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Pope Francis’ address to 18th general congregation of The Synod on Solidarity
Wednesday, 25th October 2023
“Clericalism dirties the face of the Church”
I like to think of the Church as the faithful people of God, holy and sinful, a people called and called by the power of the Beatitudes and Matthew 25 (The Parable of the Ten Bridesmaids, The Parable of the Talents (5, 2, 1). The Judgment of the Nations),.
Jesus did not adopt for his Church any of the political systems of his day: neither Pharisees, nor Sadducees, nor Essenes, nor Zealots. No “closed societies”; he simply takes up the tradition of Israel: “You shall be my people, and I will be your God.”
I like to think of the Church as this simple and humble people walking in the presence of the Lord (God’s faithful people).
This is the religious meaning of our faithful people. And I say faithful people so as not to fall into the many approaches and ideological schemes that ‘reduce’ the reality of God’s people. Simply a faithful people, or even “a holy and sinful people of God’ on a journey. And this is the Church.
One of the characteristics of this faithful people is their infallibility; yes, they are infallible in credendo. (It cannot fail in believing says Lumen Gentium, n. 12)/ Infallibility in believing.
And I explain it like this: when you want to know what Holy Mother Church believes, go to the Magisterium, because it has the task of teaching you, but when you want to know how the Church believes, you go to the faithful people.
An image comes to mind: the faithful gathered at the entrance of the cathedral of Ephesus. The story (or legend) tells that as the Bishops entered in procession, people were on both sides of the road to the Cathedral, and that they repeated in chorus: ‘Mother of God’, asking the hierarchy to declare as dogma the truth they already possessed as the People of God.
(Some say they had sticks in their hands and showed them to the bishops). I don’t know if it’s history or legend, but the image is valid.
The faithful people, the holy faithful people of God, have a soul, and since we can speak of the soul of a people, we can speak of a hermeneutic, of a way of seeing reality, of a conscience.
(editor’s note: exegesis is the actual interpretation of the Bible, hermeneutics is the study of the principles by which it is to be interpreted.
Our faithful people are conscious of their dignity, they baptize their children, they bury their dead.
We, the members of the Hierarchy, come from this people and have received the faith from this people, generally from their mothers and grandmothers, “your mother and your grandmother,”
Paul says to Timothy (Pope Francis seems to refer to 1 Timothy 2:12-15 or 2 Timothy 2:15-18),
It is a faith transmitted in the feminine dialect, like the Mother of the Maccabees who spoke “in dialect” to her children.
And here I would like to emphasize that in the holy and faithful People of God, the faith is transmitted in dialect, and generally in the feminine dialect. This is not only because the Church is Mother and it is women who reflect her best; (the Church is a woman) but because it is women who know how to wait, who know how to discover the resources of the Church, of the faithful people, who risk beyond the limit, perhaps with fear but courageous, and in the light and shade of a dawning day. They approach a tomb with the intuition (still not hope) that there may be something alive there..
The woman of the holy and faithful people God is a reflection of the Church.
The Church is feminine, she is a bride, she is a mother.
When the clergy exaggerates their ministry and mistreats the People of God, they disfigure the face of the Church with macho and dictatorial attitudes.
(it is enough to recall the intervention of Sister Liliana Franco – who said at the synod “the Gospel tells of Jesus readiness to see and hear women, to lift them up, to ennoble them, to send them”).
It is painful to find in some parish offices the “price list” of sacramental services in the form of a supermarket. Either the Church is God’s faithful people on a journey, holy and sinful, or it ends up being a company of different services. And when pastoral agents take this second path, the Church becomes the supermarket of salvation and the priests become mere employees of a multinational corporation.
This is the great defeat to which clericalism is leading us.
And this with much pain and scandal (it is enough to go to the ecclesiastical tailors in Rome to see the scandal of young priests trying on cassocks and hats or vestmentss and spools of lace).
Clericalism is a scourge, it is a plague, it is a form of worldliness that pollutes and damages the face of the Bride pf the Lord; it enslaves God’s holy faithful people.
And the people of God, the holy faithful people of God, go forward with patience and humility, enduring the contempt, mistreatment and marginalization by institutionalized clericalism.
And how naturally do we speak of the principles of the Church, or of episcopal promotions as career advancement! The horrors of the world, the worldliness that mistreats God’s holy and faithful people.
