sow forgiveness for the whole of society. I bless you with all my heart.
And I ask you, please, to continue to pray for me, because this job is a bit difficult!
But I entrust myself to your prayers. Thank you.
