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Homily of the Holy Father addressed to Canadian bishops, priests, deacons, consecrated persons, seminarians and pastoral workers
Cathedral of Notre Dame in Quebec – Thursday, July 28, 2022
Short reading (1 Peter 5:1-4).
I am addressing those of you who are elders, for I too am one of the elders, a witness to the passion of Christ, and I will share in the glory that is to be revealed. Be shepherds of the flock of God which is entrusted to you; watch over it, not by compulsion but with a good heart, as God wills; not out of miserable greed but out of dedication, not commanding as masters over those over whom you have been entrusted, but becoming the followers of the flock. And when the supreme shepherd appears, you will win the crown of glory that does not fade.
Allow me to propose three challenges (1) make Jesus known – (2) testimony – (3) fraternity
Dear brother Bishops, dear priests and deacons, consecrated men and women, consecrated persons and seminarians, pastoral workers, good evening!
I thank Archbishop Poisson for his words of welcome and I greet all of you, especially those who have had to face a lot of road to arrive: the distances in your country are really great! And so, thank you! I am glad to meet you.
It is significant that we are in the Basilica of Notre-Dame de Québec, cathedral of this particular Church and primatial seat of Canada, whose first Bishop, Saint François de Laval, opened the Seminary in 1663 and throughout his ministry he took care of the formation of priests. The short reading we have just heard spoken to us about the “elderly”, that is, priests. Saint Peter exhorted us: “Feed the flock of God entrusted to you, watching over it not because you are forced but willingly” (1 Pet 5:2). As we are gathered here as the People of God, let us remember that Jesus is the Shepherd of our lives, who cares for us because he truly loves us. We, pastors of the Church, are asked for this same generosity in shepherding the flock, so that Jesus’ solicitude for all and his compassion for the wounds of each one may be manifested.
The joy of the ministry
And precisely because we are a sign of Christ, the Apostle Peter exhorts us: feed the flock, guide it, do not let it get lost while you are taking care of your business. Take care of it with dedication and tenderness. And – he adds – do it “willingly”, not necessarily: not as a duty, not as religious salaried or officials of the sacred, but with the heart of pastors, with enthusiasm. If we look to him as the Good Shepherd before to ourselves, we discover that we are guarded with tenderness, we feel the closeness of God. Hence the joy of the ministry, and even before that the joy of faith: is not from seeing what we are capable of doing, but from knowing that God is close, that he loved us first and accompanies us every day.
This, brothers and sisters, is our joy: not a cheap joy, the one that the world sometimes offers us by deceiving us with fireworks; this joy is not linked to riches and securities; nor is it linked to the persuasion that in life we will always be fine, without crosses and problems. Christian joy, rather, is united to an experience of peace that remains in the heart even when we are targeted by trials and afflictions, because we know that we are not alone but accompanied by a God who is not indifferent to our fate. As when the sea is rough: on the surface it is stormy, but deep down it remains calm and peaceful. This is Christian joy: a free gift, the certainty of knowing that we are loved, supported, embraced by Christ in every situation of life. Because it is he who frees us from selfishness and sin, from the sadness of loneliness, from inner emptiness and fear, giving us a new look at life, a new look at history: “With Jesus Christ joy is always born and reborn” (Evangelii Gaudium, 1).
And then we can ask ourselves: how is our joy going? How is my joy going? Does our Church express the joy of the Gospel? Is there a faith in our communities that attracts for the joy it communicates?
Secularization
If we want to address these questions at the root, we cannot help but reflect on what, in the reality of our time, threatens the joy of faith and risks obscuring it, seriously undermining the Christian experience. One immediately thinks of secularization, which for some time now has transformed the lifestyle of women and men today, leaving God almost in the background. He seems to have disappeared from the horizon, his Word no longer seems to be a compass of orientation for life, for fundamental choices, for human and social relationships. However, we must immediately make a clarification: when we observe the culture in which we are immersed, its languages and its symbols, we must be careful not to remain prisoners of pessimism and resentment, letting ourselves go to negative judgments or unnecessary nostalgia. There are in fact two possible looks towards the world in which we live: one I would call “negative look”; the other “gaze that discerns”.
The Negative Look
The first, the negative gaze, often stems from a faith that, feeling attacked, is conceived as a kind of “armor” to defend itself from the world. It bitterly accuses reality by saying: “the world is wicked, sin reigns”, and thus runs the risk of dressing itself in a ‘crusade spirit’. Let us beware of this, because he is not a Christian; it is not, in fact, the way of doing things of God, who – the Gospel reminds us – “so loved the world that he gave his only Son, that whoever believes in him may not be lost, but have eternal life” (Jn 3:16). The Lord, who detests worldliness and has a good outlook on the world. He blesses our lives, he says good things about us and our reality, he incarnates himself in the situations of history not to condemn, but to germinate the seed of the Kingdom precisely where darkness seems to triumph. If we stop at a negative gaze, however, we will end up denying the incarnation, because we will flee from reality, instead of incarnating in it. We will close in on ourselves, we will weep over our losses, we will constantly complain and we will fall into sadness and pessimism: sadness and pessimism never come from God. Instead, we are called to have a gaze like God’s, who knows how to discern the good and is persistent in seeking it, seeing it and nurturing it. It is not a naive gaze, but a gaze that discerns reality.
The gaze that discerns (secularization versus secularism)
To refine our discernment of the secularized world, let us be inspired by what Saint Paul VI wrote in Evangelii Nuntiandi, an Apostolic Exhortation that is still fully relevant today: for him, secularization is “the effort, in itself just and legitimate, not at all incompatible with faith or religion”, to discover the laws of reality and of human life itself laid down by the Creator. In fact, God does not want us to be slaves, but children, He does not want to decide for us, nor to oppress us with a sacred power in a world governed by religious laws. No, He created us free and asks us to be adults, responsible people in life and in society. Another thing – St. Paul VI distinguished – secularism isa conception of life that totally separates from the bond with the Creator, so that God becomes “superfluous and cumbersome” and “new forms of atheism” are generated, subtle and varied: “the civilization of consumption, hedonism elevated to supreme value, the will to power and domination, discrimination of all kinds” (ibid. ). Here, as a Church, especially as pastors of the People of God, as pastors, as consecrated women and as consecrated persons, as seminarians and as pastoral workers, it is up to us to know how to make these distinctions, to discern. If we give in to the negative gaze and judge in a superficial way, we risk passing on a wrong message, as if behind the criticism of secularization there was on our part the nostalgia for a sacralized world, for a society of other times in which the Church and her ministers had more power and social relevance. And that’s a wrong perspective.
Instead, as a great scholar of these themes notes, the problem of secularization, for us Christians, must not be the lesser social relevance of the Church or the loss of material riches and privileges; rather, it asks us to reflect on the changes in society, which have affected the way people think and organize life. If we dwell on this aspect, we realize that it is not faith that is in crisis, but certain forms and ways in which we proclaim it. And, therefore, secularization is a challenge for our pastoral imagination, it is “the occasion for the recomposition of the spiritual life into new forms and new ways of existing” (C. Taylor, A Secular Age, Cambridge 2007, 437). Thus the gaze that discerns, while making us see the difficulties we have in transmitting the joy of faith, at the same time stimulates us to rediscover a new passion for evangelization, to seek new languages, to change some pastoral priorities, to go to the essential.
There is a need to Proclaim the Gospel
Dear brothers and sisters, there is a need to proclaim the Gospel in order to give the men and women of today the joy of faith. But this proclamation is not given above all in words, but through a witness overflowing with gratuitous love, as God does with us. It is a proclamation that asks us to be incarnated in a personal and ecclesial lifestyle that can rekindle the Lord’s desire, instill hope, transmit trust and credibility.
And on this I allow myself, in a fraternal spirit, to propose to you three challenges, which you will be able to carry forward in prayer and pastoral service.
The first challenge: make Jesus known.
In the spiritual deserts of our time, generated by secularism and indifference, it is necessary to return to the first proclamation. I repeat: it is necessary to return to the first announcement. We cannot presume to communicate the joy of faith by presenting secondary aspects to those who have not yet embraced the Lord in life, or only by repeating certain practices or replicating pastoral forms of the past. It is necessary to find new ways to proclaim the heart of the Gospel to those who have not yet encountered Christ. This presupposes a pastoral creativity to reach people where they live, not waiting for them to come: where they live, finding opportunities for listening, dialogue and encounter. We must return to essentiality, we must return to the enthusiasm of the Acts of the Apostles, to the beauty of feeling that we are instruments of the fruitfulness of the Spirit today. We must return to Galilee. It is the appointment with the Risen Jesus: to return to Galilee to – allow me the expression – to begin again after failure. Return to Galilee. And each of us has his own “Galilee”, that of the first proclamation. Retrieve this memory.
The second challenge: testimony
To proclaim the Gospel, however, it is also necessary to be credible. And here is the second challenge: testimony. The Gospel is proclaimed effectively when it is life that speaks, reveals that freedom that sets others free, that compassion that asks nothing in return, that mercy that speaks of Christ without words. The Church in Canada has begun a new journey, after being wounded and upset by the evil perpetrated by some of her children. I am thinking in particular of the sexual abuse committed against children and vulnerable people, scandals that require strong action and an irreversible fight. I would like, together with you, to ask forgiveness again from all the victims. The pain and shame we feel must become an opportunity for conversion: never again! And, thinking of the path of healing and reconciliation with the indigenous brothers and sisters, never again should the Christian community allow itself to be contaminated by the idea that there is a superiority of one culture over others and that it is legitimate to use means of coercion towards others. Let us recover the missionary zeal of your first Bishop, Saint François de Laval, who lashed out at all those who degraded the natives by inducing them to consume drinks to deceive them. We do not allow any ideology to alienate and confuse the styles and forms of life of our peoples to try to bend and dominate them. May the new advances of humanity be assimilated in their cultural identities with the keys of culture.
But to defeat this culture of exclusion we must begin: the pastors, who do not feel superior to the brothers and sisters of the People of God; that consecrated persons may live fraternity and freedom in obedience in the community; that seminarians be ready to be docile and available servants and that pastoral workers do not understand their service as power. It starts here. You are the protagonists and builders of a different Church: humble, meek, merciful, a Church that accompanies the processes, that works decisively and serenely to inculturation, that values each one and every cultural and religious diversity. Let us offer this testimony!
Finally, the third challenge: fraternity.
The first, to make Jesus known; the second, testimony; the third, fraternity.
The Church will be a credible witness to the Gospel the more her members live communion, creating opportunities and spaces for anyone who approaches the faith to find a hospitable community, which knows how to listen, which knows how to enter into dialogue, which promotes a good quality of relationships. This is what your holy Bishop said to the missionaries: “Often a bitter word, an impatience, a face that rejects will destroy in a moment what has been built in a long time” (Instructions to the Missionaries, 1668).
It is a matter of living in a Christian community that thus becomes a school of humanity, where one learns to love one another as brothers and sisters, willing to work together for the common good. At the heart of the Gospel proclamation, in fact, there is the love of God, which transforms and makes capable of communion with all and of service to all. A theologian of this land wrote: “The love that God gives us overflows into love … It is a love that pushes the Good Samaritan to stop and take care of the wayfarer attacked by thieves. It is a love that has no borders, that seeks the kingdom of God … and this kingdom is universal” (B. Lonergan, “The Future of Christianity”, in A Second Collection: Papers by Bernard F.J. Lonergan S.J. , London 1974, 154). The Church is called to incarnate this love without frontiers, to build the dream that God has for humanity: to be brothers and sisters. Let us ask ourselves: how is fraternity going among us? Bishops among themselves and with priests, priests among themselves and with the People of God: are we brothers or competitors divided into parties? And how are our relationships with those who are not “ours”, with those who do not believe, with those who have different traditions and customs? This is the way: to promote fraternal relations with everyone, with the indigenous brothers and sisters, with every sister and brother we meet, because the presence of God is reflected in the face of each one.
These, dear brothers and sisters, are just a few challenges. Let us not forget that we can carry them forward only with the power of the Spirit, whom we must always invoke in prayer. Let us not, on the other hand, let the spirit of secularism enter into us, thinking that we can create projects that work alone and with human forces alone, without God. This is an idolatry of projects without God. And, I beg you, let us not close ourselves in “backwardism” but let us go forward, with joy!
Let us put into practice these words that we address to Saint François de Laval:
You were the man of sharing, visiting the sick, dressing the poor, fighting for the dignity of the original populations, supporting the exhausted missionaries, always ready to reach out to those who were worse off than you. How many times have your projects been torn down! Every time you put them back on their feet. You understood that God’s work is not of stone, and that in this land of discouragement there was a need for a builder of hope.
I thank you for all that you do and I bless you from my heart. And please, continue to pray for me.
